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Q. How was corruption in the Republic of Vietnam?A. Four takes on corruption.Foreign Policy and the Complexities of Corruption: the Case of South Vietnam. The State Department historian looks back at the relationship between the United States and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War years, assessing the impact that tolerance of corruption in diplomatic partners can have on outcomes.Bribes, Corruption and Lost Wars actually makes a lot of sense, and I can attest to the accuracy.A Failure of Leadership in South Vietnam is a new book from a counterinsurgency official.Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption is another long read from the Guardian, looking back at the revolution and the current state of corruption with a new term “Red Capitalists”.Vietnam is by no means a basket case. Its recovery from war is close to miraculous, particularly in cutting back poverty while developed nations such as the UK were increasing it. But the reality now is that it has ended up with the worst of two systems: the authoritarian socialist state and the unfettered ideology of neoliberalism; the two combining to strip Vietnam’s people of their money and their rights while a tiny elite fills its pockets and hides behind the rhetoric of the revolution. That, finally, is the biggest lie of all. Victorious in war but defeated in peace, the claim by Vietnam’s leaders to be socialist looks like empty propaganda. In the words of one former guerrilla who risked his life for this: “They are red capitalists.””We traded millions of lives for independence and equality. I imagined corruption would end after the war, but it didn’t.”FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CORRUPTION: THE CASE OF SOUTH VIETNAMTHE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL > JUNE 2016BY STEPHEN RANDOLPHAs illustrated in other articles in this issue of The Foreign Service Journal, the U.S. government recognizes corruption as a major issue, prevalent around the world, with a range of damaging forms and effects. While details vary locally and over time, the dynamics of corruption, the problems that follow in its wake, and the difficulties in addressing it have broad continuity over time, and so a historical case study can offer perspectives that remain useful today.In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, thousands of South Vietnamese fled to the United States, including many senior civilian and military leaders. Seeking to capture their stories and analyses “before memories faded and before mythology replaced history,” the RAND Corporation, which had been deeply involved in the war since its inception, assembled a small team to interview these senior leaders as quickly as possible on their arrival in the United States, focusing on the causes of South Vietnam’s sudden and catastrophic collapse.Respondents included 23 military leaders and four from the government. These leaders attributed the fall of South Vietnam to a series of linked causes, the most fundamental of which was, in their view, “pervasive corruption, which led to the rise of incompetent leaders, destroyed army morale, and created a vast gulf of social injustice and popular antipathy.” They considered corruption the “fundamental ill” within South Vietnam’s body politic, manifesting itself in four ways: racketeering; bribery; buying and selling important positions and appointments; and pocketing the pay of “ghost soldiers,” whose names were carried on the duty roster but were either nonexistent or who paid their commanders to be released from duty.As one commander put it, the pervasive corruption “created a sense of social injustice” by creating “a small elite which held all the power and wealth, and a majority of middle-class people and peasants who became poorer and poorer and who suffered all the sacrifices.”Evolution of a “Fundamental Ill”This summary would have surprised few Americans who served in Indochina or dealt with the war at the policy level. Throughout the 21 years of decisive American engagement with South Vietnam, from the time of Ngo Dinh Diem until the fall of Saigon, corruption was invariably and routinely identified as a pervasive issue in the country, one with corrosive effects in every aspect of the state and society.In September 1954, during the first days of America’s involvement, a Special National Intelligence Estimate opened with an offhand reference to Premier Diem’s struggles with “the usual problems of inefficiency, disunity and corruption in Vietnamese politics.” Two decades later, just weeks before the North Vietnamese attack that would overwhelm South Vietnam, Senator Dewey Bartlett (R-Okla.), returning from a fact-finding mission, reported to President Gerald Ford in March 1975: “Corruption should be ferreted out, there should be freedom of the press and proper use of the courts and police. This will help them to develop their resolve and will strengthen their capability to develop in peace.” Along with its deadly effects within South Vietnam, the readily visible corruption provided an easy and unanswerable point of attack for opponents of the war in the United States, and a ready justification for Congress’s reluctance to support this American ally.Corruption in South Vietnam was invariably and routinely identified as a pervasive issue in the country, one with corrosive effects in every aspect of the state and society.Why, then, did this phenomenon persist, and even grow progressively more egregious over time? The basic conditions were set at South Vietnam’s birth in 1954, when the country emerged suddenly from its colonial past. With very few competent civil servants, with no functioning political system or tradition of democracy or transparency in government and with deep divides across religious, regional, ethnic and class lines, the new government built a military establishment from scratch. Few expected the state to last more than a couple of years. With the advent of active insurgency, the government of the Republic of Vietnam faced a deadly and immediate challenge that absorbed all of its attention.The massive intervention of American forces that followed within a decade added to the challenge in fundamental ways by infusing vast amounts of money and resources into South Vietnam and conducting military operations that created massive turmoil and dislocation across the country. As the nation moved from crisis to crisis, hampered by a sclerotic and limited government bureaucracy, corruption was always an issue to address later.At the same time, as U.S. involvement grew during the mid-1960s, American advisers were brought in who considered action against the corruption that had grown with the American investment in the nation to be an integral element of the