Word: prg
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UNTIL THE REST of the land can be reclaimed, however. Saigon will remain crowded and noisy. The PRG is unwilling to move people to the countryside unless it is certain they can be productive there. John Holum, one of Sen. McGovern's aides who accompanied the senator on a whirlwind trip to the two Vietnamese capitals last month, says that while Hanoi is "a quiet, dignified city with everyone going about their business," Saigon has "a carnival atmosphere, it's noisy, there are a lot of people standing around, dressed in Western clothing." Small stands on the streets of Saigon...
...South Vietnamese have had more trouble with industry than with the land reclamation scheme. Most industries depended heavily on American capital, fuel and raw materials, and when the United States declared an embargo on trade with the PRG, most of those factories that had not already done so in the last months of the war closed down. But the Vietnamese are now developing substitute raw materials for those they once imported from the U.S. A factory that once made the plastic mats that replaced homemade reed mats in many Vietnamese households has been converted so that it can use native...
...EFFORT to avoid any further disruption of the economy, the PRG has only nationalized the businesses of those who left the country with the Americans. Like the North Vietnamese government, the PRG is willing to work with those local capitalists willing to cooperate with it, allowing restricted profits and providing capital to bankrupt businesses. At this point, production and employment opportunities are more important than a strictly state-owned industrial sector...
...PRG has not found reconstruction easy. In the first months after liberation, South Vietnam experienced a severe rice shortage, as the last violent months of the war disrupted planting in most of the central provinces. By the time Thieu's government fell, almost 2 per cent of the population in those provinces was dying of starvation each month. During the first three months of the PRG's government, the North Vietnamese sent 70 per cent of their rice stock south to give the new government a breathing space. But entrepeneurs were able to hoard the rice, which the PRG sold...
...PRG has been as tolerant of those who collaborated with the Thieu regime as it has with private property owners. There have been no reports of bloodbaths or purges, no talks of massacres. The million or so South Vietnamese who were members of Thieu's army have not been mistreated. The PRG merely explained its policies to low-ranking soldiers and sent them home, while higher-level officials are going through somewhat longer re-education in centers one Vietnamese scholar described as "more like universities than prison camps." Religious communities have been unmolested, and Buddhists and Catholics remain free...