Preventive Action for Refugee Producing Situations

136 Chapter 3
increasingly obscure. The U.S. and Vietnamese would bomb particular
areas, after warning people to evacuate through leaflets, radio announcements,
and loudspeaker messages.
Professor Seymour Melman has assembled a number of reports filed by
correspondents of the The New York Times, The Christian Science
Monitor, and Le Figaro to support the claim that the United States pursued
a deliberate policy of creating refugees for strategic and military
reasons. 319
George Goss, the head of the U.S. Mission's Refugee Division, and Dr. Nguyen
Phuc Que, the Vietnamese Refugee Commissioner, agreed that while most
peasants voluntarily left their homes to escape from battles, bombardments and
war, more and more, though, the people called refugees have been forced into the
camps by allied troops to deny support to the Viet Cong workers and soldiers. 320
One correspondent reported that the flight of refugees and the forcible resettlement
of people from the Iron Triangle, War Zone C, and the
mountain valleys of Binh Duong province drained the Communists of one
million possible supporters in 1966. 321
Though U.S. Commanders denied that there was a policy of
intentionally generating refugees, one civilian official declared policy or
no, they sure were doing it. Another American official implied that the
U.S. was looking favorably on creating a flow of refugees for the purpose
of winning the war. "War is about people," this official said. "The side
that has the loyalty of the people ought to win it. This is a good opportunity
to add a few thousand friends on our side." 322
The intentional generation of refugees sparked reactions among the
civilian population that made the situation worse. Many people developed
a "hamster syndrome" of indiscriminate hoarding, in reaction to the
chronic shortages of critical supplies that were partly due to the highly
centralized governmental relief system. In addition, making the refugees
passive recipients of charity so strained the relief administration that it
was often on the verge of breaking down. The refugee influ into the cities
was a deliberate goal by American strategists, who calculated that this
"forced urbanization," as they termed it, would withdraw peasant
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319 Melman, pp. 347-50.
320 Melman, p. 350.
321 Melman, p. 364.
322 Melman, pp. 364-65
Analytical Discussion 137
support from the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, and thus hamper their
ability to subsist in the countryside. 323
Ambassador Kromer, however, pressed the military commander to "limit the
generation of refugees ... and to assume temporary responsibility for those they
created." 324 But some U.S. Force commanders seemed to be particularly resistant
to his suggestions, and went on generating refugees with little regard to what
would become of them.
Post-1973
After the Paris Cease-fire Agreement of January 1973, refugees still fled from
violence in the countryside. The major difference, however, in the post-cease-fire
refugee resettlement program (administered by a Vietnamese Interministerial
Committee) was the avoidance of forced relocation, (out of Communist-controlled
areas), whereas much of the pre-1972 refugee resettlement had been carried out
without the consent of the people relocated. 325 Senator Kennedy repeated his
long-standing policy recommendation that refugee resettlement in Vietnam should
be voluntary and that the movement of people should play no role in U.S.
policy. 326
The Cease-fire Agreement also guaranteed freedom of movement, a right that
was not always honored by either side. 327 The changing balance between South
and North Vietnam had contributed to increased refugee flows into overcrowded,
ever shrinking South Vietnamese-controlled areas. The numbers of refugees by
far exceeded South Vietnam's capacity to absorb them. In accordance with the
1973 Paris cease-fire agreement, many people wanted to return to their homes,
most of which were, however, in Communist-controlled areas. Therefore the
South Vietnamese authorities prevented this wherever they could. These people
were forced to remain where they were and became a festering sore
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323 Karnow, 1984, p. 439.
324 Wiesner, (Draft) p. 598.
325 U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Relief and Rehabilitation of War
Victims in Indochina, May 1974. Washington, U.S. G.P.O., p. 16.
326 U.S. Congress. Relief and Rehabilitation of War Victims in Indochina, May 1974, p.
3.
327 U.S. Congress. Relief and Rehabilitation of War Victims in Indochina, 1974, p. 17.