war for “hearts and minds,” and therefore an essential component of pacification and a high priority for action. There were, however, serious obstacles to taking decisive action, reflecting the basic nature of the U.S. relationship with South Vietnam.Anti-Corruption Efforts StymiedThe most vigorous and sustained attempt by the United States to effect change in this area occurred in late 1967, as “Blowtorch” Bob Komer established the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program, known as CORDS. Recognizing President Nguyen Van Thieu’s long-standing caution in attacking corruption, Komer sought leverage that the Americans could use to encourage a more aggressive approach to the problem.Embassy Saigon’s Minister-Counselor for Political Affairs John A. Calhoun noted a fundamental problem with Komer’s approach: it “entails an invasion of the sovereignty of the Republic of Viet-Nam so great that it could and would be argued thereafter that the United States is indeed the neo-colonialist power its critics and enemies allege it to be. … I believe that the more representative government which is emerging in Viet-Nam must be the vehicle for eliminating the social evils which beset the people. I do not think we can or should do this job for them.”The issue came down to the relationship of the United States to South Vietnam. There was a basic tension, never resolved, between helping the South Vietnamese and compelling them to accept American solutions. Or as a CIA analysis later summarized the conflict in American objectives: “The GVN [Vietnam Government] must be invigorated and reformed, and the peasantry must be won over to the government side, but all of this must be done without disturbing the political, social and economic structure bequeathed by the French colonial regime.” Put another way, corruption was not incidental to the political system of South Vietnam; it was an integral and defining characteristic of that system.There was a basic tension, never resolved, between helping the South Vietnamese and compelling them to accept American solutions.Komer sought less intrusive means of encouraging action—regular liaison with South Vietnamese officials, review of plans and budgets, and the threat or action of withholding resources. The most effective measure seems to have been the gradual accumulation of information on corrupt or incompetent officials, providing that information to both the South Vietnamese and the American chains of command. The expectation was that the South Vietnamese would eventually act, if sufficient evidence could be found to justify a dismissal.The original proposal for this program included suspending assistance if the South Vietnamese failed to react to the information, but this was a step Komer was unwilling to take—weakening support for allies in a theater at war was a very difficult course of action to propose. Ultimately, Komer succeeded in persuading the South Vietnamese to dismiss a limited number of officers, but with no guarantee that their successors would be any improvement.Setting Good Governance AsideThe Tet Offensive in early 1968 changed the war in every respect. For the communists, the successive waves of the offensive cost them dearly, the losses concentrated among the Viet Cong. Increasingly the war fell to North Vietnamese soldiers, infiltrating down the Ho Chi Minh trail. On the American side, the offensive ultimately persuaded President Lyndon Johnson not to run for a second term, and to seek a negotiated settlement.Incoming President Richard Nixon had an entirely different perspective on the nature of the war than his predecessor. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were classic realists. In part due to their basic outlook on power, and in part due to the change that the Tet Offensive had had on the war, Nixon and Kissinger were not so much interested in winning “hearts and minds,” as they were on ensuring physical control of the population. Similarly, they were more interested in ensuring a stable and acquiescent South Vietnamese government than in abstract notions of good governance.As Nixon summarized it in a conversation with British counterinsurgency expert Robert Thompson, he thought that Thieu was “getting an undeservedly bad reputation.” Nixon commented that while some people wanted the administration to pressure Thieu to “crack down on corruption, broaden the base and go forward with land reform, he, the president, didn’t care what Thieu did as long as it helped the war.” The emphasis on good government as a means of ensuring popular support for the GVN dissipated, as did the willingness to expend political capital on encouraging South Vietnam to combat corruption. In late 1971 Deputy National Security Advisor Al Haig, on a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam, noted: “Thieu’s actions against corruption have been inadequate. He has not spoken out against corruption as strongly as he should, and he has not removed the more notoriously corrupt officials.” This was one of a litany of problems Haig identified in the South Vietnamese government, and like most of the others, was never effectively addressed.In the end, the Nixon administration’s implicit tolerance for corruption served as other elements of its policy toward Vietnam to maintain a short-term stability in the government at the expense of its long-term prospects. The fall of South Vietnam stemmed from a range of causes. But, among those closest to the events, corruption was considered the most damaging, “largely responsible for the ultimate collapse of South Vietnam.”Stephen Randolph is the State Department historian. A 1974 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, he served for 27 years on active duty in the Air Force, retiring as a colonel in 2001. He flew F-4s and F-15s, with a tour in Operation Desert Storm; held senior staff positions on the Joint Staff and the Air Staff; and then joined the faculty at the National Defense University, serving for 15 years before moving to the State Department in 2011. He is the author of Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger and the Easter Offensive (Harvard University Press, 2007).Read More...Uncovering the Lessons of Vietnam, by Stephen Randolph (The Foreign Service Journal, July/August 2015)The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders, by Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen, Brian M. Jenkins (RAND)Bribes, Corruption and Lost WarsMay 14, 2011by William P. MeyersCorruption, the taking of bribes by politicians and government employees and the theft of public funds, is a nearly universal practice. But it is also a spectrum, with come governments having very little corruption, and ranges to governments that exist almost exclusively. South Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam) during