Diem Besieged

Just as things seemed to be going better in his struggle to save South Viet Nam (pop. 10.5 million), Nationalist Premier Ngo Dinh Diem last week ran into serious trouble. He was caught in an ambush set by the discredited but still powerful rearguards of his country's past--feudal warlords, religious fanatics and big-city hoodlums, with French colonials hovering indistinctly in the background. About 30,000 well-armed troops of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen sects (long subsidized by the French) were out in coalition against Diem's national government, lobbing mortar shells into peasant villages to demonstrate their lethal potentialities. Hostile Vietnamese politicians in Europe were trying to persuade Riviera-loving Bao Dai, the absentee chief of state, to go home, fire Diem and make a few changes. French politicians were frankly telling Britons and Americans that they considered Diem unworthy of support, and sure to fall. In the French press, Diem was dismissed as a creature of the Americans, discredited and entirely dependent upon U.S. dollars for survival. The French government suggested last week that the U.S., Britain and France should convene a foreign ministers conference to decide anew what should be done about Viet Nam.

French Commissioner General Paul Ely supports Ngo Dinh Diem loyally, but his influence back home is not great. The French government of Faure is working, fundamentally, to maintain "the French presence" in both halves of divided Viet Nam: in the North, the French hope with declining prospects to wheedle a deal out of Communist Ho Chi Minh; in the South, they hope to replace Nationalist Diem with a man they feel they can trust --Bao Dai's cousin, Buu Hoi, 39, a leprosy expert who has not lived in Viet Nam for 20 years.

Diem's chief claim to fame is that he is an incorruptible nationalist unstained by liaisons with the French. That is why the French dislike him; it is also why he is the first Vietnamese politician (outside of Communist Ho, who also rose to power by stressing not his Communism but his anti-Frenchness) to attract any measure of popular support.

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