Paris Peace Summit, 1971 - World Model United Nations

While the campaign achieved its goal of weakening the
communist bases and network in the countryside, the
brutality and corruption surrounding the anti-communist
eorts increased rural and urban opposition to Diem and his
family.
Diem augmented his repression of his political opponents by
issuing Public Law 10/59 in May 1959. e draconian law
expanded the category of political crimes to mean any form
of political opposition. Tribunals roamed the countryside,
setting up kangaroo courts to try, convict, and execute
subversives. Local ocials, their powers greatly widened
by the Public Law, could now imprison for life or execute
anyone they designated as a communist—and they used
these powers to extend the practices of bribery already
common under the Denounce the Communists campaign. 86
By the end of 1959, the Southern Communists counted as
few as 5,000 members in their party.
To further neutralize the threat of the DRV’s southern
supporters, whom Diem’s forces pejoratively called Viet
Cong—short for Viet Nam Cong San, or Vietnamese
Communists—Diem organized “agrovilles” (khu tru mat)
in the countryside to protect villages from communist
inltration. While development and urban life were
touted as the benets of life in the agrovilles, the political
motivation behind their establishment was rural security
and population control. 87 Peasants were relocated to new
settlements of 2 square km, and forced to provide labor for
construction, which meant that villagers had to dismantle
their current homes near their rice elds and build new
ones at some distance from the source of their livelihood. 88
While the agrovilles were easier than traditional villages for
the national army to defend, the brutal experience for the
peasantry led many to join the southern communist cause.
e Road to the South
Through the late 1950s, Communists in the South and
the leadership of the DRV watched in alarm as Diem
consolidated his power over Saigon and the countryside.
When they nally decided to endorse armed struggle in the
South at the end of 1960, it was aer a long period discord,
between Northern and Southern cadres and their allies in
Moscow and Beijing.
As the Geneva Agreements wrapped up, Ho and his top
leadership were certain of their victory in the promised
reunication elections. But even when Diem rejected the
Geneva-mandated election processes, many in the DRV
leadership continued to advocate a peaceful, gradual
campaign for national reunication. 89 Part of this reluctance
to ght came from Soviet and Chinese urgings at Geneva.
Pushing the Vietnamese towards acceptance of a truce, the
Soviet Union and China stated that if war broke out again,
the DRV might have to ght alone. 90 At the same time,
the DRV needed to consolidate their regime in the North.
eir problem was not one of illegitimacy, but rather one of
infrastructure and economy; as they withdrew, the French
had devastated basic services and dismantled industries.
Professionals had ed, and the cadres, though capable
guerrillas, found their skills lacking when it came to
administration. 91 Cut o from the rice elds of the Mekong
Delta, the Northerners turned to the Chinese for aid when
food shortage struck.
e DRV faced greater challenges to their authority. Ethnic
minorities who fought alongside the French held out against
the Vietminh in their hillside bases. Catholics in one district
rebelled, forcing Hanoi to send a division of the People’s
Army to suppress the insurrection. Land reform and local
administrative reorganization in late 1956 was so excessive
that DRV leadership felt compelled to make a public
apology. 92 Prominent writers and intellectuals who had
previously stood stalwart by the revolution ridiculed these
policies.
As a result of the food shortage and political turbulence, in
June 1956, the DRV issued a memorandum to its Southern
colleagues titled “e Path of Revolution in the South.”
Southern cadres were not to attempt to stage a coup; they
were instead to concentrate on building up their movement,
“because a weak movement would be unable to take advantage
of favorable trends”—growing popular dissatisfaction with
Protesting the Diem regime’s oppressive tactics, Buddhist
monk ichQuangDuc immolated himself in the street.
Harvard WorldMUN 2012 PARIS PEACE SUMMIT 1971 16