the 1960s is noted for its high degree of corruption. It is generally agreed that government corruption was one of the main reasons the government eventually collapsed and the south was unified with North Vietnam, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.I am reading Understanding Vietnam by Nilm L. Jamiseson and a section on the cultural aspects of corruption in Vietnam explained what happened in a way I had never considered. This contrasts with other histories I read that described the corruption, but implied it was simply due to defects in human character. This new understanding also sheds light on the collapse of the Chiang Kai-Shek regime in China in the late 1940s. It also explains a lot about many of today's regimes, including, on a smaller scale, the behavior of all too many individuals in local government in these United States of America.In Vietnam (I will call South Vietnam just Vietnam from this point forward) traditional status was highly dependent on wealth. However, leaders were supposed to show their wealth by providing feasts for their villages, and through other forms of ostentation public distribution of their wealth. In a village economy men competed for status by sharing with the less fortunate. Their families had priority, of course, but it was not too bad of a system.When the U.S. invaded in the 1960s the shock to the Vietnamese economy was profound. Government employees, including military employees, changed in a few years from being highly respected and decently paid members of a mainly traditional society to among the poorest citizens.American privates had higher salaries than Vietnamese generals. For that matter, call girls whose clients were American enlisted men made more money. The influx of American money drove inflation, but while America paid for military supplies and all sorts of economic programs, no one thought to make payments to the Saigon regime to increase the salaries of soldiers and bureaucrats. High-ranking military officers would moonlight as taxi drivers to try to make enough pay to keep their families from losing face due to poverty.Their wives came to the rescue, and that was also due to cultural traditions. In Vietnam women had traditionally done the marketing and small scale craft making that kept families afloat. Men, mostly, did not engage in business. While men went about their hierarchically controlled, government-dictated lives, women had to do more than make ends meet: they had to maintain their family's status in society. "During the late 1960s and early 1970s it was often impossible to be a dutiful and virtuous family man and a dutiful and virtuous military officer or civil servant ... his womenfolk kept reminding him that prices were up again in the market and the children needed new shoes." Women ran the free market show, which largely consisted of diverting American-donated goods into the black market. "As Madam General called Madam Colonel who called Madam Head Clerk ... the daily flow of money and of goods throughout the country was anticipated and careful plans were formulated for diverting some percentage of this bounty."This looking deeper contrasts with A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan, which is better at providing insight into the American side of the war. Americans were concerned about the corruption of Vietnamese officials and military men, but their answer was classroom training about the importance of good governance standards. That they paid their girlfriends more than they paid men they expected to die fighting communists did not seem to cross anyone's mind.Corruption has its own cultural momentum. Simply raising pay is not a sure way of stamping out corruption. Lowering pay somewhat is not likely to cause most honest civil servants to suddenly be selling their souls. Nevertheless, poor pay in the long run does breed corruption and incompetence.A single word, corruption, encapsulates a wide variety of social pressures. Americans thought that the corruption of Vietnam was due to weak ethical values in the national culture. American soldiers did not need to steal food from peasants to fill their bellies. Their corruption was at a higher level, the corruption of an entire nation by wealth from industrial production and imperialist domination.That era of American global economic supremacy is coming to an end. The corruption (lack of self-control and external control) of the banking sector and Wall Street almost brought the entire nation to its knees in 2008. The same gang funded Barack Obama's presidential campaign, just like they funded Clinton and Bush before him. So we have had much talk of reform, but very little reform.Millions of people died violent deaths in Vietnam during the French and American interventions and civil war. Corruption was problem, but it was also a symptom of the larger problems of that era. The problem now is we still have an American economy and government built for imperialism. The cracks in that system will continue to widen as the imperialist overhang continues to crumble.A Failure of Leadership in South VietnamBY JERRY MORELOCK4/14/2017 • VIETNAM MAGAZINEWas the Vietnam War essentially “unwinnable” because of the incorrigibly venal, consistently corrupt and—worst of all—egregiously incompetent South Vietnamese government officials and senior military commanders? Frank Scotton, a former foreign service officer who spent at least part of every year from 1962 to 1975 in Vietnam working for the United States Information Agency, thinks so.In his extensive and detailed memoir, Uphill Battle: Reflections on Viet Nam Counterinsurgency, Scotton looks back on the 1975 fall of Saigon and the final North Vietnamese offensive that quickly overwhelmed the U.S.-trained and -equipped Army of the Republic of Vietnam. He concludes: “There really never had been anything wrong with the courage and endurance of the [ARVN’s] basic soldiers, experienced noncommissioned officers, and junior officers. The problem was inadequate leadership higher up the chain of command.”BY HISTORY NETThe reason inept ARVN generals kept their jobs is no secret, Scotton says. In a corrupt system maintained by patronage, blind loyalty to political bosses in Saigon easily trumped battlefield competence in the selection of generals. The military leadership problem was worsened, Scotton notes, “by the deaths in combat or helicopter crashes of some of the best officers, who led from the front.” Most telling is the author’s conclusion that the South Vietnamese government, our crucial ally in the war, “failed to develop a viable political ideal for which men would risk dying.”Although most Americans who served in Vietnam were involved in combat against North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong main force