Word: conge
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...small way, the fate of South Viet Nam has long hinged on the fortunes of the restless, landless peasants whose rebellion against an intolerable feudal way of life was one of the original causes of the war. In the 1950s, the Viet Cong cut a wide swath through the Vietnamese countryside by importing Ho Chi Minh's formula of routing the landlords and distributing "land to the tiller." Today, the leading advocate of Ho's thesis is none other than President Nguyen Van Thieu...
...buffalo. Typical of the tenants was Tran Van Cau, 42, a farmer in the Delta village of Tan Loc. For ten years, Cau had tilled a small 4½-acre tract; he paid rent first to a local landlord, then for six years to the Viet Cong, then to the original landlord, who moved back after government troops "pacified" the village in 1968. Today, Cau serves only his own family of six. He keeps the title to his land, rolled in protective plastic, tucked away in a cranny of his small house...
During the 1950s, when the Diem regime was merely toying with land reform, the Viet Cong perfected a crude but effective program of their own. Landlords were simply driven to the safety of the cities, their farms were handed over to "liberated" peasants who often willingly gave their sons to Viet Cong recruiters-at a rate of up to 7,000 a month in the mid-1960s. If local allegiance to the Communists lapsed, it was often renewed later when, in towns newly pacified by U.S. troops, the old landlords rolled up in South Vietnamese army Jeeps to repossess their...
...fence toward the government," notes Jack Riggs, an American adviser. The corollary is that, poorly managed, a reform program can also force the guy back into the hands of the hungry V.C. recruiter. But there is one good indication that Thieu is pushing in the right direction: the Viet Cong have mounted a vigorous propaganda campaign against his program...
...Sihanouk and the North Vietnamese agreed that "the only way for us to obtain peace is to continue the offensive in order to persuade Nixon to give us genuine peace with total respect for our rights to self-determination. Nixon's peace proposal means that the Viet Cong must put down their weapons and go to the elections naked, while [South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van] Thieu will have his army and his police to pressure the people of South Viet Nam." The North Vietnamese, Sihanouk emphasized, link the end of Vietnamization and of U.S. support for Thieu with...