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Title: On Vietnam
Author: Ngô Văn
Date: 1968
Language: en
Topics: Vietnam, libertarian communism
Source: Retrieved on 2020-05-01 from https://libcom.org/library/vietnam-0

Ngô Văn

On Vietnam

Preface

The text below is extracted from Sur le Vietnam, a series of articles

published in Informations et Correspondences ouvrières from the end of

1967 and the beginning of 1968, at the height of the movement against

the Vietnam war in Europe and North America. Whilst this description as

a whole has not hitherto appeared in English, the final chapter, The

Saigon Insurrection of 23 September 1945, was the only account of the

events available in Britain for many years, having been first translated

by Chris Pallis and printed in Solidarity, Volume 5 no.5, 27 October

1968, pp.3–6, 16. It was subsequently reproduced in the United States as

a leaflet by the Spartacist West group of the movement now known as the

ICL, and later by S Pirani (ed.), Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia

1987, pp.56–60.

Introduction

This account was largely written from memory, without the advantage of

an extensive documentation to hand. Comrade Van’s more extensive

treatment of the same period is to be found in Le Mouvement IVè

Internationale en Indochine, 1930–39 in the Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.40,

December 1989, pp.21–60.

The author, Ngo Van Xuyet, was a member of the League of

Internationalist Communists for the Fourth International, formed in

Saigon in 1935; like Ta Thu Thau’s organisation this group supported the

Fourth International, but did not participate in the La Lutte front,

concentrating instead on the publication of the journal Le Militant. He

was jailed for a year in 1936, continued political activity on his

release, participated in the 1945 Saigon insurrection, and has lived in

exile in France since 1947.

....

1. The La Lutte Group and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Movement

(1933–37)

South Vietnam in the ’thirties: we have seen how the world economic

crisis reverberated in Vietnam in essentially peasant revolts and in the

awakening of the working class movement momentarily decapitated by the

repression at the beginning of the ’thirties.

Some Vietnamese students who had been trained in France organised

themselves into the two main tendencies that divided the Third

International: Stalinism and Trotskyism. Some of them had been expelled

from France after their demonstrations against the sentences following

the Yen-bay rebellion in 1930. [1] Moscow trained some of the militants

who were assigned to reconstruct the Communist Party in illegality; the

kernel of this new illegal party fell under the blows of police

repression in 1935, and when one of its leaders, Tran Van Giau, now in

Ho Chi Minh’s information services, was before the court in Saigon being

questioned about his occupation, he declared that he was a professional

revolutionary. Along with his companions he joined those who had been

sentenced in 1933 in the hard-labour camp of Poulo-Condore. Also born in

clandestinity round about 1932 were the small Trotskyist groups under

the leadership of some of those expelled from France. Bulletins run off

with gelatine disseminated in secret the theoretical discussions of the

Vo-san (Proletarian) group of Ta Thu Thau and the Thang-muoi (October)

group of Ho Huu Tuong and others amongst some of the awakened city

workers. The second of these groups charged the first with a

conciliatory tendency towards the Stalinists. Inspired by the Permanent

Revolution, these disciples of Trotsky advocated a ‘dictatorship of the

proletariat’ in alliance with the peasantry in order to accomplish this

‘permanent revolution,’ the foremost tasks of which would be national

liberation through anti-imperialist struggle and agrarian reform through

the abolition of private ownership and the division of the land amongst

the peasants, whereas the Stalinists were planning on a ‘democratic

dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ that would realise the

same objectives. The secret political influence of the Trotskyists was

essentially urban; the Stalinists rooted themselves in the countryside

on account of the origins of their movement, where they propagated the

notion that the Trotskyists were the enemy of the peasantry.

But very soon the three Trotskyist groups – the third being the Ta doi

lap tong tho (Publications of the Left Opposition) – were broken up; in

August 1932 the police arrested 41 militants and sympathisers in Saigon

and in the provinces. The first trial of the Trotskyists took place in

Saigon on 1 May 1933, and 16 out of the 21 accused were condemned to

between three months’ and five years’ imprisonment.

At the time of the Saigon municipal elections in 1933 both Stalinists

and Trotskyists attempted to carry out joint legal action by putting

together a single electoral list, the ‘workers’ list’ (so lao-dong). In

order to stand in elections you had to be either a proprietor or, at

least, pay business tax, so the Trotskyist teacher Ta Thu Thau became a

carpet seller in Lagrandière Street, whereas the Stalinist journalist

Nguyen Van Tao became a lemonade seller in the Old Market. Electoral

meetings began to be held in the Thanh-xuong, a small local theatre.

Coolies, commercial employees, Saigon workers and young people were for

the first time openly exhorted to struggle for the eight hour day, for

trade union rights and for the right to strike by the candidates to the

municipal council who were seeking the votes of the citizens in order to

‘represent’ them. The success of these meetings alarmed the police, who

closed the Thanh-xuong theatre along with the theatres in the suburbs

(Khanh-hoi and Tan-dinh), but meetings rendered impossible by this

police intervention were transformed into street demonstrations. The

bourgeois electoral list of the Constitutionalist Party was defeated,

and the workers’ list gained a majority of those seats upon the

municipal council that were set aside for the Vietnamese. It was at the

time of this legal agitation that La Lutte first appeared, a weekly

newspaper in French of the United Front between the Saigon Stalinists

and Trotskyists (you should bear in mind that no paper in the native

language was allowed to appear without the prior authorisation of the

colonial administration, so La Lutte could only cater for a thin layer

of the urban population, that which could read French; even then it was

often the victim of seizures and searches, but in the Vietnamese

language it would not even have been allowed to appear). A French

journalist, old Ganofsky, who lived in poverty on the margins of

colonial circles, gave his name as manager of La Lutte. This free spirit

was afterwards interfered with on several occasions and he paid the

consequences of his disinterested act right up to his death.

