RẰNG HAY THÌ THẬT LÀ HAY...

Nguyễn Việt Nữ

IT DOES SOUND GOOD...

The celebrated literary critic Thuy Khue usually wrote from the capital of light Paris that writers and artists abroad hailing from the former South did not produce works as valuable as those of the Communist writers at home, which explains why their writing have not been very much sought after.

In September 1991, in her article “Demolishing the Ghetto” published in Southern California in issue 29 of the 21st Century Weekly Magazine, Ms. Thuy Khue amounted the number of refugees of Communism from Vietnam all over the world to 2 million as compared to the number of 60 million Vietnamese residing in the country, and concluded: “On the point of view of talent, if we base on the 2/60 or 1/30 proportion between our population and the population in the country to determine the number our people of talent, this  number is very limited”.

Perhaps, in order to prove that the people of talent thrived in the land of  Uncle Ho, Thuy Khue had the work “Novel Without Theme” of Communist female  writer Duong Thu Huong published, for which she wrote the preface: Novel Without Theme aims at the core of the myth “Fight the Americans for the National Salvation”, to uncover the negative side of the “lofty and beautiful” ideals; the back side of the triumphal arches; the masks of formerly beautiful words now turned empty slogans, viz Nation – People –Just Cause – Liberty – Country –Homeland..., for having been abused and treaded on too often”.

Woman writer Thuy Khue offered the view that after the Humanistic Fine Literary and Artistic Work Group had undergone the repression “The intellectuals of the North lived hushed up, experiencing a 30-year period of immense emptiness and solitude; silently enduring, resigned to their fate, accepting supervision over their thoughts. Duong Thu Huong belongs to the generation born and grown up in the North after 1945...born in 1947, in Thai Binh...” Thus, Thuy Khue reckoned that  Duong Thu Huong’s group today resurrects the opposition atmosphere of the old times, in the fact that the  giant Duong Thu Huong, born 27 years after Tran Duy, wrote “Novel Without Theme” to clear the homeland of undergrowth and considered herself the pioneer “plowing the first furrow”. This courageous attitude received praise from woman writer Thuy Khue:

“On the road of struggle for freedom and democracy in the homeland, that plow woman cut the first furrow, dug deeper and cleared a more extensive area than any other cultivators”. So today Duong Thu Huong’s group assumes the role of the celestial corps dispatched to earth to rescue mankind.

Perhaps believing with certainty that Duong Thu Huong was a hearted giant, Thuy Khue royally invested her:

“Duong Thu Huong is a rare phenomenon, a pearl in the putrid swamp polluting the homeland”.

One would have thought that the queen would be grateful to the person who had been nice to crown her, but not so; from her golden throne Queen Duong reached out her hand for Thuy Khue’s face below and “presented” her a crushing slap in the form of the 16-page handwritten SELF-APOLOGY (2) dated August 12, 1991 and purported to have been written in jail. Queen Duong Thu Huong sedately returned the crown to Thuy Khue and had the following words: 

“A praise of such extreme height would make someone else infinitely gratified, because human beings as a rule do not mind being fondled, but regrettably not me”.

Then Duong Thu Huong entreated: “Please, do not reedit or translate into any foreign language the book Novel Without Theme” because it “has been radically exploited by the extremist anti-Communists whose aim is to oppose their enemy, the Hanoi Government”, and “because the event has been an opportunity for those extremist anti-Communists to uncover their unsated hatred,  anger and  resentment of the vanquished who wait for the opportunity to vent them”, and “this campaign has fed inaccurate information to undermine the credibility of the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

This slap set off a reaction on the part of Thuy Khue herself and many celebrated personalities, among them socialist writer Nhat Tien who jumped in to act as mediator between the two women writers; and because he had great esteem for both he concluded that “Duong Thu Huong and Thuy Khue are two fellow-travelers walking between two lines of gunfire”.

