In Saigon's huge Xa Loi Pagoda, Buddhist monks and nuns were holding a 48-hour hunger strike against the regime of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. Expecting trouble, police sealed off nearby streets with barbed wire. To prevent a repetition of the ritualistic suicide last month, when a protesting Buddhist monk burned himself to death on a Saigon street corner, two fire trucks were on hand. Show Suddenly, about 500 saffron-robed Buddhist priests, laymen and women emerged from a nearby alley and started to run toward the pagoda to join their fasting fellow-Buddhists. Stymied by wire and police, the demonstrators...
On May 8th, 1963, Vietnamese Buddhists honored the birthday of the Supreme Buddha. As they did each spring on the day known as Le Phat Dan, Buddhist communities in Vietnam paid tribute to the founder of their faith with festivals, parades, and ceremonies conducted in villages and cities throughout the country. It was the spiritual leader's 2,527th birthday, and it was a day that held special significance for the vast majority of the population. But in South Vietnam, the tone of the sacred holiday reflected far more than devotion to Buddhist philosophy or reverence for the divine prophet. Since the rise to power of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1955, Buddhist organizations had used the event to protest the regime's oppressive policies and its religious intolerance. This year was no different. In Saigon's city center, monks paraded, waving brightly colored Buddhist prayer flags—a bold demonstration, for these men, of both religious pride and political defiance. The Power of the MinorityPresident Diem, an elite Vietnamese Catholic, was a widely unpopular ruler, despised for his ruthless policies and his religious bigotry. In a country dominated by small farmers, peasants, and Buddhists (roughly 85% of the population), Diem unapologetically favored the Catholic minority and the landlord class.71 He granted public services, land grants, and tax exemptions to these groups, and freed all Catholics from corvée work—unpaid, state-enforced labor. His government forbade non-Catholics from carrying weapons; officers in Diem's Army of the Republic of Vietnam were pressured to convert to Catholicism lest they lose their ranking or be denied firearms. And in villages throughout the countryside, the military forcefully—and often violently—converted non-Catholic civilians. But Vietnamese citizens could do little to challenge his regime. The South Vietnamese government—a political system supported and in many ways created by the United States—was democratic in name, but not in practice. With each year, Diem stiffened punishment for dissent, and imposed bans on all forms of expression perceived as subversive, rebellious, or incendiary, including the display of any flag other than the national flag of South Vietnam. Symbols of OppositionPresident Diem selectively enforced this ban, not surprisingly in favor of his supporters. On May 6th, 1963, Catholics had been granted permission to drape the flag of the Vatican throughout the city during a birthday celebration for Diem's brother. But two days later, when thousands of protesters waved Buddhist flags in public, government troops fired into the demonstration, killing at least nine people. Diem refused to accept responsibility for the bloodshed, and instead blamed the incident on the Viet Cong (VC) who he claimed had incited the protest and therefore was to blame for the government's actions. But few believed his claims. In the days following the melee, some 10,000 Buddhists marched in to protest the killings. Demonstration leaders were swiftly arrested and President Diem ordered his armies to scour the countryside in order to apprehend anyone disloyal to the government. The sweeps carried out in the following weeks were brutally violent and conducted in such a way, as one Catholic priest in the South explained later, "to show the VC that the Government was strong and to make the opponents of the Government afraid."72 A BodhisattvaJune 11th, 1963 was a clear day in South Vietnam, but tension continued to grip the capital city of Saigon. Thich Quang Duc, a 66-year-old Buddhist monk, arrived at a busy intersection in the city center. There the man knelt slowly to the ground and placed himself in the lotus position. He sat still and silent as two assistants slowly doused his body with gasoline. As a gathering of monks chanted, Quang Duc calmly and deliberately lit a match and waited, motionless, as the flames engulfed him. "Before closing my eyes to Buddha," the monk had written in anticipation of his death, "I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem, asking him to be kind and tolerant toward his people and to enforce a policy of religious equality."73 The monks who retrieved Quang Duc's body discovered that only his heart remained intact. His followers believed that this proved the Buddhist priest had been a bodhisattva, or an "enlightened one," and preserved the heart to be honored as the relic of an esteemed martyr. But little changed in Saigon. The government dismissed the monk's protest. Madame Nhu, the wife of Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu and the First Lady of the South Vietnamese government, mocked the event, calling it "a barbeque."74 And President Diem, more reviled than ever in his own country, broadened his counter-resistance campaigns. Still, Quang Duc's act of protest became one of the most significant events in the war, a major turning point