This local United Front that was dictated by the necessities of the

struggle against strong colonial oppression soon became disrupted by the

evolution of the politics of the Russian Communist Party, and

consequently the politics of the French party. The France-Soviet Pact of

May 1935 converted France into an ally of Russia, and the French

Communist Party now had the duty of defending ‘French democracy’ against

Fascism. The Stalinist group dutifully dispensed with its usual jargon

of ‘French Imperialism,’ no longer talked about national independence,

and imparted a purely reformist direction to its slogans. Deep

differences arose within La Lutte, but the Ta Thu Thau group still did

not break its formal unity with the Stalinists. The wave of strikes that

was followed by the factory occupations and the formation of the Popular

Front in France in June 1936 had an immediate echo in the peninsula of

Indochina, where the reformist current grew stronger. A Popular Front

known under the name of the Indo Chinese Congress Movement

(Phong-tiao-Dong-duong-Dai-hoi) was formed on the initiative of the La

Lutte group with the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party, in order to draw

up demands relating to the political, economic and social reforms that

were to be presented to the Popular Front government of the metropolitan

country. At the end of 1935 a small secret Trotskyist group was set up,

the Internationalist Communist League, which launched the slogan of

‘action committees’ amongst the workers and peasants by means of a

leaflet in the Vietnamese language, but its militants were immediately

thrown into prison. The Stalinists urged respect for the law to the

peasants who had begun to agitate in a violent manner against direct and

indirect taxes and for a reduction in ground rent.

The ‘first trial of the Fourth International,’ the trial of the

Internationalist Communist League, opened in Saigon on 31 August 1936.

Following a plea submitted by their lawyers with regard to the tortures

and maltreatment they had undergone at the hands of the police, a

complaint that raised an echo in the Depêche d’Indochine and La Lutte,

Lu Sanh Hanh and seven of his comrades were sentenced to light prison

sentences of between six and 18 months. [2]

The ferment among the workers manifested itself in partial strikes that

culminated in the general strike of 1937 that included workers in the

arsenal at Saigon, of the Trans-Indo Chinese Railway (Saigon-Hanoi), the

Tonkin miners and the coolies of the rubber plantations, the mass of the

proletariat, in other words. They were demanding an eight hour day,

trade union rights, the right to strike and convene, a free press, etc.

It was during this struggle that the workers, assisted by the militants,

organised their strike and support committees and their contacts

throughout the country. There was something spontaneous in this wave of

demands and chain explosions, and in the limited understanding of the

workers and peasants. They were fed on the illusion of the possibilities

of freedom and social reform offered by the Popular Front of the

metropolitan country. Agitation and propaganda and the legal and

underground activities of the organised political groupings, whose

members could be counted on the fingers, are not enough to explain this

vast movement.

It was then that Brévié, who had been appointed governor of the colony

by the Popular Front government, resorted to repression. Not only was

the skeleton of working class trade unions formed during the General

Strike banned, and its militants sent to prison (October 1937), but even

the Movement of the Indochinese Congress was itself dissolved.

Trotskyist and Stalinist papers that had sometimes been able to appear

in the Vietnamese language were banned once more, and the labour

legislation remained a dead letter. It now became difficult for the

Stalinists to continue their defence of the Popular Front, which had in

no way changed fundamentally France’s imperialist colonial policy.

The Moscow Trials were now at their zenith, and the French Communist

Party sent the MP Honel to give the local Stalinists the order to break

with the Trotskyists. Abandoning La Lutte to the Trotskyists, the

Stalinists employed the same venomous methods against them as those of

their masters in the Kremlin. In their new paper Le Peuple (later

Dan-chung) they were to represent their erstwhile comrades as spies for

the Mikado and provocateurs. The period of methodical murders will be

described when we come to the 1945–46 period. The utter and immediate

obedience of the Stalinist group to the orders of Moscow can only be

explained by their blind fanaticism. Young men, driven by an ideal, were

transformed overnight into wolves, howling to the death with the other

wolves against their brothers in the fight, with whom they had still

been elbow to elbow only the day before, in struggle as well as in

prison. Regimentation had corrupted them, along with the Vietnamese

workers’ and peasants’ movement, which was thus sacrificed from birth to

Russian foreign policy. As we were later to see, the exploited were to

forge new chains for themselves under the leadership of these

‘professional revolutionaries,’ when they thought that they were

struggling for their emancipation – those of the industrial world, where

production is not a requirement of true and vital human needs, but those

of state capitalism as the ‘revolutionary vanguard’ inevitably turned

into a bureaucracy possessing the state.

