Twenty years after

New look at Ho Chi Minh

Bill Manson

Ho Chi Minh was at a party. He caught sight of Monsieur Sainteny, French delegate to Hanoi. He ignored all the Eastern diplomats and strode right across the room to him, arms outstretched. Then he turned to Mr Lavrichev the Soviet Ambassador and asked him to improvise a few words of French. The Russian diplomat was a mass of confusion. He was sorry he couldn't. Ho burst out laughing. "He can't speak French?" he cried,' "How very peculiar!"

He loved the French too well, Ho Chi Minh, and that is why today, twenty years after his most drastic mistake in the Geneva conference, Vietnam is still at war, split across the middle.

On June 9 it will be precisely twenty years since the Vietminh military delegate at Geneva said," We agree to the principle of a temporarily split Vietnam, pending elections. . ." Ho, having made the mistake of allowing him to go there at all, should have realised the Pandora's box he was opening. Once again a final solution had been bypassed. It was the second time in a decade that Ho Chi Minh had allowed his enemies — at a time when they had no real bargaining power — to pip him at the post, and snatch that for which he had been fighting all his life, the unity of an independent Vietnam.

How does a ruthless, uncompromising, wily, insurgent chief become an adaptable national compromiser? If you have an image of him as the fanatical intransigent coercer of indoctrinated suicide armies, then listen to this tale of an Indochinese Samson shorn of his winnings by an insidious French Delilah. Par.,,was the city of Ho's youth. There he did every kind of job, including making pots in the Chinese fashion and taking photos: "If you would like a lifelong memento of your family, have your photos retouched at Nguyen Ai Quoc's. A lovely portrait in a lovely frame for 45 francs." — his ad in La Vie Ouviere 1918.

Nguyen Ai Quoc, meaning Nguyen the Patriot, was the name he took as a young man. 'Ho Chi Minh' came later. His five years in Paris were proverty-ridden and painful, picking up the language, learning to live with a downtrodden working class.

By the end of the second world war, a decade of insurgency was at last bearing fruit for the Vietnamese fighters rallying around leaders like Ho and Giap. The now solid Vietnimnh found the opportunity they had waited and fought for: an impending power vacuum. The Japanese about to surrender; the Chinese looking menacing but not yet moving; the Vichy French of Indochina in no position to assert themselves. The call for a general rising of Vietnamese came from Nguyen the Patriot: "Countrymen, Arise! Let us free ourselves by our own energies!"

And so they did. They entered Hanoi on August 13, 1945, Saigon on the 23rd, and Hue for the Boa Dai's abdication on the 25th. "For eighty years," ranted Nguyen the Patriot, speaking for the first time to Vietnamese under his new name of Ho Chi Minh, "The gang of French colonialists, operating under the three colours which are supposed to stand for liberty, equality and fraternity, have stolen our land and oppressed our people. . . ."

Which sounds fine — except that in the next breath (well, a month later) he was welcoming back French troops, tanks, and generals in both Hanoi and Saigon, agreeing to rejoin the French Union, to become one of the semistates of the Indochinese Federation, and letting the French truncate Nam Bo — South Vietnam — as a seperate state, with some vague promise about a later referendum about joining up. Why did he do it? Certainly he was only just in power, an there were bland facts to face such as the presence of the army of the Kuomintang, and of General Leclerc's troops steaming up the gulf of Tongkin. But there was more than one Frenchman there who wondered silently why Ho, the wily Ho, had not played possum for a while, and left two potentially competing armies to slog it out. "Hang back," as one put it, "and let [the French] spit [themselves] on the Chinese sword." There is no doubt that Ho's permitting the French troops back in deprived him of any edge of the bargaining sword. As he said to his French negotiators, "I'm not so pleased (with the agreement), for really it is you who have benefited, you know perfectly well I wanted more than this. . . Still I realise one can't have everything overnight." After which he embraced them and said, "Friendship is my one consolation." Which is to imply only that he found the majority of those Frenchmen he dealt with sympathetic, but was to find soon enough that their superiors were of a different calibre: not long after Ho heard over the radio that the French Admiral d'Argenlieu had proclaimed in Saigon the birth of the Republic of Cochin China — a Southern Vietnamese National entity. Thus for treaties.

