• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1305 0

more than 150,000 received wounds that required hospitalization. The ARVN lost 250,000 troops, while perhaps two million civilians were killed in the South. Hanoi declared that over two million North Vietnamese civilians and one million troops died during the war. Many more on both sides are still listed as “missing in action” (MIA). Since 1975, an estimated 35,000 people – a third of them children – have been killed by left-over ordnance, while contamination from Agent Orange and other chemicals continues to cause health problems (See "Environmental issues"). In the US, some half a million veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, while veteran suicides have now exceeded the total number of US fatalities during the conflict.

History |

Reunified Vietnam

By July 1976, Vietnam was once again a unified nation for the first time since the French colonization in the 1850s. At first the new leaders trod softly, softly in order to impress the international community, but Southerners eyed the future with profound apprehension. Their fears were well founded, as Hanoi was in no mood to grant Saigon autonomy: the Council of National Reconciliation, provided for by the Paris Accords, was never established, and the NLF’s Provisional Revolutionary Government worked beneath the shadow of the Military Management Committee, and therefore Hanoi, until the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was officially born, in July 1976. The impression of a conquering army was exacerbated when Northern cadres – the can bo – swarmed south to take up all official posts.

Monumental problems faced the nascent republic. For many years, the two halves of Vietnam had lived according to wildly variant political and economic systems. The North had no industry, its agriculture was based on co-operative farms, and much of its land had been bombed on a massive scale. In stark contrast, American involvement in the South had underwritten what John Pilger describes as “an ‘economy’ based upon the services of maids, pimps, whores, beggars and black-marketeers”, buttressed by American cash that dried up when the last helicopter left the embassy in Saigon.

The changes that swept the country weren’t limited to economics. Bitterness on Hanoi’s part towards its former enemies was inevitable, yet instead of making moves towards national conciliation – and despite the fact that many families had connections in both camps – recriminations drove further wedges between the peoples of North and South. Anyone with remote connections to America was interned in a re-education camp, along with Buddhist monks, priests, intellectuals and anyone else the government wanted to be rid of. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners were sent, without trial, to these camps, where some remained for over a decade. The quagmire Vietnam found itself in after reunification prompted many of its citizens to flee the country in unseaworthy vessels, an exodus of humanity known as the boat people(See "The “boat people”").

Three weeks before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Pol Pot’s genocidal regime had seized power in Cambodia: within a year his troops were making cross-border forays into regions of Vietnam that had once fallen under Khmer sway, around the Mekong Delta and north of Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon had been renamed). One such venture led to the massacre at Ba Chuc(See "Southwest to Ba Chuc and Tup Duc"), in which almost two thousand people died. Reprisals were slow in coming, but by 1978 Vietnam could stand back no longer; on Christmas Day of that year 120,000 Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia and ousted Pol Pot. Whatever the motives for the invasion, and even though it brought an end to Pol Pot’s reign of terror, Vietnam was further ostracized by the international community. In February 1979, Beijing’s response came in the form of a punitive Chinese invasion of Vietnam’s northeastern provinces; Chinese losses were heavy, and after sixteen days they retreated. Meanwhile, Pol Pot had withdrawn across the Thai border, from where his army was able to continue attacking the Vietnamese