South Viet Nam: A Beginning

"This certainly announces the beginning of the end," exulted South Viet Nam's Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. "A great victory for the people against traitors. A victory for what is right and just against what is cruel. A victory of the entire free world against those who would enslave mankind."

Ky's happy hyperbole was perhaps a bit overheated, but he did have rea son for enthusiasm as South Viet Nam's election results flowed in last week.

So did U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who greeted him fulsomely as the results became clear. Fully 80.8% of the nation's 5,290,000 registered voters went to the polls—many more than the scant 50% that U.S. observers had cautiously predicted. It was a beginning in the slow, arduous process of building a democracy in a nation racked by war.

In the face of fierce Viet Cong threats, the voters elected 108 members of an assembly that, over the next six months, will forge South Viet Nam's first constitution since the overthrow of the Huong regime two years ago.

Well aware of the danger of ballot stuffing, the government watched the polls closely. Premier Ky stepped in twice to halt ballot rigging by province chiefs, and indeed his own nephew, running for a seat in coastal Vung Tau, was defeated. Clearly, the generals paid heed to the warning of Major General Nguyen Due Thang, who heads the "revolutionary development" (pacification) program, and also was in charge of running the elections. Thang said: "We have to do this right, or we may never have another chance. The people will never believe us again if this is not a free election."

Still, the government was exerting its influence to ensure a heavy vote: most of the South Vietnamese army was withdrawn from combat and sent to supervise the vote. Vietnamese villagers were led to believe that if they did not vote, they might incur the wrath of district and provincial officials; government pressure was at least as powerful as Communist threats. Said one observer: "There was a general feeling that if they didn't vote, it would hurt them later." It would, but in more subtle ways than government reprisals.

A Banana for Dessert. The new as sembly will scarcely be dominated by military types; of 55 uniformed candidates, only 20 were elected. Of the remaining assemblymen, 34 are Buddhists (though none is a known representative of the militant Vien Hoa Dao group that tried to overthrow the government last spring), and fully 30 are Catholics, who make up only 10% of the population. That was enough to end the 100-day fast of militant Buddhist Leader Thich Tri Quang. From his quarters in a Saigon maternity clinic, Tri Quang promptly labeled the election a fraud. Then he ate a banana.