Obviously, French imperialism breathed freely and easily during this

period of relative support by the Stalinists for the integrity of the

empire. The calm was broken by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939,

followed by the declaration of war on 3 September. The decree of 26

September, which dissolved all organisations “relating to the Third

International”, was the prelude to the mass arrests of militants of all

tendencies, Stalinists, Trotskyists, nationalists and the leaders of the

magico-religious sects in October 1939, and then were to close upon them

the sinister doors of the prisons and the camps for the “special

training of workers”, the death camps that were established in unhealthy

regions, in which few survived. In a declaration of November 1939 in

conformity with Stalin’s foreign policy the Indochinese Communist party

at one and the same time denounced the ‘imperialist’ war of France

against Germany as well as the Japanese plans for aggression against

Russia. This sudden shift translated itself in 1940 into a concealed

peasant insurrection fomented by the Indochinese Communist Party in

Cochin China, which was drowned in blood.

2. The Sects and the Vietminh

[We omit here the section dealing with the expression of peasant

discontent through sectarian Buddhist consciousness, and extract merely

what deals with the movements during the Second World War.]

The young Marxists carried their dream of “transforming the imperialist

war into a civil war” into the prisons, but the words pronounced at

Zimmerwald coming from far-off Europe, and their illustration in the

Russian events of 1917, were nonetheless to continue to sound in their

hearts. A Communist Party song composed about 1935 that called for civil

war remained deep in their hearts: “We will take the opportunity of the

war between the imperialisms and when Soviet Russia shall be attacked,

we will engage in civil war” (“Thua luc de-quoc tranh-chien, voi luc

danh So-viet lam noi-chien mau”). It was upon propaganda in favour of

this same idea in an illegal Trotskyist duplicated sheet, the Vanguard

(Tien-dao) that the Prosecutor attached to the Saigon court had

supported his indictment at the time of the trial of the

Internationalist Communist League in September 1936.

Pre-emptive arrests did not prevent the peasants of Cochin China from

rising in December 1940, and in the same year an upsurge broke out at

Bacson in Tonkin. Repression caused thousands of deaths, and courts

martial sent those who were captured to death and to the prisons. The

prisons were so full that a certain number of prisoners were locked up

in barges berthed near Saigon, where they perished like flies.

[Here we omit more material upon the beliefs and history of the Cao Dai

and the Hoa Hao.]

It should be remembered that after the French defeat in Europe the

Japanese occupied Indochina, and in agreement with Vichy preserved the

French administrative and repressive apparatus, together with a new

colonial governor henceforth at their service. The policy of the

Japanese attempted to eliminate the Stalinist tendency and to search for

a compromise of collaborating with the nationalist tendencies and the

sects; in 1942 the ‘mad bonze’ who had been exiled in Laos was liberated

by them, and when on 9 March 1945 the Japanese brought the French

colonial administration to an end, they armed the devotees of these two

sects, hoping to be able to use them as military auxiliaries in the

event of an American landing.

Let us return to the Stalinists and to their activities up to their

seizure of power in 1945. In May 1941 Ho Chi Minh, who was living in

Kwangsi in China, convened a conference that brought together Vietnamese

elements of all origins and formed along with them an organisation under

the unassuming title of Viet Minh (an abbreviation of Viet-nam dot-lap

dong minh, The League for the Independence of Vietnam), whose effective

leadership belonged to his own followers.

The Chinese generals of the Guomindang now convened a second conference

of the Vietnamese political refugees in China at Lieou-tcheou on 4

October 1942, with the intention of brushing aside the Communist

tendency and of setting up the Dong-minh hoi, the Association for

National Liberation, presided over by Nguyen Hai Tha, an old pro-Chinese

emigré. Ho Chi Minh was imprisoned for 18 months. However, at the

conference of March 1944 at Lieou-tcheou, in the course of which a

programme for a ‘provisional republican government of Vietnam’ was

elaborated, the Vietminh was represented, and had a portfolio. This

programme consisted of two points: the liquidation of the domination of

the French and Japanese, and independence for Vietnam with the

assistance of the Guomindang; but whereas the nationalists of this

government remained in China, where they waited for the intervention of

the Guomindang to assure them of power in Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh

group, under the banner of the Vietminh, came back into Tonkin and

established itself in the region of Thai-nguyen. When the Japanese coup

of 9 March 1945 put an end to French rule in Indochina, the Vietminh

found itself practically master of the highlands. Orientating himself

towards the Allies (Russia, Nationalist China, Great Britain and the

United States), Ho Chi Minh organised a few skirmishes against the

Japanese, made contact with the Americans at Kun-ming, and from them

obtained weapons with which to struggle on the side of the Allies. After

the surrender of the Japanese on 15 August 1945, the Ho Chi Minh group

(the Vietminh) was already an organised military force, however hastily

armed and numerically weak.

3. August 1945, The Coming of Ho Chi Minh

Here we shall examine the situation that permitted the seizure of power

by Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh followers in August 1945.

The first cannon shots in Europe that began “the continuation of

politics” in the blood of the slaves opened up for Japanese imperialism,

which had been engaged upon a full-scale war of conquest in China since

1937, a perspective of realising the Greater Asia Plan of Tojo for the

ousting of the old Western masters from South-East Asia. When the French

refused to allow their troops to penetrate into Tonkin in 1940, the

Japanese went over to the attack at Lan-son and Dongdang in the evening

of 22 September, and on the 24^(th) landed at Haiphong after having

bombarded the port. So began the Japanese occupation of Indochina; it

maintained the administrative apparatus of French colonialism with a

Vichy admiral in charge who largely collaborated with the Japanese

general staff. The systematic plunder of the produce of the country for

the needs of war plunged the population into increasing misery; more

than ever the peasant masses lived in destitution. American bombing,

typhoons and exceptional cold all added up to disaster, culminating in

the great famine of March to May 1945, with about a million deaths in

the north, including deaths in the streets of Hanoi.