that strengthened and further motivated rebellious factions in South Vietnam. The American ResponseThe practice of self-immolation by Vietnamese monks wasn't new. For centuries, Buddhist monks had participated in these acts of suicide, often performed in political protest. But in the United States, such self-sacrifice was unimaginable. The American press published graphic images of Thich Quang Duc's charred body enveloped in flames, and Americans were horrified. But many also responded with great sympathy for the martyred monk. For those on both sides of the political debate over American involvement in Vietnam, Quang Duc's protest illustrated the deep divisions within South Vietnam. It marked the moment when much of the nation began to raise questions about American support for the South Vietnamese government, a regime revealed to be corrupt and despotic. Martyrdom or Insanity?Though many Americans eulogized the Vietnamese monk for his righteous sacrifice, most didn't award the same compassion to anti-war martyrs closer to home. For instance, when Norman Morrison, a Maryland Quaker, lit himself on fire outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, his act was perceived not as a venerable protest, but as the work of a "demented" man.75 While that may have been possible, Morrison's friends and family described him as a very sane man, committed to his religious beliefs, particularly pacifism. The 31-year-old father was a leader in the Stony Run Friends Meeting, a Quaker organization based in Baltimore that vigorously opposed war. The group revered human life but didn't specifically condemn suicide. According to his wife, Morrison was deeply disturbed by "great loss of life and human suffering caused by the war in Viet Nam. He was protesting our Government's deep military involvement in this war."76 Exactly one week later, Roger LaPorte, a 22-year-old student at Manhattan's Hunter College, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire outside the United Nations headquarters. LaPorte, a Roman Catholic dedicated to the doctrine of pacifism, chose suicide by way of self-immolation to protest American involvement in Vietnam. He was a student of a seminary in Vermont who volunteered with the radical pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. Friends and family members regarded him as a devout, normal young man who smoked and dated now and again. The Catholic Church, the American press, and the public denounced LaPorte's violent demonstration as shameful. While the Vietnamese eulogized Morrison and LaPorte, Americans withheld sympathy. "What perhaps was most pathetic about the Morrison and LaPorte suicides was the futility of such attempts at martyrdom," Time magazine remarked in the days following LaPorte's death. "Within the ample means and methods of U.S. democracy, a human voice means more than a human torch." Reflecting the culturally specific understandings of martyrdom in the United States, the writer concluded his comments with a quote from a psychoanalyst: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."77
 South Vietnam was an independent nation-state, formed in the wake of the Geneva Accords of 1954. South Vietnam became a client state of the United States, supported by American military and financial aid. Though nominally democratic, South Vietnamese leaders often subverted democracy and the rule of law in order to maintain and expand their own power, causing problems for their US benefactors. FormationUnder the terms of the Geneva Accords, North and South Vietnam were to exist for two years as temporary transitional states – at least in theory. In reality, both had already begun to develop into separate national entities. As this process unfolded, the divisions between North and South Vietnam widened. This reduced the likelihood of peaceful reunification or free elections to determine future reunification. The new rulers of South Vietnam were backed by the United States and their Western allies. These men, epitomised by the Christian prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem, presented themselves as aspiring democrats and capitalists. After fighting to remove the shackles of French colonialism, they claimed to desire a free and independent South Vietnam based on Western political and economic values. What unfolded under their leadership, however, was neither democratic or beneficial to most South Vietnamese people. Ngo Dinh DiemNgo Dinh Diem became the prime minister of South Vietnam in 1954. He was a Catholic and a political outsider who was appointed as leader chiefly due to American manipulation. From the outset, Diem faced considerable challenges from criminals and political opponents, particularly communist subversives still active in the southern provinces. Thousands of Viet Minh agents and guerrilla soldiers, most acting on orders from Hanoi, ignored the migration amnesty of 1954-55 and remained underground in South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, who doubted the 1956 elections would take place, described these agents as his “insurance”. Opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem could also be found in the military. In November 1954, a clique of officers, trained by and loyal to the French, attempted to remove Diem and install a Francophile military junta. Their coup was thwarted by Diem, with the help of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The continuation of the opium trade, another legacy of French colonialism, also encouraged warlords, organised