Asia Times: Anniversary fails to spark popular excitement


	May 03, 2000	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

Anniversary fails to spark popular excitement
By Nguyen Nam Phuong

HANOI - The 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon passed in relatively low key fashion over the weekend, despite a foreign media circus that brought hundreds of reporters flocking to Ho Chi Minh City.

The April 30 celebrations, marking the victory of the North over the US-backed Southern regime, bore the kind of pomp that usually accompanies important dates on the Vietnamese Communist calendar. However, growing reconciliation with its former foe, the US, meant that national pride was higher on the agenda than lingering resentment.

Ho Chi Minh City's main streets were festooned with red and gold banners and propaganda posters hailing the victory, meaning that none of the city's inhabitants - many of whom would rather forget the anniversary - could avoid it.

The crowning event of the weekend was a parade in the grounds of the Reunification Palace on Sunday. The building, known as the Presidential Palace under the Southern regime, was the sight of the surrender exactly 25 years earlier as northern tanks burst through its gates. A huge banner of a grinning and waving Ho Chi Minh, former president of North Vietnam, who died six years before the end of the war, hung over the palace's facade.

With speeches notably kept to a minimum, a moment of silence was followed by military marches. Tunes singing the praises of such key institutions as the People, the Party, the army and Ho Chi Minh himself were aired. Girls in traditional ao dai dresses bearing flowers performed stiffly choreographed maneuvers with victorious soldiers. In the afternoon there was a mass wedding of 25 couples, each in gaudy traditional garb.

But among the Saigonese the celebrations elicited little enthusiasm and, if anything dredged up memories best left forgotten.

Dong - not his real name - a middle-aged doctor, remembers how, at the time, his hopes for a reunified Vietnam outweighed his fear of communism. ''We were very naive about politics and thought that what the Americans told us about communism was just propaganda,'' he says. ''Later we learned that it was in fact very close to the truth.'' Keen to put his skills to work for the post-war nation, Dong was instead ordered to clean floors by the northern staff that took over his hospital. He says several patients died due to the incompetence of the new doctors, who boasted impressive communist credentials but poor medical knowledge. Like so many middle-class Saigonese, Dong was sent to ''re-education camp'', which in his case was a former US military compound. There he spent seven months of forced labor and political indoctrination.

Hanh - also not her real name - was born in 1971. Her memory of the ''liberation'' is sketchy but she does remember waving a communist flag with her father to show support for the incoming troops. Harsh times followed and poverty drove her family to a number of abortive attempts to leave the country with thousands who fled in boats. Nevertheless, over the past decade things have improved and she is happy to leave her dark childhood memories behind. On the subject of the anniversary, her sentiments are shared by many. ''I'm looking forward to the holiday. I'll get two days off work and a bonus,'' she explained.

Lack of interest among the Saigonese might have been one reason for the apparent decision to downplay the celebrations. Another could be that the government is now trying to draw back the Overseas Vietnamese who left at the end of, or soon after, the war. Remittances from sizeable Vietnamese communities, notably in North America, Australia and France, have helped to make Ho Chi Minh City easily the most prosperous city in the country. Market-oriented reforms have gathered sufficient pace to persuade many of the business-minded exiles to consider building bridges with their homeland. Once treated with deep suspicion, the government has recently made gestures - such as exempting them from exorbitant foreigner prices for train and plane travel - to lure them and their capital back.

A heavy-handed or overly jubilant approach to the anniversary would also have sent the wrong signals to foreign investors, who tolerate communist rhetoric as long as it remains only that. With the eyes of the world focused on the country whose name has become synonymous with a war, the Vietnamese leadership was careful to appear neither smug nor provocative.

Some diplomatic sniping did occur prior to the festivities, however.

Former US Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain speaking in Ho Chi Minh City told reporters that ''the wrong guys won'' the war and that the ruling Communist party was holding back Vietnam's development. To add insult to injury, McCain - who had played a key role in the normalization of US-Vietnam relations - refused to endorse a possible visit by President Bill Clinton, claiming the trip could be interpreted as a reward the regime did not deserve.

This came on the heels of his visit a few days earlier to the ''Hanoi Hilton'' prison where he had spent five years as a prisoner of war. There, McCain reiterated that he could not forgive his captors, whom he accused of torture and the killing of a number of his friends.

Reacting to his comments, a spokeswoman from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Americans, who committed ''horrendous crimes'' in Vietnam, had no right to make such allegations, which she said were untrue. ''It runs counter to the norms of morality that those people who brought bombs and shells to sow death among our people and wreak havoc with a country now pass themselves off as having the right to criticize their victims-cum-saviors,'' she added.

US brutalities were further highlighted at a commemoration held in Hanoi on the eve of the anniversary. Vietnam's leaders gathered for a slew of solemn speeches, after watching footage of US soldiers burning villages and roughly interrogating suspected communist sympathizers. Ironically, the show also featured newsreel clips of Buddhist monks immolating themselves in Saigon in protest at their treatment at the hands of the former pro-Catholic Southern regime.

Only two days earlier however, dissident Buddhist leader Thich Huyen Quang, called on the government to proclaim April 30 ''a national day of repentance for the Communist Party of Vietnam''. In a letter to Vietnam's top leaders, the head of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam asked those in charge not only to ''remember all those who were killed or wounded during the war, but also those who are alive but have been deprived of their basic freedoms, human rights and individual freedom''.

In a bid to put a shine on Vietnam's much-battered human rights record, the government said it would free more than 12,000 prisoners in an amnesty to mark the anniversary. The unexpectedly high total includes 29 foreigners.

It was not revealed whether alleged political prisoners, whom the government denies detaining, would be among them.

(Inter Press Service)

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