Word: minh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...coalition of Communists and the calendar. With no personal political organization, a civil service that is amateur and an army still in training, the Premier of South Viet Nam is charged with building a government and a popularity strong enough to overcome the strength and skill of Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime in North Viet Nam. Under the Geneva pact, which sliced the country in two, the South Vietnamese have only 15 months to prepare to meet Ho's Communists in a nationwide test at the polls, winner take...
...Room for Both. Ngo Dinh Diem seems at first glance an improbable man for a fight against Ho Chi Minh, the wispy, twisting onetime chef's assistant who is so resolutely Communist, yet so clever that much of Asia still toys with the notion that he is really just a Vietnamese patriot. Diem's career has grown mostly out of negative decisions. He is a sparsely gifted administrator, and of politics he says: "Clever maneuvers only betray, demoralize and divide the people." To some of the more sophisticated in the game, he rates as a marginal...
...Dinh Diem loyally, but his influence back home is not great. The French government of Faure is working, fundamentally, to maintain "the French presence" in both halves of divided Viet Nam: in the North, the French hope with declining prospects to wheedle a deal out of Communist Ho Chi Minh; in the South, they hope to replace Nationalist Diem with a man they feel they can trust -Bao Dai's cousin, Buu Hoi, 39, a leprosy expert who has not lived in Viet Nam for 20 years...
...Communist North Viet Nam (pop. 12 million) came unmistakable signs that the austere autocracy of Ho Chi Minh is having trouble with its housekeeping. The rice crop of the devastated Red River Delta is down by 30% to 40%. The worst floods in 70 years have washed out irrigation dikes and dams, endangering the spring planting. Some 700,000 refugees have moved off to the rice-rich south, leaving for Ho their burned farmhouses and untilled land. An additional 10,000 refugees are fleeing the north every week. Refugees from Red Viet Nam reaching the French-held port city...
...Communists, however, trade in the north is now at a standstill, and there is heavy industrial unemployment. French and neutralist Indian businessmen are moving out. All but Communist official cars have disappeared. Ironically, Ho's own picture is becoming the symbol of Ho's economic distress: Viet Minh currency, which bears Ho's picture, is worth less than half what it used...