In the south of the country the religious sects that had been persecuted

by the French cherished a hope in Japan. The Cao-daists, whose Pope Pham

Cong Tac was living in exile at Nossi-lava (Madagascar), were counting

on the return of Prince Cuong-de, who was a refugee in Japan, and the

devotees of the ‘Mad bonze,’ the Hoa-Hao, had obtained from the Japanese

the return of their master Huynh Phu So, who had been exiled to Laos by

the French. From 1943 onwards some pro-Japanese nationalist groups were

formed, and their members were utilised in the Japanese propaganda and

police services.

Round about 1943 in the mountain region of Tuyen-quang near the Chinese

frontier in the north, Ho Chi Minh organised his guerilla centre and

made contact with the Americans to ask them for weapons, whilst

proclaiming himself to be on the side of the ‘democratic Allies against

Japanese Fascism’; his ‘people’s army’ was officially inaugurated in the

resistance starting from 22 December 1944.

Faced with the American offensive in the Pacific and the threat of ruin

for the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome Axis, the Japanese put an end to the authority

of the French over the whole peninsula by a coup starting from 9 March

1945. The French troops were disarmed and confined to their barracks,

and the commanders were either imprisoned or put to death; the

population was concentrated and strictly controlled. The Japanese

effected a proclamation of independence by the Emperor Bao Dai and by

means of Tran Trong Kim created a ‘national government’ at Hué on 2

March. The leaden cover that had weighed down upon the country was now

split. The popular masses felt relieved, since of the two brigands who

had been plundering them, one had fallen under the blows of the other,

and they were filled with a feeling of satisfaction over the one that

was impotent, along with the illusion that with ‘national independence’

something positive was going to be done about their condition. The

arrogant policemen of the French regime were no longer in the streets of

Saigon questioning workers and clerks returning from work in order to

verify their personal identity cards (giay thne than). No longer were

French colons to be heard threatening to kick the backsides of rickshaw

boys who were claiming what was owed them. The members of the

pro-Japanese nationalist groups received key posts in the

administration. The youth of country, town and village was

paramilitarily organised to serve as an auxiliary force for the Japanese

army in the event of an American landing; this movement was known under

the name of the Youth Vanguard (Thank-nien tied-phong). The Cao-daists

formed their own armed groups, whereas the Hoa-Hao were forging

sharp-edged weapons whilst “waiting upon events”, in other words, the

opportunity for seizing power. The militants of the Stalinist group who

had escaped the repression or who had been freed from the concentration

camps after 9 March were working – mobilised after a fashion – for the

‘national government’ and the peasants, and were operating underground

within the Youth Vanguard. All this political ferment in the South

during the five months that preceded the defeat of the Japanese was

escaping from their control, whereas in the regions of Upper Tonkin the

zone of the armed groups of Ho Chi Minh was spreading; they, also, were

waiting upon ‘events.’

The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed by the surrender of Japan

on 15 August 1945 marked another bloody era for this corner of Asia,

intended by the imperialist powers (the Potsdam agreement between

Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt) to be occupied to the north of the

seventeenth parallel by Chinese troops and to the south of it by British

troops. This new partition of the world wiped French imperialism from

the map of Indochina, and through the mediation of Chiang Kai-Shek’s

Chinese the Americans were counting on including Northern Vietnam within

their sphere of influence in South East Asia.

Faced with the political gap created by the Japanese surrender, and

preceding the Chinese troops who were bringing with them the pro-Chinese

nationalists of the Dong-minh-hoi and the Viet-nam quoc dan-dang, Ho Chi

Minh brought together his supporters in the village of Tantrao (province

of Thai-nguyen) and created a Committee for the National Liberation of

Vietnam (Uy-ban giai-phong dan-toc Viet-nam), the majority of which was

composed of about 10 former members of the Communist Party. In this way

he broke with the ‘government in exile’ in China, and therefore with the

pro-Chinese nationalists. After some spectacular demonstrations

organised by his emissaries in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh made his entrance

there at the head of his ‘people’s army’ around 18 August. Without

further ado the representative of Bao Dai’s pro-Japanese government in

Hanoi, Phan Ke Toai, withdrew. Thus the de facto power of the Vietminh

was set up with the indifference of the Japanese, who had received

instructions from the Allies to maintain order until the arrival of the

Chinese troops. It should also be said that the Japanese released some

400 political prisoners who had been incarcerated in the Shell buildings

who were claimed by the Vietminh, and that they allowed them to get hold

of weapons. At the same time the ‘people’s committees’ took control of

the administration in the provinces, and the Mandarins disappeared or

submitted. A provisional Vietminh government was formed in Hanoi on 25

August, presided over by Ho Chi Minh; in Hue, after the resignation of

the Tran Trong Kim government, Bao Dai also abdicated, and was

designated as a ‘supreme counsellor’ by Ho Chi Minh.

