CHAPTER II

Beginnings of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group Program

There were two principal reasons for the creation of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program. One was that the U.S. Mission in Saigon believed that a paramilitary force should be developed from the minority groups of South Vietnam in order to strengthen and broaden the counterinsurgency effort of the Vietnamese government. The other was that the Montagnards and other minority groups were prime targets for Communist propaganda, partly because of their dissatisfaction with the Vietnamese government, and it was important to prevent the Viet Cong from recruiting them and taking complete control of their large and strategic land holdings.

One major study of the situation in Southeast Asia concluded that in 1961 the danger of Viet Cong domination of the entire highlands of South Vietnam was very real, that the efforts of the Vietnamese Army to secure the highlands against Viet Cong infiltration were ineffective, and that the natural buffer zone presented by the highland geography and Montagnard population was not being utilized properly to prevent Communist exploitation. The government was, in fact, failing to exercise any sovereignty over its highland frontiers or its remote lowland districts in the Mekong Delta where other ethnic and religious minority groups were established. This lack of control deprived the government of any early intelligence of enemy attacks and any real estimate of Viet Cong infiltration. The Communists, on the other hand, continued to exploit the buffer zone, and there was always the danger that the insurgents would use this territory as a springboard into the more heavily populated areas.

The Vietnamese had not only made no attempt to gain the support of the Montagnards and other minority groups but in the past had actually antagonized them. Before 1954 very few Vietnamese lived in the highlands. In that year some 80,000 refugees from North Vietnam were resettled in the Montagnard area, and