Preventive Action for Refugee Producing Situations

130 Chapter 3
This program turned a major part of the population into refugees and displaced
persons. By the end of the summer of 1962, the government of
Vietnam claimed that 3,225 of the planned 11,316 hamlets had already been
completed. Over 33 percent of the nation's total population were already
living in completed hamlets. 296 According to a study by the Southeast Asia
Program at Cornell University, by July 14, 1963, 8,737,613 people were
housed in 7,202 hamlets. 297 Although this figure appears exaggerated, even
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk claimed that half the population had
been relocated by 1963. 298
According to the assessment of David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prizewinning
reporter of the The New York Times, the U.S. and Vietnamese
authorities had hoped that the hamlet concept would force the Vietcong to
attack the civilians, driving the enraged populace into the arms of the
government. The policy, however, achieved exactly the opposite result:
Most able-bodied men rallied to the Vietcong, perhaps less out of conviction than
[in] defiance of the regime's coercive methods. 299
Moreover, the Vietcong were not hungry, and did not need to prey off the
villagers. Most of them were originally from the South, knew the area well,
and thus easily infiltrated the hamlets.
When they attacked, they attacked only the symbols of the Government: the
armory or command post of the hamlet, the hamlet chief or the youth leaders. They
rarely harmed the population, and so the people of the village, who saw that the
Government had not kept its promises and could not protect them, often sided with
the Vietcong after a raid. 300
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296 See Table, Government of Vietnam Report on Status of Strategic Hamlets in:
Department of Defense, Study, Published by the Armed Forces Committee of
the House of Representatives, O & D Task Force Final Report Bk. 3, United
States -Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, IV. B. 2. Evolution of the War,
Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961-1963, Appendix, p. 28.
297 Milton Osborne, Strategic Hamlets in South Vietnam: A Survey and a
Comparison, South East Asia Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 1965), p. 33.
298 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar
Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Boston: South End
Press, 1979), p. 322.
299 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History: The First Complete Account of Vietnam
at War (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 256.
300 Melman,p.340.
Analytical Discussion 131
The results showed that the method of combating insurgency with a carrotand-stick
approach (appealing programs and coercive control) utterly failed to
bring the entire nation under the government's control, as Under Secretary of
Sate George W. Ball commented. 301 It may well have been doomed from the
outset because of "the peasants' resistance to measures which changed the
pattern of rural life - whether aimed at security or control." 302 Such a policy of
forced relocation, dictated from above in absolute disregard of the interests
and needs of the people, was bound to be both costly and ineffective and,
even worse, to backfire on the initiators. Even the Pentagon itself
acknowledged later that this program was doomed from the outset because it
alienated many of those whose loyalty it aimed to win. 303
On November 1,1963, a coup d'etat toppled the Diem regime; the deposed
President and his brother Nhu, the architect of the strategic hamlet program,
were killed. The strategic program died with them. 304
Large-scale bombardment and military operation
The skirmishes of the Vietnam War began escalating into major military
operations following the Southeast Asia Resolution (later known as the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution), which was originally a contingency plan for
responding to potential attacks by the North Vietnamese Army forces. 305 The
incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 2 and 4, 1964 in which the North
Vietnamese Army allegedly attacked U.S. patrol ships, signaled the real
beginning of the Vietnam War. Later, as the war became increasingly
unpopular and its legitimacy was called more and more into question, the
Gulf of Tonkin incident came under reexamination. An investigative hearing
was held before the U.S. Senate Committee on For-
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301 The Pentagon Papers, Vol. u, The Senator Gravel Edition, Beacon Press
Boston, 1971, p. 149.
302 The Pentagon Papers, Vol. H, The Senator Gravel Edition, Beacon Press
Boston, 1971, p. 131.
303 The Pentagon Papers, Vol, n, The Senator Gravel Edition, Beacon Press
Boston, 1971, p. 131.
304 The Pentagon Papers, Published by the Armed Forces Committee of the House
of Representatives, United States - Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, IV. B. 2.
Evolution of the War, Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961-1963, p. 35.
305 U.S. Senate, The Gulf of Tonkin: The 1964 Incidents; Hearing before the Committee
on Foreign Relations. 93rd Congr., 21 February 1968 (Washington,D.C.: U.S.
G.P.O.), pp. 11-12