Military the loser in Vietnam

By Michael Mathes

HANOI (DPA): Vietnam's armed forces, considered a vital component of the communist leadership, have had their wings clipped in a party reshuffle which saw the military excluded from representation in the ruling troika for the first time since the Vietnam War.

Last weekend saw the elevation of reform-leaning ethnic minority member Nong Duc Manh to the top post of Communist Party secretary general, Vietnam's first leader not to have served in the country's bitter and protracted military struggles for independence.

President Tran Duc Luong and Premier Phan Van Khai, who will stay in their posts at least temporarily, are university graduates more versed in forging ASEAN agreements than firing AK- 47s.

Socialist and military bluster was strong at the Ninth Party Congress, with party doctrine urging eternal armed vigilance in order to "timely smash all schemes and acts of encroachment on the homeland's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity."

But for a military hailed for its trouncing of foreign aggressors France and then the United States -- and even looming northern neighbor China during a brief border war in 1979 -- the dressing down it received at the congress is nothing short of an embarrassment.

The politburo, downsized from 18 to 15 members, has gone from four generals to just two, including Defense Minister Pham Van Tra and the minister of public security.

Unpopular outgoing party bass Le Kha Phieu was military commissar for several years; his protege and current commissar Pham Thanh Ngan was booted from the politburo and is expected to be sacked.

"It was inevitable they were going to lose out," a European diplomat said of the military.

To make matters worse, Minister Tra and his chief of staff Le Van Dung both received disciplinary reprimands by the party earlier this year, for what Tra admitted were serious security lapses during former U.S. President Bill Clinton's historic visit to Vietnam.

With surprising frankness, Tra said his ministry took "full responsibility" for allowing Ly Tong, a former South Vietnam fighter pilot during the Vietnam War and now a U.S. citizen, to buzz over Ho Chi Minh City and drop anti-communist leaflets ahead of Clinton's arrival.

Sources say the Ly Tong stunt led to more serious developments.

Catastrophe was avoided in the days following the incident, diplomats and military attaches have said, when Vietnam's jittery air force was said to have very nearly shot down a passenger jet approaching Saigon with communications problems.

Tra denied such an event took place. "According to our investigation there was no foreign airliner," Tra said.

Vietnam's top brass was nevertheless said to have been infuriated over a breakdown in the chain of command which led to the near-disaster.

Carlyle Thayer, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii, says the recent military reprimands "are likely to have far-reaching implications for the Vietnam People's Army and for party-military relations."

Some observers see a silver lining, particularly in what one Vietnamese economist described as a transition in the leadership from gun-carriers to pen-carriers.

"What we are seeing now is a step in the right direction, towards honest to goodness civilian control of the military," says a Western military attache who asked not to be named.

Vietnam's armed forces today number about half a million troops, a far cry from the more than three million conscripts when Vietnam emerged from a stint in Cambodia in the late 1980s.

Military presence in the powerful central committee dropped only slightly at the congress, from 10 per cent to nine per cent.

The military attache believes the People's Army would be unlikely to lose out even further. But in the future, he says, "The military is going to have to earn seats instead of just be given seats, which will be a new paradigm for them."