Frozen

What happened in the South of the country after 15 August? The same

absence of power as in the North made itself felt in Saigon; the

Japanese troops seemed to be frozen into immobility whilst awaiting the

arrival of the British, whereas ever since 9 March the disarmed French

had been waiting for their ‘liberation’ and their return to power. The

supporters of Ho Chi Minh (some emissaries who had come from Tonkin had

joined the Stalinist group of Cochin China) went around in cars provided

with loudspeakers calling out “defend the Vietminh” (“ung-ho Viet

minh”), the ‘Vietminh’ being a name hitherto unknown around Saigon

having all the attraction of a mystery, and then they distributed

leaflets claiming themselves to be “on the side of the Russian, Chinese,

British and United States Allies for independence”. The ‘United National

Front’ which in a few days had collected together the Party for the

Independence of Vietnam (Viet-nam quoc gia doc lap dang), the Vanguard

Youth, the Group of the Intellectuals, the Federation of Civil Servants

and the Tinh do cu Buddhist sect along with the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai,

appealed to the population to demonstrate for independence in the

presence of an uncertain and threatening situation. On 21 August 1945,

for the first time in the political life of the country, from the

morning onwards, veritable masses of people assembled like ants and

filled the Norodom Boulevard, then the Botanical Gardens near the

governor’s palace, and then crossed the major arteries in order chanting

slogans: “Down with French imperialism!” (“Da dao de quoc phap”), “Long

live the Independence of Vietnam!” (“Vietnam hoan toan doc lap’”, whilst

the flags and banners floating above this moving army indicated the

presence of the Vanguard Youth, who had been a pro-Japanese organisation

only yesterday, peasants led by Stalinist militants who had come from

the environs of Saigon, workers of Saigon-Cholon, Cao-daists, Buddhists

of various sects grouped around their bonzes, the Hoa Hao, and the

militants of the Trotskyist La Lutte and Internationalist Communist

League groups. The latter, under the flag of the Fourth International,

raised the slogans of “the land and ricefields to the peasants, the

factories and enterprises for the workers!”. Some demonstrators were

armed with sharpened bamboo poles. Banners were seen with the unusual

inscriptions such as “Murder Assault Groups” (“Ban am sat xung phong”)

raised by bare-chested and tatooed men, who were carrying sharpened

weapons and old rifles. The Vietnamese police at the service of the

occupation no longer knew from where to take its orders: it remained

passive in the presence of the procession crossing the city on strike,

and the crowd only disappeared in the afternoon. This demonstration,

which owed its initiation to the Vietminh, was the classic tactic

preparatory to the seizure of power – it represented the seal of general

approval. But in fact everybody went down into the street with different

aspirations. The only common but overwhelming sentiment was “never to

see the French back in power, long live the end of the colonial regime!”

This first awakening of these masses, who had been forever in “chains .

and gags”, emanated an electric tension amid an unusual calm, the

brooding calm that preceeds a storm. All constraint was broken, and

everybody seemed to live a moment of total liberty, where the absence of

the state and the bankruptcy of the police allowed everyone to prepare

himself in his own way for the eventuality of a terrible conflict. What

darkness upon the horizon of a fundamental change! Roosevelt, Churchill

and Stalin had decided our fate at Yalta and Potsdam. We were now to be

cast body and soul into a future without a tomorrow. Faced with the

perspective of the imminent arrival of the British troops, and faced

with the threat of the return of the old colonial regime (Colonel

Cédile, the special envoy of the ‘New France,’ was already in the

Governor-General’s palace in Saigon), everybody decided to look for and

obtain weapons; everyone lived in the same explosive atmosphere.

Events were about to unfold in these crucial moments of general crisis

with the speed of lightning. The nationalist groups and sects that had

been pro-Japanese remained armed, but incapable of taking the

initiative: their time was finished with the fall of Japan. The

Vietminh, politically reinforced by the coming of Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi,

and having already taken control of the movement of the Youth Vanguard,

whose leaders has joined it, also having been strengthened by the

monster demonstration of 25 August, in which it saw the approval of the

masses for its policy of collaboration with the ‘Allies’ for national

independence, was about to impose its rule.

Range

In fact, a proclamation signed by the ‘Southern Provisional Executive

Committee’ (‘Uy-ban hanh chanh lam-thoi Nambo’) soon appeared on the

walls of the city. The Committee appealed to the population to range

itself behind it with a view to obtaining the independence of the

country by negotiation with the ‘Allies,’ and promised the formation of

a democratic parliamentary republic. At the same time as this poster

announced the ‘taking of power’ by the Vietminh, a list of the members

of the Provisional Government, presided over by the Stalinist Tran Van

Giau, was put up in front of the Saigon town hall, fastened to an

imposing column covered with red cloth; another Stalinist, Nguyen Van

Tao, who had been a Saigon municipal councillor, was assigned to the

Ministry of the Interior, and in order to give their committee the

appearance of a national union that would be acceptable to the Allies in

an eventual negotiation, the Stalinists secured the governmental

collaboration of a doctor, some non-Stalinist intellectuals, and even a

landowner. This Nam-bo committee sat in the town hall, guarded by

militiamen in white uniforms. The police and cops had joined them, and

the commissariats were controlled by Tran Van Giau’s comrades; the

pirates of Le Van Vien, called the Bay Vien, had been enlisted as

policemen and as agents for the future Stalinist assassinations (they

had been well known under the French under the label of the ‘bands of

Binh xuyen,’ the name of a hamlet situated between Saigon and Cholon).

