A Vision of United India

Chapter 4

A Brief History of the unification of Vietnam

Vietnam was reunified on Apr. 30, 1975, with democratic South Vietnam absorbed by communist North Vietnam by force. The reunification is a typical example where one people divided by ideological confrontation of democracy on one side, and communism on the other, was unified by force under socialist revolutionary strategies and tactics. In Chinese, Vietnam means going over to the South. This indicates that people in Vietnam were driven away to the South by outside powers in the North. The name of the country attests to its historical hardship of having been subject to numerous foreign invasions. Historically, Vietnam faced a myriad of aggressions by China. China once called the country Annam, which originates from the fact that Ming subjugated barbarians in the South. With the decline of Ching and the advance of Western powers to Asia, Vietnam was reduced to a French colony. From the late 18th century, France began its invasion into the IndoChina peninsula. In 1900, it finally annexed Vietnam to the Indo-China Federation of French territory along with Cambodia and Laos. With the occupation of France by Germany during World War II, Japan occupied Vietnam in 1940 and installed Baodai, the Vietnamese emperor, as the leader of a puppet government. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the communist guerrillas waged an anti-Japanese independence campaign by organizing an alliance for independence. France claimed its colonial control over Vietnam in the wake of the defeat of Japan in 1945. Ho Chi Minh responded to the situation with a declaration of establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi in September 1945. In September 1945, France temporarily recognized the republic headed by Ho Chi Minh. But, an armed clash between the two countries in Hanoi in December 1945 touched off an all-out war. The war continued for eight years until a truce agreement was signed in Geneva on July 21, 1954.

Under the Geneva agreement, Vietnam was divided into two countries with the 17th degree northern latitude as the borderline. North Vietnam, with Hanoi as its capital, had a population of 13 million. In the face of the division of the country, 800,000 North Vietnamese people fled to the South in pursuit of freedom. In October 1955, Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem of the provisional South Vietnamese government declared the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam and assumed the first presidency. He boycotted a general election slated for June 1956 under the Geneva agreement, contributing to a lasting division of the country. The dog-eat-dog conflict between South and North Vietnam began to spread in 1956 when Vietcong, North Vietnam-sponsored communist elements in South Vietnam, started to deliver

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sporadic surprise attacks. (Vietcong stands for Vietnamese communists.) Vietcong organized the Vietnamese National Liberation Front on Dec. 20, 1960, in an aggressive effort to communise South Vietnam. Vietcong, under its newly acquired name of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, professed itself an advocate of reunification of the two Vietnams and peaceful independence based on neutrality. In reality, however, Vietcong was merely a sub-organization under the North Vietnamese Communist Party, which was sponsored and dictated by North Vietnam. When France finally gave in to Ho Chi Minh in the war and the Ngo Dinh Diem government was installed in South Vietnam, the U.S. began to render political support to South Vietnam in place of France. In 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy expanded the support into the military area. In early August 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided to bomb a strategic military point of North Vietnam immediately after the Maddox, a destroyer of the 7th U.S. Fleet, was attacked twice by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. It marked the commencement of the U.S.-North Vietnamese war without a declaration of war. On Jan. 27, 1973, the U.S., South and North Vietnam and Vietcong signed a peace accord to end the war in Paris. Article 4 of the accord prescribed that the U.S. should stop military interference or intervention in internal affairs of South Vietnam. In addition, Article 5 stated that all the troops, military advisors and technicians of the U.S. and other foreign countries specified in Article 3 and all the military personnel related to the subjugation plan, military equipment and supplies including ammunition should be withdrawn from South Vietnam within 60 days from the signing of the accord. Article 15 also said that reunification of Vietnam should be realized in stages through peaceful means, based on mutual consultation and agreement between the two Vietnams without coercion or consolidation of one party by the other and interference of outside powers.