I also have the same esteem, and I trust that these two persons of the fair sex possess the zeal to search for a way to erase hatred to rebuild the homeland in ruins.  Being of the same sex I understand you quite well, I understand the heart and the soul of the Vietnamese woman with regard to things related to family and nation. Thus, though you are well-known as “writer, critic” and I am nobody, I still wish to take the liberty to contribute a few opinions hoping to shorten the road toward finding an efficient solution for our nation.

First, according to the common mathematical principles, two parallel lines never converge, except perhaps at infinity. In the present conditions of our country no one has the courage to live till that “infinite” day. You certainly agree on that point. So, desist from walking parallelly to each other. Halt and face each other, each advancing one step and ...crack! Two heads collide, right? But how far is the distance in between? How long would it take? It may take a year or a hundred years. Is there a formula to solve this problem? Yes, there is.

 It appears very conspicuously and precisely in the “Self-apology” of Duong Thu Huong as it points out that the reason for people to refuse to meet each other is that they “stubbornly clung to their fixed opinions and old complexes, are intolerably intolerant, pitiless to the hilt toward the nation and humanity. They all are unwilling to get to the source of the Truth. They all close their ears to the word FORGIVE”.

So let us try to apply this formula to solve the problem of Duong Thu Huong...”Why couldn’t you envision that at another epoch where were two newborn babies. One was in Hanoi, the other is Saigon. Eighteen years later the child in the North heeded the call to “fight the Americans to save the country”, “for the sake of the Socialist Regime”; the child in the South was attracted by the “nationalist ideal”, by “the campaign to stop the red wave”, by verses such as “the rampart to prevent the red wave rises motionless to the clouds...”and the two children set out fired with enthusiasm set out, desirous to achieve brilliant feats of arms with the Republican Nation or the Socialist Nation. Then they shot to kill each other. Then they sustained wounds, they both became disabled, they died alike in the concealing jungle, their corpses decayed in the mud of the battlefield (...). Are those two children guilty in the cruel game of destiny? (...). To me, those two youths are both my children. The blood they shed is my blood. And in the altar of my spirit I burn two similar incense sticks to keep their memory!”

“It does sound good”... But!

I have in front of me the book “Vietnam 10 years later” by journalist Tim Page who was invited together with other foreign newsmen by the government of the Socialist Regime to attend the 10th victory celebration (April 30, 1985).

In chapter 6 with the main subject “Liberation”, the author wrote down a few lines of lyrics of a song of the Liberation Front dated 1966 which run roughly as follows: “Hey, you, American invader! – I swear to you in words as sharp as a knife – That, this is Vietnam – So, if I am already here – Then you must leave”. 

Under the lines is a summary of the changes of Saigon after April 30, 1975, when the Russian T54 Tank number 844 from Hanoi rushed over and rammed down the gate of the Independence Palace in Saigon...Tim Page had been a Communist- sympathizer in New York since 1969. For having taken part in many anti-war demonstrations, he had won the trust of the government of the socialist regime who allowed him to go wherever he pleased for his journalistic works, and so he could take pictures of the following scenes:

After page 100 he displayed the photo of a vandalized tombstone of a dead soldier in the Military Cemetery in Thu Duc with the eyes poked. The caption runs “desecrated Army of the Republic of Vietnam graves at the former military cemetery”. Next was a large photo of a blind holding out his hand begging for money with the caption “Blind, pensionless, old soldier, begging outside Ban Me Thuot cathedral after Sunday mass”.

 On page 113 is the picture of a man, bare back, wearing a pair of black shorts with a torn bottom showing his buttocks, bandaged legs, sleeping on the brick pavement in front of a store, without blanket or mat, with the caption “Recently released from re-education camp, homeless of Dong Khoi (Revolution – formerly Tu Do) Street, Ho’s Ville)...and many more...