The activity of the Nam-bo Committee extended out towards the provinces,

where they set up their own provisional committees that took control of

the people’s committees that had spontaneously arisen in the villages

and of the old Vanguard Youth. The arrival of the Allied Commission was

announced for the beginning of September. In the streets of Saigon

floated immense banners bearing inscriptions of greeting in English,

Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese: “Welcome to the Allied Forces!” Some

demonstrative actions marked the intentions of the Nam-bo Committee to

have done with French colonialism: the Saigon streets changed their

names. The Rue Catinat, the luxurious artery of the city, famous for its

police offices, jails and torture chambers, was baptised ‘The Street of

the Paris Commune,’ and the Norodom Boulevard was called ‘The Boulevard

of the Republic’ ... The statues of the ‘heroes’ of the conquest (the

Bishop of Adran holding the young prince Canh by the hand in front of

the cathedral, Admiral Rigault de Genouilly at the side of the Saigon

river, and Bonnard in front of the Municipal Theatre) and other

monuments of the colonial era were destroyed.

On the morning of 2 September a large official procession was organised

by the Nam-bo Committee. The newly armed militia opened the march in

uniform. In the afternoon some shots were fired in the cathedral square,

no-one knows from where, provoking a general outburst; the demonstrators

flung themselves upon the French houses, and the demonstration ended

late at night with dead and wounded on both sides.

Soon the Gurkhas of the Twentieth Indian Division arrived by plane under

the command of the British general Gracey. From the moment of his

arrival Gracey had leaflets spread all over the city by Japanese fighter

planes proclaiming that he had charged the Japanese with the maintenance

of public order, and that he forbade the population to keep any weapons

under threat of severe punishment. An immense poster repeating this

proclamation was stuck on the city walls. The haughty tone of this

Allied military representative was the equivalent of a formal notice,

addressed not only to the armed groups of the religious sects who had

held onto quantities of Japanese weapons, but also to the Nam-bó

Committee, whose armed militia was more or less held responsible for the

‘disorders’ of 2 September. Gracey installed his headquarters in the

small palace of the governor of Cochin China. A feverish activity

agitated the groups and sects. The Hoa Hao assumed the name of the

Social Democratic Party (Dang dan-xa), and it seems that they, along

with the Cao-daists, were invited to a few subordinate ministerial posts

of social affairs by the Vietminh. The Trotskyists of the La Lutte group

pronounced in favour of support to the Stalinist Vietminh in this phase

of the struggle for national independence and for the formation of a

democratic republic, but declared that they reserved the right to

criticise; another Trotskyist tendency denounced as an illusion fostered

among the masses the possibility of obtaining national independence by

negotiation with the imperialist brigands whose alliance was being

solicited by the Vietminh. Advocating the arming of the people (which

was against the intentions of the Nam-bo Committee to control all the

armed groupings) and the preparation of an armed insurrection and

against the return of the old regime, they organised some tens of

workers and clerks in a ‘People’s Revolutionary Committee’ (‘uyban

nhan-dan cach-mang’) in the Tandinh suburb of Saigon, and a similar

people’s committee was formed at Bien-hoa, some 30 kilometres from

Saigon. But the activity of such committees, in a duality with the de

facto power of the Stalinists, was a stain that could spread, and the

arrest and incarceration of their members by the police put a stop to

it. We should note that the militants of Tan-dinh allowed themselves to

be disarmed without protest, for they feared that if they fired upon the

police they would only foster the accusations of provocation that had

been launched against them by those in charge in the town hall, and they

would be misunderstood by the masses. The leaders of the sects who were

also the victims of police searches disappeared, along with their armed

groups. The repression of the Vietminh was already aiming at controlling

all its opponents.

The Nam-bo Committee, to whom Gracey had accorded some polite

acknowledgements without giving them formal recognition, still operated

in the town hall; on the other hand Cédile, who was feverishly plotting

with the British to “re-establish colonial order”, had also entered into

a dialogue of the deaf with this same Committee. The leaflets of the

Committee of 17 September called for a general strike against the

French, but always in the hope of a possible negotiation with the

British, and recommended calm to the population. Three days afterwards,

on the 20^(th), the Vietnamese press was banned by the British, and the

proclamations of the Committee were torn down and removed from the walls

of the city. On the 22^(nd) the British were controlling the prison, and

were rearming some 1,500 French soldiers who had been shut up by the

Japanese in the barracks of the second Indo Chinese Regiment. Finally,

during the night of 22–23 September, the French, assisted by the

Gurkhas, reoccupied the police stations, the political police

headquarters, the Tax Office and the Post Office. The Vietminh Committee

left the town hall and withdrew into the neighbourhood of Cholon; that

same night the Saigon insurrection broke out.

4. The Saigon Insurrection

One of the main concerns of the Vietminh Committee was to ensure its

‘recognition’ by the British authorities as a de facto government. To

this end the committee did everything it could to show its strength and

demonstrate its ability to “maintain order„.

Through its press it ordered the dissolution of all the partisan groups

that had played an active role in the struggle against Japanese

imperialism.