guerrillas, Scotton fought the “other war,” the counterinsurgency effort (then variously called “revolutionary development” or “pacification”), a grassroots program to get South Vietnam’s population to support the Saigon government. Over the years, he worked closely with a cast of South Vietnamese and American officials, civilian and military, that reads like a “Who’s Who” of counterinsurgency, notably including John Paul Vann, Robert Komer and William Colby.Uphill Battle seems a particularly apt title for this memoir. Scotton describes his efforts to build effective counterinsurgency programs at theSo local level against dedicated and experienced Communist operatives, South Vietnamese government corruption and frequent opposition (or, at best, indifference) from senior U.S. officials in Washington and Saigon.Considering that Scotton wrote this book four decades after the events he describes, it is a remarkably detailed account of his experiences. He explains that “stored boxes of maps, correspondence, books and other research material” helped him reconstruct his experiences so thoroughly. Although readers may find Scotton’s frequent barrage of unfamiliar Vietnamese names (of individuals and places) tough going, those who persevere will be rewarded with a truly first-rate firsthand account of Vietnam’s “other war.”Scotton has included very useful appendices, chiefly an extensive glossary of Vietnam War abbreviations and terms, as well as a “Persons of Interest” list, identifying more than 160 people that he mentions. The book has 16 pages of personal snapshots showing Scotton with various Americans and Vietnamese between 1962 and 1972. Readers would have greatly benefited, however, from the inclusion of at least one map showing the locations of the countless places the author refers to.Finally, Scotton deserves praise for giving all proceeds from the book’s sales to the publisher, Texas Tech University, “in appreciation for the university’s maintaining the Vietnam Center and Archive.” In an era when seemingly every high-ranking politician and government official feels compelled to write a book hoping to cash in on his or her public service, Scotton’s stance is refreshingly principled: “It is ethically questionable for retired officials to profit from their own accounts of service for which they have already been compensated.” Well done, Mr. Scotton.First published in Vietnam Magazine’s April 2016 issue.Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruptionNick Davies Wed 22 Apr 2015 06.00 BST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 19.41 GMTSouth Vietnamese soldiers sleeping on board a US Navy troop carrier in 1962. Photograph: AP/Horst FaasEarly one morning in February 1968, when the fighting in central Vietnam had reached a new level of insanity, a group of South Korean soldiers swept into a village called Ha My, a straggly collection of bamboo huts and paddy fields about an hour outside the city of Danang. They were from a unit called Blue Dragon, which was fighting alongside the Americans, attempting to suppress the communist uprising.For weeks, they had been herding farmers and their families into a crowded compound that the Americans called a “strategic hamlet”. By taking the farmers out of their villages, they hoped they could starve the communist guerrillas of food and shelter. And for weeks, the farmers and their families had been escaping, trailing back to Ha My, loathing the captivity of the strategic hamlet, needing to farm their land. Now, the Blue Dragon soldiers had had enough.In the hour that followed their arrival, the Koreans herded the waking villagers into small groups and then, methodically, opened fire. An hour later, they had killed 135 of them. They then burned their homes and bodies, and bulldozed the whole mess into mass graves. For years the truth lay buried, too.Now there is a monument to that massacre, built 30 years later at the expense of Blue Dragon soldiers who came back offering genuine remorse. But there is something wrong. The monument stands proud, as big as a house, with ornate roofing that shelters two collective tombs and a large gravestone carrying the names of the adults and children who died. But there is no explanation for their deaths.The villagers say that when the monument was first built, the back of the gravestone displayed a vivid account of what happened that day. One even has a copy of the words, which turn out to be a powerful poem recalling the fire and blood, the burning flesh, the bodies in the sand: “How painful to see fathers and mothers collapse into pieces beneath the flames … How terrifying to see children and babies screaming and crying, reaching out, still suckling on the breasts of dead mothers … ” But, the villagers say, some South Korean diplomats paid a visit before the official opening and complained about the poem; instead of standing up to them, Vietnamese officials ordered that it be covered up with a tableau of lotus blossom. A Korean anthropologist, Heonik Kwon, who was studying Ha My at the time, recorded one villager saying this denial of the truth was like a second massacre, “killing the memory of the killing”.Why would the Vietnamese compromise like that? Why would the people who won the war allow the story of that war to be defined by the losers?The villagers say the answer is simple: South Korea had become one of the biggest foreign investors in their economy, and had offered to pay for a local hospital if the massacre poem was concealed. So the Vietnamese authorities agreed; they could not afford to resist. And there is the heart of what has happened to Vietnam since the war ended 40 years ago, on 30 April 1975.A month spent travelling there at the beginning of this year – talking to farmers, intellectuals, academic specialists and veteran fighters from both sides of the line – revealed numerous falsehoods and compromises that have been forced on the Vietnamese people by the powerful in pursuit of profit. The US has succeeded in promoting a false account of the cause and conduct of its war. In spite of losing the military conflict, the Americans and their allies have returned with the even more powerful weapons of finance, forcing the Vietnamese down a road they did not choose. Now, it is their leaders who are telling the biggest lie of all.US army helicopters provide covering fire for South Vietnamese troops as they attack a Vietcong camp near the Vietnam-Cambodia border in March 1965. Photograph: AP/Horst FaasNguyen Hao Thu, aged 90, lives in a bright and beautiful flat in Hanoi. She chatters like a bird in fluent French and broken English, describing how, as a young woman, she saw her country crushed between two powerful enemies. First, it was the French who refused to let go of their colony at the end of the second world war. In 