The Capital of Discontent

SOUTH VIET NAM The Capital of Discontent

Sleeping beside the River of Perfumes, the Imperial City of Hué in central Viet Nam seems to have no purpose beyond its past. Once, a century ago, the Nguyen princes ruled nearly all of Viet Nam from their proud palaces with their gardens and lagoons in Hué (pronounced whey). Today their palaces are crumbling, and Hué is a subdued and ceremonial city of 105,000 without a newspaper, scarcely a telephone, and little traffic beyond bicycles and canvas-topped cyclo taxis. The only industry is a lime plant employing 50 people. Lunch is a leisurely three-hour affair. A woman dropping her cooking pans can shatter the tree-shaded silence at midday for blocks around. The facade is deceiving. The site of Viet Nam's first university in 1918, Hué is the intellectual—and Buddhist—capital of the nation. It is also the capital of the nation's discontent, a place where politics is an obsession and proud factionalism the overarching fact of life. Under the French, the people of Hué mounted some sort of rebellious trouble at least once a year. More recently, the agitations that ultimately toppled Diem, then General Khanh, then Chief of State Phan Khac Suu, all began in Hué and rippled southward to Saigon like an infection. And for the last month, the waves of political unrest aimed at swamping Premier Nguyen Cao Ky have been rolling out of Hué in measured but ominously mounting intensity across Viet Nam.

Chauffeured Monks. Last week Hué provincial police staged a protest march against the recall of their chief to Saigon, after a weekend protest march of 20,000 civilians and even some uniformed soldiers demanding "Down with [Chief of State] Thieu and Ky" in 12-ft. banners. A two-day general strike was called for civil service employees —and like others in recent weeks, was happily honored by the citizens of Hué. Indeed, Hué and the five northernmost provinces of the 1 Corps, in which it is the principal city, are virtually under the control of militant Buddhist Leader Thich Tri Quang and the Hué students. Though Ky's government remained in control in Saigon, the Hué infection was all too evident.

On the public holiday commemorating Emperor Hung Vuong, who founded Viet Nam more than 3,000 years ago, Saigon's Buddhists asked the government for a license to celebrate the occasion in the city's central market. Ky and the generals agreed, provided that no more than 600 took part and that there was no antigovernment tone to it. Saigon Buddhist Leader Thich Tam Chau promised as much—or as little. But several thousand gathered at the market, led by five well-known agitators. They pinned up pictures of Ky and other generals on the stakes used for public executions, together with a sign that read: "This is the plaza of demagogy. Ky, Thieu and Co. must be executed." With that, the Buddhist monks slipped into their chauffeur-driven cars and sped away, while the agitators used megaphones to turn the assembly into an antigovernment, anti-American, anti-war parade through Saigon. Their banners, in English, were often antigrammatical as well. Samples: "Down with U.S. Obstructions," "Our Nation's Sovereignty Must Be Conserved," and "Down with the Americans' Attempt of Objecting to the Forming of a Vietnamese National Assembly."