Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
the penetrated community's traditional structure.
U.S. intelligence was not at the time well informed on the ensuring events, but since various sources (chiefly Northern refugees) have filled in a fairly coherent picture. 25/ From the farmers' point of view, the regime's Campaign, involved three particularly onerous procedures. The first was an attack upon the position and prerogatives of the traditional village hierarchy, accomplished by the cadre's selecting and training several of the poorest, least successful villagers for a Land Reform Committee and a Special People's Tribunal, and soliciting, from the same sources, accusations against the more prosperous, socially elevated villagers. 26/ The second was the classifying of the entire populace into such lettered categories as "dishonest and ferocious landlords," "average normal landlords"; "rich peasants"; "strong middle level peasants"; or "very poor peasants." 27/ Thirdly, each village Tribunal was then assigned a quota of one landlord death sentence. According to a former Viet Minh, the initial results were displeasing to the "our Chinese comrade advisers, who felt that more "exploiters" should have been found. Accordingly, on orders from the Lao Dong Central Committee, new classifications were assigned which labeled five times the number of landlords. At the same time, the landlord execution quota was raised from one to five per village. 28/
The results of the Campaign were like the outcome of similar procedures in China earlier in the decade: widespread bloodshed. Aside from persons executed on the direct order of the Tribunals themselves, there were countless others who, evicted from their landholds, and ostracized by the community, were condemned to die of starvation. Figures on casualties of the Camp a ign are inconclusive. George A. Carver states that the killed ' ·Te re "probably on the order of 100,000"; a French professor then in Hanoi estimates that altogether 100,000 were lost; refugees have testified that the countryside of North Vietnam was white with the clothing of mourning; Bernard Fall believed that 50,000 to 100,000 were killed. 29/ That there were significant excesses i s evident from the behavior of the DRV itself, which beginning in August 1956, moved publicly to restrain Party cadres, to curb the power of the local courts, and to dampen the ardor of the "poor" peasants.
In August, 1956, Ho admitted that "errors had been committed in realizing the unity of the peasants" and promised to redress wrongful classifications and maljudgments by Land Reform Committees. 30/ At the 10th Plenum of the Lao Dong Party Central Comnlittee on 29 October 1956, Truong Chinh "TaS replaced by Ho Chi Minh himself as Party Secretary, and the top levels of the Central Land Reform Committee and the Ministry of Agriculture were shaken up. 31/ Vo Nguy en Giap, as the Party's spokesman, read a list of errors considered in these changes:
"(a) While carrying out their anti-feudal task, our cadres ... have separated the Land Reform and the Revolution. Worst of all, in some areas they have even made the two mutually exclusive.