All weapons were to be handed over to the Vietminh’s own police force.

The Vietminh’s militia, known as the ‘Republican Guard– (Cong

hoa-ve-binh) and their police thus had a legal monopoly in the carrying

of weapons.

The groups aimed at by this decision were not only certain religious

sects (the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao) but also the workers’ committees,

several of which were armed.

Also aimed at were the Vanguard Youth Organisation and a number of

‘self-defence groups,’ many based on factories or plantations. These

stood on a very radical social programme but were not prepared to accept

complete control by the Vietminh.

The Trotskyists of the Spark group (Tia Sang), anticipating an imminent

and inevitable confrontation with the military forces of Britain and

France, started to distribute leaflets calling for the formation of

Popular Action Committees (tochuc-uy-ban hanh-dong) and for arming of

the people.

They advocated the creation of a popular assembly, to be the organ of

struggle for national independence.

Workers of the big Tramway Depot of Go Vap (about eight kilometres from

Saigon), helped by Tia Sang militants, organised a workers’ militia. The

militia issued an appeal to the workers of the Saigon-Cholon area to arm

themselves and to prepare for the inevitable struggle against the forces

of British and French imperialism. By now General Gracey had prolaimed

martial law.

Before it abandoned the centre of Saigon, the Vietminh Committee

plastered the walls with posters, inviting the population to “disperse

into the countryside”, to “avoid confrontation”, and to “remain calm,

because the Committee hopes to open negotiations”.

A sense of insecurity hovered over the town, which slowly drained itself

of parts of its Vietnamese population.

During the night of 22–23 September 1945 French troops, supported by

Gurkhas commanded by British officers, reoccupied various police

stations, the Post Office, the Central Bank and the Town Hall. They met

no immediate resistance. The news spread like a trail of gunpowder and

triggered off a veritable insurrection in the working class districts of

the town. Explosions were heard in widely separate areas. The movement

had broken without anyone giving any kind of directive.

The Vietminh had certainly not called for insurrection. Their one

preoccupation was ‘law and order‘ and their own accession to power –

following negotiations.

In all the outlying suburbs trees were cut down, cars and lorries turned

over, and primitive furniture piled up in the streets. Elementary

barricades were set up to prevent the passage of French and Gurkha

patrols, and the taking up of strategic positions by the imperialist

forces. The centre of the town rapidly fell under the control of the

French and Japanese troops, supported by Gurkhas. But the poorer suburbs

of Khanh Hoi, Cau Kho, Ban Co, Phu Nhuan, Tan Dinh and Thi Nghe were

firmly in the hands of the rebels.

Erupted

The rebels themselves were not a homogenous lot. Among them were members

of the Popular Committees, of the Vanguard Youth, Cao-daists, and even

‘off the line‘ groups of Stalinist Republican Guards.

In areas where the popular forces were in control Frenchmen were shot:

the cruellest functionaries of the old regime, the hated policemen,

known by the population to have participated in torture, were sought

out, killed and thrown in the canals. Racialism, fed by 80 years of

imperialist domination, and by the contempt of the white man for the

yellow man, left its imprint on the violence of the masses, which

erupted at moments like these. The massacre of a hundred French

civilians in the Heraud Estate, at Tan Dinh, was a painful reminder of

this fact. The threats of certain French colons to “skin the Annamites

alive to make leather sandals” rebounded back against all whites.

The occupation forces feverishly searched the whole centre of town. This

did not prevent the insurgents from setting fire to various important

buildings, such as the Manufactured Rubber Company, and to warehouses.

During the night of 23–24 September, guerillas attacked the port without

respite. The following day revolutionary groups openly paraded in the

Rue de Verdun and marched up the Boulevard de la Somme, converging on

the Market Place, which they later burnt down.

In Saigon there was neither water nor electricity. Supplies were

breaking down. Each day the French sought to extend the area under their

control, while various armed groups organised themselves as guerillas in

the periphery of the city.

The Vietminh Committee produced a leaflet: “The French ... seem to take

pleasure in murdering our people. There is only one answer: a food

blockade.” While seeking to ‘starve out‘ the French (a futile hope, as

the British ships controlled the access to the harbour) the Vietminh

clung to its hope of starting negotiations with the British.

Talks with Gracey did at last start ... and a truce was announced on 1

October. On 5 October General Leclerc, head of the French Expeditionary

Force, arrived. His mission was to “restore order” and to “build a

strong Indochina within the French Union”. He landed his troops. The

commandos of the battleship Triomphant paraded down the Rue Catinat. The

hated Tricolour again fluttered from various windows.

The ‘negotiations’ between the Vietminh and the British continued. The

only result was that British and Japanese troops were allowed “free and

unmolested passage” through zones occupied by the insurgents. The

Vietminh Committee, continuing its policy of appeasement towards the

imperialist Allies, had consciously taken this decision.

The Gurkhas and the Japanese moved out further detachments occupying

strategic points on the periphery of Saigon. On 12 October French

troops, supported by Gurkhas, launched a general attack towards the

north-east. The miserable peasant huts burnt from Thi Nghe to Tan Binh.