1946, aged 21, Thu took to the jungle and joined the guerrilla struggle, specialising in mixing acid, saltpetre and alcohol to make gunpowder: “I was very happy in the forest. With the powder in the bomb, you can – pop! – realise our dream.”And that dream was not simply nationalist, to expel the foreign invader. It was specifically communist and revolutionary. Thu recalled a childhood during which the French took away her father, a kindergarten teacher; she used to bring food to him in jail when she was just seven years old. “I hated all the people who wanted to fight and occupy Vietnam. In my mind, I became communist,” she said. Her family were comfortably middle‑class, but during the 1930s, she said, their home was used as a meeting place for the underground Vietnamese Communist party. She remembered reading Marx and Lenin and how, when she was 16, the French executed one of her friends. “Sincerely, I am communist.”Le Nam Phong is nearly as old as Thu. He was 17 when he signed up as a common soldier to fight the French in 1945. He spent the next 30 years at war, rising to become a lieutenant general in the army of North Vietnam and a key figure in the eventual destruction of the US military machine. Sitting outside his comfortable home, slicing a mango on a warm evening, he remembers his own revolutionary motive: “Socialism? Yes, of course. The purpose of all the fighting was to build a socialist society, to gain freedom and independence and happiness. During the first days against France and against the US, we already had in mind the society we wanted to create – a society where men would not exploit other men; fair, independent, equal.”We already had in mind the society we wanted – one where men would not exploit other men: fair, independent, equalThis is where the US’s own account of its behaviour begins to fall apart. The American version of events has it that when the French were defeated in 1954, the US army became involved in order to protect the nation of South Vietnam from the threat of a takeover by communists from North Vietnam. The reality is that the French had alienated people all over Vietnam, driving them into the arms of Ho Chi Minh’s Communist party. And, more important, there were no two separate nations. In 1954, in spite of the victory of the Vietnamese army, France and its western allies hung on to power in their southern stronghold. At an international convention in Geneva, all sides then agreed that the country should be divided – temporarily – into South Vietnam and North Vietnam, until July 1956, when an election would deliver a new government for the nation as a whole.The then US president, Dwight Eisenhower, later admitted that if that election had been allowed to take place, some 80% of the Vietnamese people would have voted for Minh and the new socialist society – and the Vietnamese we spoke to concurred. But the US would not allow it. Instead, they turned to a notorious CIA officer, Edward Lansdale, who proceeded to use a dexterous combination of bribes and violence to install a new government in Saigon, headed by the Catholic politician Ngo Dinh Diem. He was autocratic and nepotistic, but anti-communist and pro-American. In October 1955, Lansdale rigged an election in the South to make Diem president. The national elections were cancelled. The “temporary” division now became a prolonged pretence that Vietnam really was two different countries, the South as the passive victim of invasion from the North.* * *At first, the US, which had been funding the French war, was content to pour money into South Vietnam’s army, and to send its own troops only in the guise of “advisers” – 16,300 of them. By March 1965, it was sending its own men into combat. At the peak of the fighting, in 1969, the US was using 550,000 of its own military personnel, plus 897,000 from South Vietnam’s army and thousands more from South Korea and other allies. By the time the war was over, the number of dead was beyond counting, possibly as high as 3.8 million, according to a study by the Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington.The British foreign correspondent James Cameron described US actions as “an offence to international decency, both disgusting and absurd”. Writing in 1965, he looked back at the path to war: “It was clumsy and cruel and thoughtless and without consideration. Step by step, the west blundered and floundered into a dilemma they never completely comprehended and never in fact sought: from the very beginning, they argued in cliches.”The violence of those years still lives with those who suffered its grand assault. In a small house in Saigon, as many Vietnamese still call Ho Chi Minh City, a former member of the communist guerrillas remembered the US bombers roaring down on their jungle camp, and how he and his comrades hid in shallow foxholes: “We had very strong rice wine. If you drink it, it would bring tears to your eyes. We used to call it ‘tears of the motherland’. It stopped us being frightened.”The US dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than the allies used on Germany and Japan together in the second world war. It also dropped napalm jelly, which stuck to its victims while it roasted their skin; white phosphorous, which burned down to the bone; fragmentation bombs, which hurled ball bearings and steel shards in all directions; and 73m litres of toxic chemicals, including 43m litres of Agent Orange, which killed vegetation and inflicted illness on those who were exposed to it.Infamously, the US also bombed Hanoi – a city full of civilians with no air force to defend it. A woman who was eight at the time remembered wearing a leafy branch on her back as flimsy camouflage against F-111 bombers flying at twice the speed of sound. A man who worked on an anti‑aircraft battery says he went home after a night of fruitless defence to find his neighbourhood obliterated: the only sign of his son was a dismembered leg, which he identified by a scar.On the ground, the US assault was just as powerful. In a village in the Mekong delta, a peasant farmer in her late 60s sat peacefully in her home, with its floor of baked mud. She remembered the day her mother in law, who was working in the fields nearby, made the mistake of running when a US helicopter thundered down towards her: a missile caught up with her and smashed her to pieces against a coconut tree. “We had to go to collect her. We had to pick up her teeth.” The helicopter gunships killed three of her brothers as well, she said. All these years later, she added, she still has trouble sleeping, and is full of fear if she hears any sound that could possibly be a helicopter.A US paratrooper guides a medevac helicopter down to pick up soldiers injured during a five-day patrol in Vietnam in April 1968. Photograph: AP/Art GreensponMany