Thus, assuming there is aid in artificial eyes, or in property or money from abroad to Vietnam, would the soldiers of the Republic of Vietnam as represented by the pictures described above get an equal share like the soldiers of the venerable old Mr. Ho? No, for sure. If it could be done, even corpses would be dug from the ground to be killed again to satiate the “unsated hatred”, so let us not waste time talking about the sharing of food and clothing to surviving foes.

 

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Duong Thu Huong could view this as the conclusion drawn by “the prejudiced anti Communists...who only focus their attention on the ruling Communists (...). It is true that there are rulers (...) who wield blind tyrannical power...but...” ( Duong Thu Huong’s own words).

Here I will discard the question: To know about a regime, who else do you look at if not the government? Instead I will for instance look at Duong Thu Huong, who solemnly declared she would consider the Republican soldier and the Communist soldier as her two children, that is she was resolved to share aid equally to both children of the same blood as hers. But let us sincerely 

respond: would she be able to realize her aspiration when even all of the injured and disabled soldiers and crippled civilians of the Socialist side have not been completely accounted for, let alone  the same complete list of  all those of the “rebel” side?

Supposing Duong Thu Huong was governing and giving orders to list the war victims of the Nationalist side, what is certainly going to happen is that the orders will not be executed; and supposing Duong Thu Huong herself was executing the orders and submitting a list she had prepared to higher authorities, those higher places will not ratify it, but ignore it instead.

That was without mentioning the fact that even though those who execute orders have already “set up spiritual altars to equally honor the memory” of the two youths of both sides, the orders cannot be enforced.

The obvious reason is that the Republican children, who had been railed at as impious to their parents and were conscious of their humble self, “bolted” down to the bottom of the sea searching for...sharks or sneaked off to jungle hideouts leading a Tarzan life; as to those crippled children who could not flee, and thus remained on the land of the Socialist Regime, and who were wise to pretend to be deaf or blind in order to be left alone, have now been struck with real deafness or blindness; so, they no longer could hear, understand the passionate call of their beloved mother! Alas, had they known that after  some 15, 17 years there was such a honeyed day: “the blood you shed is my blood too, my children”; strive hence to remain lucid till the day when you could give yourselves up to fulfilling relish of maternal spiritual love!

Those were the elements that make the “conferment of equal honors” problem unsolvable.

 Now supposing Duong Thu Huong was successful in carrying out her nurtured aspiration, would she be able to bring about Reconciliation and Harmony, the obliteration of the hatred, for which she would make use of  “even death without regret” to struggle?

My answer is simply another “No”.

To prove this point I’d like to use an objective fact which most people would be able to verify.

                              ***

That is the Persian Gulf War ending the 207 days of occupation of Kuwait by Iraq President Saddam Hussein waged by the United States and Allies. The Republican Guard was resigned to die to show loyalty to Hussein for the following reasons:

Saddam Hussein was the sole great leader capable of defending the territory of the Arab Bloc. The occupation of Kuwait, the annexation of this country to make it the 19th province of Iraq, had for aim the restoration of prosperity and happiness to the Iraqis. The anterior war for Iraqi territorial expansion waged against Iran and creating an 80-billion dollars debt to the Iraqi budget had resulted in the population’s extreme poverty and deprivations. Meanwhile neighboring Kuwait had more oil fields and lowered the price of oil to serve the interests of the Capitalistic Imperialists; and as a result amassed a huge sum in Western nation investment. The sale under the price of the oil by Kuwait did not harm Kuwait’s economy, but Iraq’s losses amounted to the billions of dollars. And there was no reason for a 2-million population group to possess far too much wealth to the extent of being at a loss of using it and at going as far as building highways in the desert, etc...It is clear that Kuwait’s riches derived from exploitation. A revolution therefore had to be made to bring back justice and prosperity to the Iraqis. That was the just cause of the Republican Guard and the Iraqi military when they invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

Hussein’s aim was to erase Kuwait from the world map as fast as possible. 

The faster Kuwait became the 19th Iraqi province the sooner the Iraqi people progressed toward paradise.

