[The following appeared as an editorial in the July 18 issue of the French-language Inprecor. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/ Inprecor.]
For thirty years the imperialists waged a war of pitiless destruction against the Indochinese revolution. In 1975 they suffered a major setback. The liberation of Saigon in April 1975 marked a great historic defeat for U.S. imperialism.
The powerful effects of this victory for the workers and exploited masses of the entire world are far from being exhausted. This is why the imperialist governments and Washington first of all are stepping up their military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological moves against the Indochinese revolution.
It is in this context that the international capitalist press and the governments it represents have launched their vast counterrevolutionary propaganda offensive around what they call the "boat people."
There are now several hundred thousand refugees in Southeast Asia. The overwhelming majority of them are persons who chose to emigrate rather than devote themselves to the difficult tasks of building socialism.
This massive emigration, which has been permitted by the Vietnamese government, increased sharply after the nationalization of the economy was completed in the beginning of 1978. As has been reported by American journalists who have visited the refugee camps and who can hardly be suspected of being sympathetic to socialism, most of the emigrants are small property owners, shopkeepers, former functionaries of the puppet regime, former soldiers in the puppet army, doctors, and so forth.
These people lived off the crumbs that fell from the table of the U.S. military administration and the corrupt Saigon regime. After the liberation, they saw their standard of living plummet to the level of the workers and poor masses. The overwhelming majority of the refugees are petty-bourgeois types hostile to socialism who want to get out of the country at any cost.
The outcry by the imperialist governments and the capitalist press about "bureaucratization" and "corruption" is not intended to help the Vietnamese masses solve these problems, which they alone can solve. What the imperialists are trying to do is to conceal their real objective-to weaken the Vietnamese workers state or destroy it if they can. The blackmail being carried out around economic aid, especially by the French government, shows this clearly.
The economic situation on the Indochinese peninsula is tragic. Decades will be needed to wipe out the effects of the most destructive war in history, which was waged for ten years by the U.S. imperialists. Fifty million Vietnamese are engaged in the work of reconstruction, and at the same time they have to maintain an excessively costly military defense against the imperialist threats. Poverty is still the daily lot of the Indochinese masses.
It is in this situation that hundreds of thousands of refugees have flooded into Southeast Asia. They now face inhuman conditions. Encouraged by their imperialist masters, the governments of Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia are refusing to accept them. With the blessing of the international capitalist press, these regimes are preparing to expell the refugees.
These governments are following Washington's policy. Last January, the U.S. authorities rejected a proposal from the Vietnamese government for an internationally organized operation to airlift these refugees to the countries of their choice. The cynical game of the imperialists is to let hundreds of thousands of refugees pile up in these camps so that they can accuse the Vietnamese government of causing this misery. In this way, the U.S. imperial.
ists hope to wipe out the memory of the genocide they carried on for years.
Instead of helping to rebuild what it destroyed, the U.S. government is redoubling its attacks against the Vietnamese masses and the Indochinese revolution. It has fixed an annual aid budget for the refugees that represents less than half the daily cost of the war in 1968-69.
For its part, the French government, the heir of the French colonialists who were driven out of Indochina after their defeat at Dienbienphu in 1954, is trumpeting about the need for "humanitarian concern." But it is only taking in a few thousand refugees. And at the same time, it is deporting immigrant workers back to the poverty of the countries they come from. For the French government as well the tragic situation of the refugees is only an opportunity for a vast counterrevolutionary propaganda campaign.
The need to assure decent living conditions for 300,000 refugees, which are being denied them by the imperialists' puppet governments in Southeast Asia, must not take precedence over the need to provide the economic aid that is essential for the population of the Indochinese peninsula as a whole.
The need to care for the refugees cannot take precedence over the need to end the aid to the Thai dictatorship, to the puppet "guerrillas" in Laos and Cambodia, and to all the regimes through which the imperialists maintain their military and economic foothold in Southeast Asia. It cannot take precedence over the need for international solidarity with the Indochinese revolution!
will give you a week by week analysis of the most important world events.