Americans now believe that the notorious massacre of villagers at My Lai was a unique or rare event, but the journalist Nick Turse found a different picture in the US National Archives in June 2001. He discovered files that recorded the findings of a secret US task force, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. They showed that the army had substantiated more than 300 claims of massacre, murder, rape and torture by American soldiers.Turse then visited Vietnam. In his book, Kill Anything That Moves, he describes trying to find the site of an incident from the files in which 20 women and children were said to have been killed in a hamlet in the central highlands. Following local people, he says, he stumbled across memorials to five other massacres in the same small area: “I’d thought that I was looking for a needle in a haystack; what I found was a veritable haystack of needles.” He concluded that a combination of racial indifference to the life of mere “gooks”, official pressure to raise the number of “kills” and the designation of rural areas as “free-fire zones” meant that “killings of civilians were widespread, routine and directly attributable to US command policies”.Those who survived were sometimes taken prisoner and subjected to harsh abuse. In 1970, a group of US congressmen visited the notorious Con Dao prison. There they found men and women shackled in “tiger cages”, starved, beaten, tortured and reduced to eating insects. In spite of the uproar when this was reported, the prison stayed open.* * *Until a couple of years ago, journalists from one of the big newspaper groups in Saigon used to stop to buy their coffee from an amiable woman who spent each day on the pavement in front of their office. Few of them knew her name. They used to call her the Coffee Lady. She has her own small story about the war, but mostly she has a story about what has happened since peace came. This is the context in which the Vietnamese Communist party now tells its lies.She remembers Liberation Day: the wild rejoicing because the war was over; the sheer pride that communist forces had beaten what everyone said was the biggest army in the history of the world; the hopes for a better life. There was fear, too. There were rumours of violent retribution and looting. The Coffee Lady was worried about crazy people picking up the guns she could see lying in the street. And she was sad, for a very personal reason.A few years earlier, she had worked as a waitress on a US base at Vung Tau, on the coast near Saigon, and there she had met a soldier called Ronald. He came from New York and he flew surveillance missions over Vietnam and Cambodia. They fell in love. At short notice, he was sent back to the US, but for a while he carried on writing, and he told her that he would sponsor her to join him. Then he went quiet, and she came to understand that there was no chance he would come back for her. Scared that the new regime might be angry, she burned Ronald’s letters and never heard from him again. Years later, now aged 64, grey-haired and calm, sitting quietly outside a Buddhist pagoda, she can still feel the sadness.The Coffee Lady belonged to neither side in the conflict. She was simply a Vietnamese woman, in love with an American man and in search of a decent life. Liberation Day did not bring easier times. At first, she found work in one of the new cooperative factories. There, she sat bowed over a sewing machine for 11 hours a day, earning nothing more than a ration card that entitled her to small amounts of low-quality rice and even smaller amounts of meat. For years, she shared a tiny house with her brother, who spent his days in another textile workshop. The economy ran into a decade of depression. “Life was tough for ordinary people,” she said.The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people.The economy was in chaos. By the time Liberation Day arrived, inflation was running at up to 900%, and Vietnam – a country full of paddy fields – was having to import rice. In peace talks in Paris, the US had agreed to pay $3.5bn in reconstruction aid to mend the shattered infrastructure. It never paid a cent. Adding insult to penury, the US went on to demand that the communist government repay millions of dollars borrowed by its enemy, the old Saigon regime. Vietnam desperately needed the world to provide the trade and aid that could turn its economy around. The US did its best to make sure it got neither.As soon as it had lost the war, the US imposed a trade embargo, cutting off the war-wrecked country not only from US exports and imports, but also from those of other nations that bowed to American pressure. In the same way, the US leaned on multilateral bodies including the IMF, the World Bank and Unesco to deny Vietnam aid. The US acknowledged that Agent Orange was likely to cause serious illness and birth defects and paid $2bn compensation – but only to its own veterans. The Vietnamese victims – more than 2 million of them – got nothing.South Vietnamese soldiers escort terrified children after a napalm attack in June 1972. Photograph: Nick Ut/APIt is not clear how any economic model could have survived this hostile encirclement. Inevitably, Vietnam’s socialist project began to collapse. It adopted a crude Soviet policy that forced peasant farmers to hand over their crops in exchange for ration cards. With no incentive to produce, output crashed, inflation climbed back towards wartime levels, and the country once again had to import rice. In the early 1980s, the leadership was forced to allow the peasants to start selling surplus produce, and so capitalism began its return. By the late 1980s, the party was officially adopting the idea of “a market economy with socialist orientation”.It was this shift that allowed the Coffee Lady in 1988 to leave the textile factory to become a trader. Each morning, she says, she would get up at 4am to prepare coffee in time to travel across the city. By 5am, she was sitting on a small chair outside the newspaper office. Change was all around her during the 1990s. Foreign investors were allowed to come in and private businesses were encouraged – free trade, free markets, profits for some, wages for others. Behind the scenes, the government was sending signals of compromise to Washington. It stopped asking for the $3.5bn reconstruction aid or compensation for Agent Orange and war crimes. It even agreed to repay the old Saigon regime’s war debt of $146m. By 1994, the US was appeased and lifted the trade embargo that had been throttling Vietnam for nearly 20 years. The World Bank, the IMF and other donors began to help. The economy started growing by up to 8.4% a year, and Vietnam was soon one of the world’s biggest exporters of rice.Crucially, throughout the 1990s, there were still strong factions