Reunification by Communisation

In compliance with the peace accord signed in Paris, the U.S. completely pulled out its troops from Vietnam on Mar. 19, 1973. U.S. interference with a Vietnamese dispute came to a halt eight and a half years after Washington started a bombing campaign against North Vietnam in August 1964. The number of American troops in Vietnam stood at up to 540,000 at a point. In addition, five other countries (South Korea, Australia, Thailand, New Zealand and the Philippines) dispatched more than 70,000 troops. With 600,000 South Vietnamese government forces counted in, a total of 1.2 million troops fought against Vietcong. The U.S., which started to intervene in Vietnamese affairs from 1961, spent US$ 141 billion over 14 years and sustained a loss of 56,000 soldiers. Moreover, President Lyndon

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Johnson gave up his second bid for presidency amid escalating armed conflicts and fierce anti-war demonstrations. During the war, 4,687 South Korean troops were killed in action. The accord for termination of the Vietnam War and restoration of peace in the country went into effect at 00:00, January 28. But, the first day of its enforcement was marred by more than 400 violations, meaning that the war virtually continued. Only the U.S. fully honoured the peace accord, withdrawing its forces within the proposed 60 days. In the meantime, 150,000 North Vietnamese troops, who had been already infiltrated into South Vietnam, were preparing for an all-out war against South Vietnam. After driving out American forces on the basis of the peace accord even without rifle shooting, North Vietnam launched an all-out offensive against South Vietnamese government forces in collusion with Vietcong. North Vietnam finally occupied Saigon, drawing an unconditional surrender from South Vietnamese President Duong van Min at 10:14 of Apr. 30, 1975. It marked reunification of Vietnam by force by communist forces.

Reunification of Vietnam by force is attributed to many factors. First, North Vietnam's persistent strategies and tactics for a communist revolution served the purpose effectively. After a long colonial rule by France, Vietnam was occupied by Japan in World War II. Against the backdrop, North Vietnam cashed in on the xenophobic sentiments of the Vietnamese. Labelling the U.S. troops in Vietnam as colonial forces, North Vietnam fanned anti-American sentiments to the utmost. In addition, North Vietnam linked the communist theory of class conflicts with an anti-government and anti-American campaign. North Vietnam argued that the exploitative bourgeois class and capitalist countries had to bear the blame for chronic poverty and corruption in Vietnam. Under the circumstances, not only the proletariat, but also those with religious professions, journalists and teachers in South Vietnam led the vanguard of anti-government and anti-American protests, leaning toward Vietcong. Second, corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese government was also responsible for communisation of South Vietnam. The degenerated South Vietnamese government was a dictatorial regime. It might be natural that the government, which failed to get the backing from its own people, went to ruin ultimately. The following is a part of the editorial of Le Suer, a Belgian newspaper just before the fall of South Vietnam. A corrupt, incompetent and despotic government such as the Thieu regime was certainly destined to lose a game at its start even with money and weapons. Indeed, South Vietnam fell to ruin even with 600,000 government troops, 540,000 U.S. forces, 70,000 allied forces, state-of-the-art

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American weapons and US$ 140 billion in aid. It was obviously attributable to internal corruption of the regime. Third, unjustifiable intervention by the U.S. was also to blame for communisation of South Vietnam. The U.S., which ruthlessly thrust itself into a conflict in the Vietnamese jungle after the defeat of France, gave an impression that it was a successor to French colonialists. Furthermore, the U.S. dispatched its troops to Vietnam on the heels of the Korean War that claimed the lives of 54,000 young Americans including those not killed in action, in only five years from the end of World War II. Americans questioned the legitimacy of the Vietnam War, saying that it was irrational to sustain the loss of a huge amount of money and thousands of young Americans for a corrupt and dictatorial government. In the end, escalation of the Vietnam War touched off unprecedented anti-war demonstrations in American history, as it was supposedly the worst war with little popular support. Against this backdrop, the press frequently distorted facts, reporting that the American forces suffered a devastating defeat when they won a battle. Moreover, the press overstated the atrocities perpetrated in the war, stirring up anti-war sentiments and creating public opinions in favour of the pullout of the American forces from Vietnam. Under the circumstances, the U.S. government had no alternative but to withdraw its troops from the country with haste and it ultimately resulted in communisation of South Vietnam. Fourth, the deceptive tactics of the communists also played a role in communisation of South Vietnam. According to the accord for termination of the Vietnam War and restoration of peace in the country signed also by North Vietnam, reunification of the two countries was to be realized based on peaceful means and mutual consultation and agreement. When the U.S. government pulled out its forces from the country within 60 days of the signing of the accord in accordance with it, North Vietnam absorbed South Vietnam by forcing it into an unconditional surrender, not resorting to peaceful means and mutual consent.

