Vietnam

F

French Intervention

A French missionary, Pierre Pigneau de Behaine, had raised a mercenary force to help Nguyen Anh seize the throne in the hope that the new emperor would provide France with trading and missionary privileges, but his hopes were disappointed. The Nguyen dynasty was suspicious of French influence. Roman Catholic missionaries and their Vietnamese converts were persecuted, and a few were executed during the 1830s. Religious groups in France demanded action from the government in Paris. When similar pressure was exerted by commercial and military interests, Emperor Napoleon III approved the launching of a naval expedition in 1858 to punish the Vietnamese and force the court to accept a French protectorate.

The first French attack at Đa Nãng Harbour failed to achieve its objectives, but a second farther south was more successful, and in 1862 the court at Huê agreed to cede several provinces in the Mekong delta (later called Cochin China) to France. In the 1880s the French returned to the offensive, launching an attack on the north. After severe defeats, the Vietnamese accepted a French protectorate over the remaining territory of Vietnam.

G

Colonial Rule and Resistance

The imposition of French colonial rule had met with little organized resistance. The national sense of identity, however, had not been crushed, and anti-colonial sentiment soon began to emerge. Poor economic conditions contributed to native hostility to the conspicuously harsh French rule. Although French occupation brought improvements in transport and communications, and contributed to the growth of commerce and manufacturing, colonialism brought little improvement in livelihood to the mass of the population, and fostered a general impression of mercantile capitalism as a foreign imposition. In the countryside, peasants struggled under heavy taxes and high rents for collaborationist landlords. Workers in factories, in coal mines, and on rubber plantations laboured in abysmal conditions for low wages. Vietnamese were excluded from almost all echelons of the colonial administration. The French frequently recruited forced labour for public works projects, and legal protection or redress for Vietnamese was virtually absent. By the early 1900s, nationalist parties began to demand reform and independence. In 1930 the revolutionary Ho Chi Minh formed an Indochinese Communist Party.

Until World War II started in 1939, such groups laboured without success. In 1940, however, Japan demanded and received the right to place Vietnam under military occupation, restricting the local French administration to figurehead authority. Seizing the opportunity, the Communists organized the broad Vietminh Front, with some covert American assistance, and prepared to launch an uprising at the war’s end. The Vietminh (short for Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam) emphasized moderate reform and national independence rather than specifically Communist aims. When the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, Vietminh forces arose throughout Vietnam and declared the establishment of an independent republic in Hanoi.

The French, however, were unwilling to concede independence, and in October drove the Vietminh and other nationalist groups out of the south. For more than a year the French and the Vietminh sought a negotiated solution, but the talks, held in France, failed to resolve differences; chiefly because of French determination to re-annexe Vietnam. In November 1946 French warships bombarded Haiphong, causing thousands of civilian casualties; Vietminh forces in Hanoi retaliated in December, and war was under way.

H

Expulsion of the French

The conflict lasted for nearly eight years. The Vietminh retreated into the hills to build up their forces while the French formed a rival Vietnamese government under Emperor Bao Dai, the last ruler of the Nguyen dynasty, in populated areas along the coast. Vietminh forces lacked the strength to defeat the French and generally restricted their activities to guerrilla warfare. In 1953-1954 the French fortified a base at Điên Biên Phu (also known as Điên Biên). After months of siege and heavy casualties, the Vietminh overran the fortress in the decisive Battle of Điên Biên Phu. As a consequence, the French government could no longer resist pressure from a war-weary populace at home and in June 1954 agreed to negotiations to end the war. At a conference held in Geneva the two sides accepted an interim compromise to end the war. They divided the country at the 17th parallel, with the Vietminh in the North and the French and their Vietnamese supporters in the South. To avoid permanent partition, a political protocol was drawn up, calling for national elections to reunify the country two years after the signing of the treaty.

I

Partition

After Geneva, the Vietminh in Hanoi refrained from armed struggle and began to build a Communist society. In the southern capital, Saigon, Bao Dai soon was toppled by a new regime under the staunch anti-Communist president Ngo Dinh Diem. With diplomatic support from the United States, Diem refused to hold elections and attempted to destroy Communist influence in the South. By 1959, however, Diem was in trouble. His unwillingness to tolerate domestic opposition, his alleged favouritism of fellow Roman Catholics, and the failure of his social and economic programmes seriously alienated key groups in the populace, especially Buddhist groups, and led to rising unrest. The Communists decided it was time to resume their revolutionary war.

J

The Vietnam War

In the fall of 1963, Diem was overthrown and killed in a coup d’état launched by his own generals. In the political confusion that followed, the security situation in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate, putting the Communists within reach of victory. In early 1965, to prevent the total collapse of the Saigon regime, US President Lyndon Johnson approved regular intensive bombing of North Vietnam and the dispatch of US combat troops into the South, marking the overt entry of the United States into the Vietnam War.

The US intervention caused severe problems for the Communists on the battlefield and compelled them to send regular units of the North Vietnamese army into the South. It did not persuade them to abandon the struggle, however, and in 1968, after the bloody Tet offensive shook the new authoritarian Saigon regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu to its foundations, the Johnson administration decided to pursue a negotiated settlement. Ho Chi Minh died in 1969 and was succeeded by another leader of the revolution, Le Duan. The new US president, Richard Nixon, continued Johnson’s policy while gradually withdrawing US troops. In January 1973 the war temporarily came to an end with the signing of a peace agreement in Paris. The settlement provided for the total removal of remaining US troops, while Hanoi tacitly agreed to accept the Thieu regime in preparation for new national elections. The agreement soon fell apart, however, and in early 1975 the Communists launched a military offensive. In six weeks, the resistance of the Thieu regime collapsed, and on April 30 the Communists seized power in Saigon. The Vietnam War had left more than 15 per cent of the Vietnamese population killed or wounded.