crime and gangsterism. Diem assumes powerThe newly appointed Diem was determined to deal with all of these problems, despite his lack of political experience. When Diem assumed power, however, South Vietnam was bankrupt and without the organs of government. During their withdrawal from Indochina, the French had dismantled the apparatus of colonial government. In some cases, entire buildings and departments had been cleared, their contents packed and shipped back to France, all in the space of a few months. The French also stripped South Vietnam of important resources, from military equipment down to telephones and typewriters. By late 1955, South Vietnam had almost no army, no police force and very little functioning bureaucracy. Not only did Diem have to persuade the South Vietnamese people that he was in charge but he also had to construct a working system of government. Diem’s nepotismWithout an established bureaucracy or political network, Diem relied on American advisors – and on his own family. His most prominent relatives were his four brothers – Ngo Dinh Nhu, Ngo Dinh Thuc, Ngo Dinh Can and Ngo Dinh Luyen – and one of his sisters-in-law, Tran Le Xuan (later known in the West as Madame Nhu). Diem gave these family members, friends and political allies important leadership positions in the government, military, business and Vietnam’s Catholic church. His closest confidante was his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, an opium-addicted neo-Nazi who lived alongside Diem in the presidential mansion. Nhu oversaw the creation and organisation of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN, formed in October 1955) while also running his own private armies and anti-communist ‘death squads’. In late 1954, Nhu attempted to provide political legitimacy for his brother’s regime by forming the Can Lao, a South Vietnamese party that Nhu hoped would grow to rival Ho Chi Minh’s Lao Dong. Can Lao never inspired the people or became a popular movement, however, and remained relatively small. Membership was only open to pro-Diem Catholics from the middle and upper classes. In reality, Can Lao was just a political device to justify Diem’s rule. Corruption and rigged electionsBy 1956 Diem’s regime had taken clearer form. Though the South Vietnamese government presented itself to the world as a developing democracy, it was anti-democratic, autocratic, corrupt and nepotistic. There was a National Assembly that claimed to be representative, though rigged elections meant it was nothing of the kind. The Assembly was filled with Diem’s acolytes and did little more than rubber-stamp Diem’s own policies. Freedom of the press was curtailed; writing or protesting against the government could end in a prison sentence, or worse. The regime also eradicated Diem’s opponents, under the guise of anti-communist action. Under Nhu’s supervision, private armies launched campaigns to locate, arrest and dispose of suspected communists and sympathisers in South Vietnam. Thousands were rounded up, deported, tortured, thrown in prison or executed. According to some sources, more South Vietnamese were killed during Diem’s four-year anti-communist purge than during the First Indochina War of 1946-54. In May 1959, Diem issued the notorious Law 10/59. This decree empowered military tribunals to impose a death sentence on anyone belonging to the Viet Minh, Lao Dong or any other communist organisation:
Rural reformsThe Diem regime also embarked on social reorganisation it hoped would disrupt communist influence. In 1959, the Saigon government introduced the Rural Community Development Program, or ‘Agrovilles’ (khu tru mat). This was effectively a program of mass resettlement: peasants in small villages or isolated areas were forced to relocate to populated areas under government control. It had some similarities to Soviet farm collectivisation, though its objectives were more political than economic. By the early 1960s, there were more than two dozen Agrovilles in South Vietnam. Each contained several thousand peasants, most driven there at the point of a gun, from villages which had previously contained just a few families. The Agroville resettlements caused enormous social and economic disruption. Families were separated, shifted from familiar territory and forced to abandon important spiritual sites, such as temples and ancestral graves. Most of these Agrovilles were too small for everyone to be given plots of land or employed as farmers, meaning there was little or no work. ‘Strategic hamlets’In 1961, the ‘Agroville’ scheme was transformed into ‘strategic hamlets’ (ap chien luoc). This was suggested to Diem by American advisors and developed largely by the CIA. The strategic hamlets were intended to be a network of self-sustaining communities, strong enough to withstand communist infiltration and attack. Peasants would be moved into these large rural settlements; they would be compensated for this relocation and allocated plots of land. Each strategic hamlet would be provided with a defendable perimeter, small arms and militia training; it would be outfitted with a radio or telephone connection to make contact with the government, ARVN and nearby hamlets. Like the Agrovilles, the strategic hamlets program failed, chiefly because it was poorly implemented. Despite a barrage of CIA-produced propaganda, most peasants did not wish to relocate. Much of the money set aside for compensation ended up in the pockets of corrupt government officials – including Diem’s own family – instead of being