within the Communist party that defended socialism against the new tide of capitalism. In spite of the economic chaos, they had succeeded in engineering a dramatic reduction of poverty. When the war ended, 70% of Vietnam’s people lived below the official poverty line. By 1992, it was 58%. By 2000, it was 32%. At the same time, the government had constructed a network of primary schools in every community, and secondary schools in most; it had also built a basic structure of free healthcare. For a while, the socialist factions still had enough political muscle to direct the new capitalist vehicle. Three times during the late 1990s, the World Bank offered extra loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars if Vietnam would agree to sell its state-owned companies and cut its trade tariffs. Each deal was rejected.Three decades after the communist victory, Vietnam was part of the global capitalist economy. The west had won after all.But from 2000, the rate of change accelerated and the political balance shifted. Reflecting persistent pressure from international donors and foreign investors, Vietnam now approved the sale of its state-owned companies. It also struck a trade deal with the US, and finally hit a peak in 2006 when it was given membership of the World Trade Organisation, which meant it could reap yet more foreign investment and aid. Three decades after the communists emerged as victors in the war, it was now a fully integrated member of the globalised capitalist economy. The west had won after all.On the pavement in Saigon, the Coffee Lady watched all of this unfold, and yet she saw no change in her life. “I earned the same, lived in the same room,” she says. “There were more things in the shops, but the prices kept going up. The country changed, but not for people like me. The people who had connections got richer.” All throughout these years, she had stuck with the same brand of Vietnamese-made coffee, Trung Nguyen. While she remained poor, the man who owns that company rode the new tide of free enterprise and is now reckoned to be worth $100m.* * *In an office across the city sat Nguyen Cong Khe. For years, he edited Thanh Nien, the newspaper that was based in the building outside which the Coffee Lady plied her trade. During his editorship, Khe upset some powerful people, disclosing links between a Saigon gangster and senior officials, then publishing the story of a huge scandal that implicated some very well‑connected families in the theft of public funds. That was risky. Vietnam runs a clumsy system of official censorship, calling in editors every week – on Tuesdays in Hanoi and Thursdays in Saigon – to tell them what to cover and what to conceal. For his efforts, in 2008, Khe was sacked.In November last year, Khe took another risk by using the New York Times to call on his government to allow a free press. Sitting in the office where he now runs a news website, he went further. Insisting that his name be attached to this appeal, he said what others will say only behind one hand: that the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist party have become traitors to their own cause.“At the very outset, those who made the revolution installed a government [that] had a very good intent to develop the country and to be prosperous in the fairest way, but things went wrong somewhere. Those who joined the revolution, who swore to be transparent – eventually they betrayed their commitment and their ideology.”Khe was himself part of the revolution. As a student in the early 1970s, he agitated against the Americans and spent three years behind bars. He was a party member for years. He understands why the leadership turned to the tools of capitalism to kickstart the economy, but he has seen the dark side of the neoliberal coin – the corruption and the inequality.You can see it on the streets. Despite its dark past, Saigon has boomed into a seething mass of commercial activity. But it is, nonetheless, a city in the developing world, with signs of poverty on every side. And then there is Dong Khoi Street – an island of self-indulgent wealth where the new elite can buy a T-shirt from Hermes for $500, a watch from Versace for $15,000, or a dining-room table with four chairs covered in gold-leaf calf skin and stuffed with goose feathers for $65,000. And on the corner, the Continental Hotel sells meals that would cost a week’s pay for a worker, in a restaurant called – with one final slap in Ho Chi Minh’s face – Le Bourgeois.Khe reckoned that for every $10 assigned to any public project, $7 is going into somebody’s pocket. Really? So 70% of Vietnam’s state budget is being stolen? That would be a theft of staggering proportions. We spoke via a translator. He nodded, and twisted one hand in the air: “Between 50 and 70%.”Transparency International last year reported that Vietnam is perceived to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, doing worse than 118 others and scoring only 31 out of a possible 100 good points on its index.Nobody claims that the corruption is new. There is a well-established tradition of public officials in Vietnam selling their influence and favouring their families. But the allegation is that it has hit new levels under the current leadership. People say that the problem was boosted specifically by the privatisation of Vietnam’s huge state-owned companies and the opportunities that provided some politicians and officials to appoint themselves and their families as executives. The British academic Martin Gainsborough, who spent years in Vietnam doing fieldwork for his research on development in south-east Asia, wrote: “Rather than being inspired by reformist ideals, officials have been motivated by much more venal desires … What we often refer to as ‘reform’ is as much about attempts by rival political-business interests to gain control over financial and other resources.”For three months recently, an extraordinary website published detailed allegations about the behaviour of named members of the Vietnamese power elite. The site called itself Chan Dung Quyen Luc (“Portrait of Power”) and backed up its claims with documents, audio and video footage. It has never been verified, but observers speculated that it was the work of a very powerful politician using inside information to try to damage rivals. It claimed to provide glimpses into a secret world of theft.The site attacked one very senior figure, claiming that a local official had delivered a suitcase containing $1m in cash to his home, as a result of which he had agreed not to collect $150m of tax due from a property company who were involved in a “giant development”. The company had then given him and the local official free villas. The site went on to finger two leading politicians, claiming that one had blocked the prosecution of