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THE reclamation of Saigon by indigenous forces 50 years ago today spelt the end of what the Vietnamese refer to as the ‘American war’. It wasn’t their first triumph in the struggle against Western imperialism. Almost 21 years earlier, Viet Minh forces had cornered the French army into a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in a battle described as “the Stalingrad of decolonisation”.
Had the UK and US abided by the self-determination clause relating to European colonies in their 1941 Atlantic Charter, the liberation of Vietnam could have been sealed in 1945, after Japan’s surrender. After all, the Viet Minh forces had been instrumental in resisting the Japanese occupation of Indochina, alongside Chinese and Allied troops. But for post-Roosevelt US and Britain alike, colonial brutality was preferable to even a hint of communism.
Hence, Douglas Gracey — the British general who later served as the Pakistan Army’s commander-in-chief for nearly three years — led pre-partition Indian troops into Saigon until the French could return in sufficient force to re-establish control. Equally ignominiously, the Allies also deployed Japanese soldiers to keep the Viet Minh at bay.
It’s worth noting that the brutal Nazi occupation of France had evidently failed to awaken the French to the inherent moral turpitude of colonisation. The lessons of Dien Bien Phu did not deter them, for instance, from the atrocities in Algeria, until they were obliged to retreat. But that’s how the colonial or neocolonial mentality tends to operate.
And let’s not forget Bandung 1955.
The so-called Vietnam syndrome served only briefly as a barrier to America’s neoconservative ambitions. Its role in Afghanistan during the 1980s was described as the CIA’s largest covert operation since Vietnam. The subsequent semi-colonisation from 2001 lasted almost 20 years, much like the US role in Vietnam, and the eventual exit, with helicopters whirring across Kabul, evoked memories of Saigon in 1975.
The failure to learn history’s lessons, or to misinterpret them, is more or less universal. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the colonisers of Palestine refuse to recognise the echoes in their current actions of what their ancestors suffered in Europe, or that the likes of Germany — the nastiest offender against Jews, Gypsies and communists in the 1930s-40s — prefer to condone the horrors that the children of their victims feel free to perpetrate.
Two Vietnams were accommodated at the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung 70 years ago this month, after the Geneva conference had established the 17th parallel the previous year between North and South Vietnam. It was intended to be temporary, with reunifying elections scheduled for 1956. As Dwight Eisenhower conceded in his memoir, the consensus was that “possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh”.
That served as sufficient cause to avoid any elections, and to perpetuate the regime the Japanese had established in the south. And, ultimately, to segue from a French to an American war that continued for another two decades, at the cost of up to three million Vietnamese and more than 50,000 American lives. Vietnamese losses included 504 victims slaughtered at My Lai in 1968. As Seymour Hersh put it, “24 families were obliterated — three generations murdered, with no survivors. Among the dead were 182 women, 17 of them pregnant. 173 children were executed, including 56 infants. 60 older men died.” You’re not alone if you think it sounds like Gaza.
Vietnam did not feature much on the Bandung agenda, given its decolonisation was still expected. But the conference itself was a landmark, bringing together the leaders or representatives of 29 African and Asian states that had either recently been liberated or were on the verge of independence. The leading lights in the Indonesian city were the prime ministers of Asia’s largest nations, China and India, but it was also the first outing on an international stage for Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Jawaharlal Nehru, alongside Sukarno, was a dominant figure at Bandung, but Zhou Enlai stole the show on China’s behalf with his conciliatory attitude, bereft of ideological fervour.
Sukarno accurately hailed the Bandung gathering as “the first international conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind”, but its direct consequences were limited, not least because several participants (including Pakistan) were already wedded to the Cold War-era US, and suspicious of its radical adversaries. That included North Vietnam, one of the only two purportedly communist countries represented at a gathering that many US media outlets envisaged as a ‘Red’ endeavour.
Who can doubt that the ghosts of the Cold War echoed in Trump’s current crusades against ‘the radical left’ and ‘Marxism’, minus any knowledge of what either of those terms might mean?
Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2025