The encirclement of the town by the rebels was gradually broken, in

desperate fighting. The leader of the Bay Vien group of guerillas

refused to undertake underhand police work against other tendencies not

affiliated to the Vietminh. He proclaimed his independence in relation

to the latter. His was not the only armed band to refuse the authority

of the Stalinists. The biggest of such ‘dissident’ groups was known as

the Third Division, de-tam-su-doan. It was led by an erstwhile

nationalist, who had for a while placed his faith in Japan.

A few hundred armed men organised sustained resistance to the French, in

the Plaine des Joncs, but they surrendered a few months later, and the

group disbanded.

The Vietminh would not tolerate any tendency that dared formulate the

least criticism of it. It dealt with such tendencies by physically

liquidating them. The militants of the Trotskyist group La Lutte were

the first victims of the Stalinist terror, despite their proclamations

of “critical support to the Vietminh government”.

Gathered in a temple in the Thu Due area, and while preparing the armed

struggle against the French on the Gia Dinh front, they were surrounded

one morning by the Vietminh, arrested and interned shortly afterwards at

Ben Sue in the province of Thu Dau Mot.

There they were all shot – together with some 30 other prisoners – at

the approach of the French troops.

Among those murdered was Tran Van Thach, one-time municipal councillor

for Saigon, elected in 1933 on a Stalinist-Trotskyist list, and a few

months earlier released from the penal settlement at Poulo Condore.

Ta Thu Thau, also released from Poulo Condore, had gone to Tonkin

Province to help organise assistance to the famine-stricken areas. He

was murdered by supporters of Ho Chi Minh, on his way back, in central

Annam.

In this atmosphere of Vietminh terror, the workers’ militia of the Go

Vap tramway depot, some 60 strong, participated in the insurrection, on

its own initiative. The 400 workers and employees of the Tramway Company

were well-known for their militancy and independent frame of mind.

Under French imperialist rule there had been no trade union rights.

After 9 March 1945, when the Japanese had replaced the French at the

head of this particular enterprise, the workers had immediately

constituted their own workers’ committee and put forward a series of

demands.

Japanese soldiery, led by Colonel Kirino, had come to threaten them, but

confronted by their militant and united stand, had eventually been

obliged to grant them a wage increase and even to recognise 11 delegates

elected by the 11 categories of workers: electricians, carpenters, metal

workers, etc.

In August 1945, when foreign technicians had momentarily abandoned the

enterprise, the depot had been taken over and managed by the workers

themselves, until the time of the insurrection.

All those insurgents who did not rally immediately to the Vietminh flags

were denounced by the Vietminh as traitors. Workers who didn’t identify

with the ‘patriotic cause’ were called ‘saboteurs’ and ‘reactionaries.’

The southern CGT was presided over by the arch-Stalinist Hoang Don Van.

Its function was to control the workers of the Saigon-Cholon area, by

nominating their ‘representatives’ for them, from above.

In this atmosphere of violent ideological totalitarianism, the workers

of the Go Vap tramway depot, although affiliated to the southern CGT,

refused the label of Cong-nhan cuu-quoc (Worker Saviours of the

Fatherland). They insisted on remaining a proletarian militia, and

rejected the Vietminh flag (yellow star on red background), saying they

would continue their fight under the red flag, the flag of their own

class emancipation.

The tramway men then organised themselves into combat groups of 11 men

under elected leaders … and under the overall command of Tran Dinh Minh,

a young Trotskyist from the north who had published a social novel in

Hanoi, under the pseudonym of Nguyen Hai Au, and who had come south to

participate in the struggle.

At this stage the local Stalinists, under the command of Nguyen Dinh

Thau, seemed far more concerned at arresting and shooting their left

critics – and in fact all whom they saw as potential rivals for the

leadership of the movement – than at prosecuting the struggle against

the French. Terrorist acts became the rule. They left a deep imprint on

the ‘state-in-embryo‘ which the maquis was soon to become. The emergence

of the Vietminh as the dominant force, in the years to come, was only

possible after a lot of working class and peasant blood had been shed.

Refusing to accept the authority of Nguyen Dinh Thau, the tramwaymen’s

militia sought to regroup in the Plaine des Joncs, towards which it had

opened a way, fighting meanwhile against the Gurkhas and the French at

Loc Giang, Thot Not and My Hanh.

In the Plaine des Joncs the tramwaymen established contact with the poor

peasants. And it was here that, in a fight against the imperialist

forces, Tran Dinh Minh was killed, on 13 January 1946. Some 20 other

tramway workers had already lost their lives in the course of battles

waged on the way.

The intolerance of the Vietminh in relation to all independent

tendencies, the accusations of treachery combined with threats of murder

and the numerical weakness of the tramwaymen’s militia eventually forced

its members to disperse. Three of them, Le Ngoc, Ky and Huong, a young

worker of 14, were stabbed to death by Vietminh bands.

The Saigon explosion reverberated into the countryside and into the more

distant provinces. The peasants seized the local officials who had most

distinguished themselves by their cruelty or their extortions, and many

were put to death. But in the countryside, as in the towns, the pretext

of popular anger against the exploiters was everywhere used by the

Vietminh to settle accounts with political dissenters.

[1] For the Yen Bay incident, cf nl1, see below Ngo Van Xuyet’s account

of Ta Thu Thau.

[2] Apart from ‘Lucien,’ the writer, Ngo Van Xuyet, was also jailed at

this time.