a corrupt banker and was now receiving healthy backhanders; and that the second had diverted $1bn from a state company into the bank account of his sister, who was now running 20 different businesses. It also accused a senior military figure of using his son’s company to sell army land for personal profit. In his case, the website displayed a letter from bank employees who claimed he was part of an “extremely large-scale corruption network”, with bank accounts worth millions of dollars.Vietnam Is Sentencing Corrupt Bankers to Death by Firing SquadFrom time to time, the state acknowledges corruption and cracks down. In high-profile trials at the end of last year, four executives from former state-owned companies were sentenced to death for bribery and fraud; two others were sentenced to life in prison. Khe does not believe these trials are tackling the scale of the problem. He shrugged: “We traded millions of lives for independence and equality. When I was in prison I imagined the country would be clear of corruption after the war, but it didn’t happen. The development of the country should proceed, so we don’t go against those who make money legitimately. But we can’t allow those who make illegitimate money to continue to make poor people poorer.”We traded millions of lives for independence and equality. I imagined corruption would end after the war, but it didn’t.There he hit the most painful nerve. Despite its earlier track record of spreading economic success quite evenly, Vietnam no longer stands up for the poor as it once did. A 2012 report for the World Bank noted that “inequality is back on the agenda”. Between 2004 and 2010, income for the poorest 10% of the population fell by a fifth, it found, while the richest 5% in Vietnam were now taking nearly a quarter of the income.The worst of this inequality is in the rural areas. Millions of farmers have been driven off their land to make way for factories or roads. In the early 90s, nearly all rural households (91.8%) owned land. By 2010, nearly a quarter of them (22.5%) were landless. A relentless tide of poor peasants has poured into the cities, where they have been joined by hundreds of thousands of workers who have been made redundant as the private owners of the old state-owned companies set about cutting costs. This wave of men and women has swirled into the “informal sector” – hidden away in sweatshops in private houses or sitting trading on the pavements – and into the sprawling network of new industrial parks and export‑processing zones.In the informal sector, there is no protection at all. In the industrial areas, protections have become noticeably weaker. Prof Angie Ngoc Tran is a specialist in the study of labour in Vietnam. In her book, Ties That Bind, she explains how the country’s labour code – which was once famously progressive – has been watered down, partly as a result of lobbying by groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce. The state-sponsored unions have been weakened and have never called a strike. Tran concludes: “With the surge of capital entering Vietnam by way of foreign investment and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, the state is becoming less and less of a government acting on behalf of the people. At times, some state organs and institutions are in alliance with the capitalists.”Every worker is guaranteed a minimum wage. Originally, in 1990, this was set at a level that matched the “living wage” – meaning that it covered the essentials of life. But over the years, for fear of losing foreign capital, the government has allowed it to be cut, frozen and overtaken by inflation, with the result that by April 2013, the government’s own union was protesting that wages now covered only 50% of essential costs. Most city workers, the federation said, were “destitute and physically wasted away … They rent cheap, shabby rooms and cut daily expenses to a minimum … suffer serious malnutrition and other health risks.”Meanwhile, healthcare and schooling are no longer free. The World Bank report noted that “incomes are beginning to matter more for determining access to basic services”, and that the government was spending considerably more on hospitals for the better off than it was on communal health centres for the poor.Vietnam is by no means a basket case. Its recovery from war is close to miraculous, particularly in cutting back poverty while developed nations such as the UK were increasing it. But the reality now is that it has ended up with the worst of two systems: the authoritarian socialist state and the unfettered ideology of neoliberalism; the two combining to strip Vietnam’s people of their money and their rights while a tiny elite fills its pockets and hides behind the rhetoric of the revolution. That, finally, is the biggest lie of all. Victorious in war but defeated in peace, the claim by Vietnam’s leaders to be socialist looks like empty propaganda. In the words of one former guerrilla who risked his life for this: “They are red capitalists.”• Additional research by Calvin Godfrey. Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongreadIs Vietnam corrupt? (Quora.com)Flag of PetroVietnam flutters next to Vietnamese flag and Communist Party flag in front HQ of PetroVietnam in Hanoi Jan 11, 2016. REUTERS/KhamWhat's behind Vietnam's corruption crackdown? (Reuters.com)HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam’s crackdown on high level corruption has led to the arrest of dozens of officials from state oil firm PetroVietnam and the banking sector.As well as shedding light on graft, mismanagement and nepotism within state firms at a time privatization is accelerating, the arrests show the ascendancy of a more conservative faction within the ruling Communist Party.HanoiVietnam Corruption ReportSaigonCorruption continues to be pervasive in Vietnam's business environment. Companies are likely to experience bribery, political interference and facilitation payments in all sectors. The land administration, construction sector, and public administration are especially prone to corruption. The Vietnamese Penal Code and the Law on Anti-Corruption criminalizes public sector corruption, in the form of attempted corruption, facilitation payments, extortion, abuse of office, fraud, money laundering, and active and passive bribery. Punitive measures range from fines to capital punishment, depending on the severity of the corruption case. Enforcement of the anti-corruption framework is lacking. Gifts are criminalized by law, but there are exceptions for special occasions gifts with a value below VND 500,000. Facilitation payments are illegal but common in practice.Last updated: September 2017GAN IntegritySaigonVietnam's Corruption Crackdown Is All About Protecting Its Economic Miracle From Its SOEs (forbes.com)Danang