Indeed, a hotel in Kuwait could harbor a large military unit. The Kuwaitis lived in affluence with a surplus in bare necessaries such as lamps, printing machines, radio sets, refrigerators, timepieces, cars of all sizes, of all models, etc..., while the Iraqis were deprived of all those things. 

The truck convoys carrying those goods back to Iraq are the concrete images revealing the Republican Guards’ patriotism and love for the Iraqi people. 

Hussein’s orders had to do with this transfer of wealth from Kuwait to Iraq. 

Any Iraqi soldier who arrived in Kuwait “must take something back to Iraq on the penalty of being shot”. Women were raped without regard for feelings (though Islamic law severely forbids the practice). Files of ambulances kept bringing the wounded to the largest hospital of Kuwait; the victims included people hit with hammers, whose knee caps got holes drilled into them, or whose skulls were sawed open from which brain matter was hanging out. Some women had their nails pulled out, while others had their eyes gouged, or ears severed, or were left completely naked. There were soldiers who were thrown acid, or burned with cigarette tips before being killed. If Kuwaitis could die from a bullet to minimize the pain, they would consider it a favor. The people of this country estimated that after only 7 days of liberation by the Iraqis they had regressed 400 to 500 years.

Despite of all that, when President Bush gave the order to attack Iraq on January 17, 1991 to liberate Kuwait, many nations in the world gave Saddam Hussein their support stating as reason their opposition to war. Moslems in London marched raising banners reading: “Saddam is the champion of Islam”.

Wherever tyranny and oppression exist, so does opposition. In Iraq there were organizations that rose up and allied with Kurdish resistant for example. They demolished the key agency of Saddam’s Baath Socialist Party, resisted the Republican Guards, whose loyalty to Saddam was almost absolute. 

This group killed 3 high ranking officials including Saddam’s eldest son Udai Hussein, 29. This group of “rebels” counted in its rank the participation of 15,000 soldiers frustrated with the regime, frustrated with Hussein’s promise that after the conquest of Kuwait they would share the heritage, but in reality they obtained nothing, except hunger, poverty and death, while in barely 10 years Hussein’s personal wealth had reached some 10 billion dollars in oil productions, that is not counting the shares in companies abroad.

The rebels and the population swarming into several locations killed many members of the police and people of Hussein’s side. They demolished the detention camps and interrogation center in the provinces of Basra and Nasiriyah, freed over 1,500 kidnapped Kuwaitis and other political prisoners. The province chief of Basra, the police chief, the head of the intelligence agency and the leader of the Baath party, and 17 Iraqi military officers of those two provinces were killed. The rebels frequently organized demonstrations to shout slogans such as “No Saddam! Death to Saddam!”

Naturally Saddam must have measures to crush the opposition by, on the one hand murdering the former trusted subordinates which today showed an undecided attitude, to give warning to other subordinates, and on the other hand step up the campaign to appeal to the devotion to Islam of the Iraqis. 

To the people in the country Saddam must be the idol. The history of Iraq was written to let the young generation know that the occupation of Kuwait was a duty to be performed for the people of Iraq, and that he was a heroic leader of the Arab Bloc to oppose the exploitation by the United States and the West. Hussein took advantage of the faith of the Iraqi people to skilfully use it as an effective instrument of propaganda such as when Bagdad was being consumed in an ocean of fire, the military almost completely destroyed, two days before the surrender as ordered by the United Nations, Saddam made up the story that “last night I saw in dreams Lord Mohammed who advised me to pull the troops out of Kuwait”.

So the following morning, he met with the Iraqi Revolutionary Command  Council of which Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz (who 6 weeks earlier told US Foreign Secretary James Baker that Iraq was resolved to fight, not to make peace) and told them about his “last night’s dream”.

  Next, leaflets were disseminated along the Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian borders, proclaiming to the Iraqi soldiers that the God of Islam had instructed a retreat, insinuating that the defeat leading the nation to its death had not been caused by Sadam’s mistakes.