Eight years of continued fighting, and once again, after the stunning battle at Dien Bien Phu, played to a ready-made gallery of everyone who counted sitting in the Palais des Nations in Geneva, and Ho ChiMinh's greatest moment had arrived. If you look at the amoeba-like map of Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu, showing which side has what areas, all that remained in French hands were a bubble around Hanoi-Haiphong, a strip of coast around Quang Tri, and scattered blotches north and south of Saigon..

So why, in the exhilaration of the victory which this Asian army had wrought upon the 'best of the French army, with more than two thirds of the country in their hands, did Ho's Vietminh agree to negotiate once again, and when they did, to accept such compromises?

Again it was a set of temptations and

dangers. France required an act of faith that she would make possible the elections which the Vietminh were promised in return for withdrawing from south of the 17th parallel. Could Ho accept such a promise. Should he? In 1946 they came to nothing. This time the French were eating so much from the Americans' hands — the Americans who with the Saigon representatives were ignoring the agreements anyway — that even then it must have seemed impossible that the French would be in a position to dictate events as significant as elections.

It's clear that the Vietminh leaders would never have been anywhere near so moderate but for the strong persuasive hand of President Ho. But how could he be so naif? Did he fear American intervention? It was surely a misreading of his to imagine that the French, while it was their war, wanted to internationalise the conflict, to bring in the US and its hastily bullied up SEATO allies. That was the last thing they wanted to accept a more-than-necessary public humiliation in which the rights of Empire were overtly snatched from their hands. Certainly France was bein&. financed on a limited scale of $500 million a year at the time of Dien Bien Phu, with the American becoming more and more edgy seconds in the ring. Perhaps he saw that it was better to come to some arrangement now with the French, than have to treat with a United States armed with everything from atom bombs to aircraft carriers.

But behind it lay Ho's genuine feeling of a relationship with France, despite the years of colonial rule and war.

Could it be that his desire for this sort of family relationship then was more important for Ho than the guaranteed acquisition of the South? Ho, remember, was not the narrow nationalist bred solely in the jungles of South China. He was the man who returned to Paris, his Paris in 1945 and charmed it to its knees. He was urbane, diplomatic, witty — nothing of the Comintern gruff bear image. He loved the days and nights of discussions and parties with old revolutionary friends and philosophers, with the government officials and with the ladies. At one party he issued out a flower to every woman guest present; charming host was a role he revelled in. "Better to sniff France's dung for a while than eat China's all our lives," said Ho, but his trips and his relationships with French negotiators, journalists and statesmen show, as Jean Lacouture says far more than a Machiavellian desire for relations with France.

But as post-Geneva history demonstrates, the French were too busy forgetting a bad dream anti being nice to non-communist allies to keep a promise to one who would genuinely be their friend.

Thus Ho gave away the South again, and in withdrawing back to the seventeenth parallel set his programme back several years, and the French did nothing about the elections — could do nothing when faced with the blank refusal of Saigon and Washington.

In November 1955 as North Vietnam gradually closed the windows around her, Ho agreed to see two visiting French Senators, Messeiurs Michelet and Hamon. The two Senators some of the last of Ho's visitors from Europe were out to see what economic and cultural links could be maintained. Ho they said would respond fully and imaginatively to any initiative from Paris and that he deeply regretted the widening rift between the two countries. They came away with the impression that Ho continued to think longingly of his years of understanding with France.

The pity is in the French shortsightedness at not being able to see the immense rewards in treating genuinely with one of her foster sons, a communist who had gone soft on the capitalists of France.

Bill Manson spent several years as the New Zealand Broadcasting Company's correspondent in South-East Asia.