Thieu's Travails

These are not the best of times for President Nguyen Van Thieu. Since the 1973 Peace Accords were signed in Paris, the opposing sides in South Viet Nam have methodically killed each other at a doleful rate of 4,000 a month. What makes the fighting utterly futile is the fact that neither the Communists nor the Saigon government has scored any strategic gains. Moreover, public discontent with Thieu's tautly run regime has been fueled by inflation, which is currently running at a staggering 70% a year. As a result, Thieu, for the first time since the ceasefire, now faces a disparate but potentially volatile opposition from militant Roman Catholics and Buddhists, as well as from the normally docile Saigon press.

Land Deals. The opposition first surfaced a fortnight ago in the shattered former imperial capital of Hue, where 5,000 civilians gathered in front of the city's Roman Catholic cathedral to protest government corruption. The complaint was familiar enough, but the specifics were startlingly new. In a document that quickly circulated throughout the country, priests charged that Thieu had profited handsomely from housing and land deals, that his wife Nguyen Thi Mai had taken a rake-off from running a hospital that admits mostly well-to-do patients, and that his brother-in-law Nguyen Xuan Nguyen had made hundreds of millions of piasters in fertilizer speculation.

The priests also accused the mother of freewheeling Information Minister Hoang Due Nha, 32, a cousin of the President's and his closest confidant, of profiteering in sales of subsidized rice in the largely barren central coast. Police roughed up some of the Hue demonstrators, but to avoid triggering trouble elsewhere, they dispersed the crowd peacefully.

Next a group of editors and publishers met in Saigon to protest the press code that has long muzzled South Vietnamese newspapers and magazines. After a long series of unproductive meetings with Information Minister Nha, the editors announced that they would henceforth ignore government restrictions. When three Saigon newspapers published the full text of the Catholic priests' charges against Thieu and his family, about 60 Catholics, Buddhists and journalists marched to prevent police from entering the printing plants. One newspaper proprietor burned 10,000 copies of an edition the police had ordered confiscated while a crowd shouted, "Down with dictatorship and corruption!" Such public displays would have been unthinkable only a few months ago.

Although Buddhist immolations in 1963 roused American opinion against Ngo Dinh Diem and in 1966 forced Thieu to promise elections, until recently the Buddhists had limited their anti-Thieu protests to pathetic little marches in downtown Saigon, in which they were outnumbered 10 to 1 by police. They have now formed an organization called the Forces for National Reconciliation. The Buddhists carefully refrained from labeling the "force" a political party in order to avoid legal harassment, but they clearly intend to exert renewed political influence. Says Senator Vu Van Mau, leader of a Buddhist group in the Thieu-dominated Senate: "I think in a democracy--and Thieu claims that this is a democracy--that he must take account of the opinion of the people. He must explain himself."

Even more explicit was Lawyer Tran Van Tuyen, leader of the 27-man opposition bloc in the lower house, which is also dominated by Thieu favorites. "There have always been charges of corruption," said Tuyen, "but the open charges [of the priests] were just the last drop of water that makes the full glass overflow. President Thieu just has to make an answer."

So far none has been forthcoming. Thieu seems reluctant to gag the opposition, at least for now, apparently fearing the impact that a crackdown would have on Gerald Ford, the U.S. Congress and American opinion. The Pentagon had originally asked for $1.6 billion in military aid, which South Viet Nam desperately needed, but Congress has tentatively trimmed aid for the next fiscal year to $700 million. The Administration had hoped to get $750 million from Congress to shore up Saigon's sagging economy, but Capitol Hill seems more likely to settle for a modest $400 million. For Nguyen Van Thieu, it is money that counts.

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