The night of February 26, 1991 Saddam went on air and proclaimed in a choky voice the surrender: “Today, our heroic army will withdraw from Kuwait...People of Iraq, we had stood up to 30 nations and heroically endured...we had won...This war will come down in history as a glorious feat for Iraq”. So when the United States proclaimed a ceasefire the Iraqi population ostentatiously applauded Saddam, the hero that could force the United States and the armies of 30 allied nations to a ceasefire just by a dream!

The soldiers of the Republican Guard followed that stream of history; then they watched the images shown again and again on television accompanied by the figures of 700,000 allied troops and 48,000 bombing missions, which reduced to rubbles their cities, killed their compatriots whose bodies were no longer intact, had all 200,000 army remnants raise their hands in surrender. They were beset to see their cities without electricity, water and food;  some 50,000 of their people killed;  not to mention the long  aftermath of the war...As their patriotism rose, the Republican Guards were determined to sacrifice their lives in a jihad to defend the Arab world, in response to the call of their hero Saddam Hussein for a stand against the Americans to save the homeland, and against the Kurdish rebels and the revolted group, slaves to the Americans, who brought in the war that destroyed their country.

Due to those two opposing ideals, the Republican Guard and the Kurdish resistance were engaged in a fight to the death. And, if the Iraqi mother had as the only measure “the equal honoring of the memory of both sides”, would she be able to prevent the misfortune that the homeland would forever be an immense graveyard where bone layers keep piling over other bone layers?

Perhaps you have already found the answer. To reconciliate her two children the Iraqi mother needs to use Duong Thu Huong’s formula: seek the TRUTH right at its source.

 To find the truth the accurate way, one must not  stubbornly cling to any fixed ideas and old complexes, these fixed ideas  being those of a Muslim, since the majority of Iraqis are Muslims, who considered Saddam Hussein his God; for, if the Iraqi mother stubbornly clasps her fixed ideas, she has the tendency to consider that the just cause is in Saddam’s side, and hence, though she wants her two own children to stop killing each other, she silently imputes a bigger mistake to the Kurdish child.

On his side, the Kurdish child witnesses that his mother is biased, because to him Saddam is nurturing the dream of the bloodthirsty, invading, greedy and cruel, despotic dominator...that is the reason why he opposes him. Should he lose the war and was no longer strong enough to fight on, he still would not feel eager to collaborate with his Republican Guard brother, and so the family of the Iraqi mother would not fare any better, on the contrary, the fire of hatred temporarily repressed would flare up again at the first opportunity.

Only when the Iraqi mother, even though a hardcore Muslim, but whose courage goes beyond her fixed conceptions, does not judge Saddam in relation to religion but impartially judge him on the basis of his humanistic origins, that a right solution will be found.

 To clarify about Saddam’s humanism, the Iraqi mother, for example, can just let her Republican Guard son know that Saddam, in 1956, at the age of 19, had taken up the assignment of assassinating King Faisal II. The early attempt failed. But Saddam lived with a truth, his own, expressed as follows: “There is nothing to argue about, just pull your gun and shoot him, and you have done your job”, which means: he did not need to question why he should commit the murder. Which this attitude, barely two years later, in 1958, he succeeded, not only in killing King Faisal II, but also massacring the whole royal family, including the assistant chief of staff of the royal army, his own brother-in-law.

In 1968, Saddam’s Socialist Baath Party gained political advantage and he  was raised to the function of Vice-President. Nominally Vice-President, Saddam practically was already ruling Iraq with an iron fist, with terrorism, with concentration camps erected to detain and savagely torture ople for simply disagreeing with him.

 The Iraqis’ torture chamber Mukhabarat which Saddam Hussein built was very well-known to the Muslims (One might wonders whether it is on a par with Dam Bun detention camp in North Vietnam in Mr. Ho’s times?)