distributed to the peasants. By late 1963, the South Vietnamese government claimed to have completed 8,600 strategic hamlets, however, a subsequent American investigation found four-fifths of these were incomplete. American funding dried up and the program soon faded away. Many strategic hamlets were abandoned, stripped of whatever was useful and left to rot. Other economic reformsDespite its failures and rampant corruption, the Diem government did make some progress in industrialising the economy. South Vietnam’s status as a developing nation recovering from war and colonialism received extensive media coverage in the West. This prompted many Western companies to assist Saigon with trade and investment. In 1957, Diem announced a five-year economic plan and called for foreign loans and domestic investment. Those who invested in the South Vietnamese economy, particularly its export industries, were promised government guarantees and concessions, such as lower tax rates and land rents. Local companies were subsidised and locally produced goods were protected with tariffs. Meanwhile, the government and its agencies imported much-needed equipment: factory and farm machinery, motor vehicles and raw materials such as steel and ore. South Vietnam’s agricultural sector also recovered. Rice production boomed, growing from 70,000 tons per annum (1955) to 340,000 tons (1960). Predictably, Diem’s main trading partner during this period was the United States. Between 1954 and 1960, the US government pumped around $US1.2 billion into South Vietnam, about three-quarters of which was used to expand and bolster the military. Washington also offered incentives to American companies willing to trade with South Vietnam. Diem’s persecution of BuddhistsThe relative success of Diem’s economic program enabled many to overlook the brutality and excesses of his regime. It was Diem’s persecution of another group – South Vietnam’s Buddhists – which made headlines around the world and spelt the beginning of the end for his regime. More than three-quarters of the South Vietnamese population was Buddhist. Despite this, it was minority Catholics who benefited most under Diem’s regime. Government officials, high ranking military officers, business owners and landlords in receipt of government assistance were overwhelmingly Catholic. Many even converted to Catholicism just to win favour with the regime. In May 1963, on the eve of Vesak (a celebration of Buddha’s birthday), Diem issued a decree banning the display of religious flags in public. Thousands of Buddhists in Hue rioted in response. The demonstration was brutally dispersed by government forces and eight people were killed. Vietnamese Buddhists protested their treatment with a series of rallies, sit-ins and hunger strikes. In June, Diem’s forces dealt with one protest by using tear gas and pouring battery acid on the heads of seated Buddhists. In July, a group of American journalists covering Buddhist protests were involved in a fistfight with a group of Diem’s secret police. These incidents started to expose tensions between Washington and Saigon. Thich Quang DucThe most striking Buddhist protest occurred on June 11th 1963. In the middle of a busy Saigon street, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc calmly sat down and delivered a short speech, after which a colleague doused him in gasoline. Duc then set himself alight and sat motionless as the flames engulfed his body. Images and footage of Duc’s suicide were circulated worldwide. His self-immolation drew attention to the Buddhist plight in South Vietnam and the corruption and inherent brutality of Diem’s regime. Even this did not halt Diem’s anti-Buddhist program. In August, shortly before a major Buddhist protest rally in Saigon, Diem declared martial law in the city. He authorised ARVN forces to raid Saigon’s Buddhist pagodas and arrest suspected “communist sympathisers”. Hundreds of Buddhists were arrested and many vanished, probably murdered. Thousands more fled and their pagodas were desecrated by Diem’s troops. In Washington, the situation in South Vietnam was now considered untenable. Diem seemed almost uncontrollable and his regime was a constant source of bad news and negative publicity. In late August, just days after the anti-Buddhist raids, president John F. Kennedy asked the State Department to investigate the options for ‘regime change’ in South Vietnam.
1. Between 1954 and 1963 South Vietnam was a nominally democratic republic, propped up by American political and financial support. In reality, there was little democratic about its government. 2. South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, claimed to head a democratic government. In reality, Diem was a petty dictator, assisted by family members, Catholic acolytes and US advisors. 3. During his rule, Ngo Dinh Diem authorised brutal campaigns against his political enemies, particularly suspected communists (1955-59) and Vietnam’s Buddhist monks (1963). 4. Diem’s social program included the failed ‘Agroville’ and ‘strategic hamlet’ resettlement programs. His economic reforms, helped by foreign trade, were more successful. 5. The United States supported Diem and his government with advisors and money, however by August 1963 Diem was a liability and Washington began investigating ways to remove him.
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What did a number of buddhist monks do to show their opposition to diem, the south vietnam leader?
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