We see here two totally different examples of unification, one by some kind of force and the other by understanding and the pressures of economic necessity. Both these hold a lesson for the Indian subcontinent. A possible combination of these two methods might have to be adopted in the Indian subcontinent.

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Real Unity

We may thus conclude that whenever and wherever there is a deep underlying national psychological unity, political unity will come about after however long a time and suffering. It naturally leads us to the conclusion that there are two types of units, the political unit and the real unit. History gives us innumerable examples of artificial political units breaking up, while units that have not achieved political unity but are bound by a deep and subtle psychological feeling survive the most difficult periods of centrifugal conflict.

This truth of a real unity is so strong that even nations which never in the past realized an outward unification, to which Fate and circumstance and their own selves have been adverse, nations which have been full of centrifugal forces and easily overpowered by foreign intrusions, have yet always developed a centripetal force as well and arrived inevitably at organized oneness. This is clearly illustrated in the unification of Saxon England, mediaeval France, the formation of the United States of America; in all these cases, it was a real unity, a psychologically distinct unit which tended and has been driven, at first ignorantly by the subconscious necessity of its being and afterwards with a sudden or gradual awakening to the sense of political oneness, towards an inevitable external unification. It is a distinct group-soul, which is driven by inward necessity and uses outward circumstances to constitute for itself an organized body. But the most remarkable instance of this phenomenon is India. Here is a passage from Sri Aurobindo to illustrate this theme:

"But the most striking example in history is the evolution of India. Nowhere else have the centrifugal forces been so strong, numerous, complex, obstinate. The mere time taken by the evolution has been prodigious; the disastrous vicissitudes through which it has had to work itself out have been appalling. And yet through it all, the inevitable tendency has worked constantly, pertinaciously, with the dull, obscure, indomitable, relentless obstinacy of Nature when she is opposed in her instinctive purposes by man, and finally, after a struggle enduring through millenniums, has triumphed. And, as usually happens when she is thus opposed by her own mental and human material, it is the most adverse circumstances that the subconscious worker has turned into her most successful instruments. The beginnings of the centripetal tendency in India go back to the earliest times of which we have record and are typified in the ideal of the Samrat or Chakravarti Raja and the

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military and political use of the Aswamedha and Rajasuya sacrifices. The two great national epics might almost have been written to illustrate this theme; for the one recounts the establishment of a unifying dharmarajya or imperial reign of justice, the other starts with an idealised description of such a rule pictured as once existing in the ancient and sacred past of the country. The political history of India is the story of a succession of empires, indigenous and foreign, each of them destroyed by centrifugal forces, but each bringing the centripetal tendency nearer to its triumphant emergence. And it is a significant circumstance that the more foreign the rule, the greater has been its force for the unification of the subject people. This is always a sure sign that the essential nation-unit is already there and that there is an indissoluble national vitality necessitating the inevitable emergence of the organized nation. In this instance, we see that the conversion of the psychological unity on which nationhood is based into the external organized unity by which it is perfectly realized, has taken a period of more than two thousand years and is not yet complete. But it must be remembered that France, Germany, modern Italy took each a thousand or two thousand years and more to form and set into a firm oneness.

And yet, since the essentiality of the thing was there, not even the most formidable difficulties and delays, not even the most persistent incapacity for union in the people, not even the most disintegrating shocks from outside have prevailed against the obstinate subconscious necessity. And this is only the extreme illustration of a general law".

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