When Saddam acceded to the rank of President of Iraq in 1972 at the age of 42 the first thing he did was to put to death 21 Ministers in the Cabinet Council for treason including his long time closest comrade. The condemned was led before the death squad, their mouths closed with tapes, their hands tied. Saddam gave the order to each member of the squad to open fire... Each condemned received at least 500 bullets in his body. Immediately after, Saddam went on television to tell the people that they just saw the punishment reserved for the traitors to their party and warned that: “The closer someone is with me the further he will be to me if he opposes me”. 

The book “Republic of Fear” published in 1989 tells that during just the summer of the first year of Saddam’s presidency he executed 500 high-ranking Baath Party members.

Like Hitler, Saddam advocates that in the Moslem world Iraq is the only nation that occupies the summit of human intellect. Thus, in 1980, when Iraq waged war with neighboring Iran, Saddam’s Health Minister aired concerns about the war he was killed immediately. A general who submitted a report cautioning him that an intended plan of assault would surely cause heavy loss of lives was invited to step to the adjacent room to further discuss about the plan. Next, behind the tightly closed door a gun report shattered the silence, and a while later Saddam stepped out, his hand returning his pistol to the holster.

 The Iraq-Iran war lasted 8 years but was indecisive; and yet Iraq sustained 120,000 dead; its number of wounded civilians rose to 300,000; its debts amounted to a huge sum, which caused poverty and deprivations to the nation, and led to the opposition of the Kurdish Iraqis, which resulted for them the hatred and the accusations of connivance with foreigners, which were the country of Iran in those days, and the American capitalists today.

Thus, if the Iraqi mother dared unveil for the Republican Guard son to see that the idol Saddam was a lie, then there wouldn’t be any Iraq-Iran war at all.  Indeed, if everybody had kept himself from being blinded by passion and had paid no heed to Saddam’s foolish orders, then a million people in both countries would not have died unjustly in an Iraq-Iran war. But, if in those years, 1980-1988, this mother was victim of a cover up and wasn’t aware of the lie, then after the war had been waged against the Americans  and their Allies, three years after, she must be fair, honest to see that her God was an untruth: when one was poor then one needs to strive to toil for a living, not take justice in one’s own hand and unleash an armed invasion to kill and rob in neighboring Kuwait to feed one’s own people! If all the national rulers share this same way of loving their people, then what would be the order in the world?

Or, in a more homely fashion, the Iraqi mother must ask her Republican Guard son, “If you were better off than your neighbor, and he, in something’s name, ran over and beat you to steal your house, what should you do? In case you were unable to resist, you should call your neighbors for help, shouldn’t you?

An Iraqi mother with any inborn common sense should teach her son such kind of reaction. The unfortunate thing that happened was that she dared not be “reactionary” to such a degree. A General of the Army, for opening his mouth and reporting that the plan of operation would cause the death of “a great number of people”, was shot, then who else would dare utter a word?

So, there must surely be a reason for the Kurds’ constant jibbing.

The Iraqi mother with an innate intelligence of judgment must see the cowardice of bowing to violence, and especially the sin that her Republican Guard son has committed by following the wicked and taking part in crimes. 

To get the two sons to live in harmony with each other, it is not enough for her to just demonstrate that she loves both sons equally, but she must also tell the Republican Guard son to at least approach and pat the Kurdish son on the shoulder and admit that in the past he was wrong for having been a victim of deception, for having been blind, etc...Then the Kurdish son will show his mercy: “You have discerned the good and the bad, thus I no longer hate you, on the contrary I love you because you have been victim of deceptive propaganda, etc...Thus, from now on we shall let bygones be bygones so that we can earn our living honestly, and fulfill our duty of filial piety...”

Thus, only when the two brothers, Republican Guard and Kurdish, had a heart-to-heart talk with each other, and one side had to honestly admit his fault, give up his habit of clinging to fixed conceptions, that they could proceed toward union and harmony.

Only when these two brothers love each other sincerely, without affectation and pressure, that they could exert themselves to rebuild their common home, bringing back happiness to their family.

                                              ***