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Sunday, May 01, 2005

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International

Vietnam celebrates Liberation Day

Jonathan Watts

Thirty years later, with its economy rising, Vietnam is at last enjoying the fruits of peace

HO CHI MINH CITY: On April 30, the 30th anniversary celebrations for Liberation Day here have been in keeping with a country that is belatedly starting to enjoy the fruits of peace. In Ho Chi Minh City — the post-war name for Saigon — the country's first laser show lit up a huge stage erected for the festivities. The gates in front of the presidential palace — renamed Reunification Hall — were thrown open to a parade of gaudily decorated floats. Streets once filled with sandbags and barbed wire were lined with red banners and the gold stars of the Communist Party.

Vietnam, a focus of campus protests, groundbreaking reportage and the miserably surreal cool of films such as Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter and Platoon, was one of the most bloody wars of our age. At the peak of U.S. involvement in 1969, there were half a million American troops in Vietnam. By the war's end, 58,183 had died — double the body count in the Korean war — at a cost of $165 billions. Vietnamese losses were far greater — more than 1.3 million fallen soldiers, most of them communists, and four million civilians killed or wounded.

Vietnam is still one of the poorest countries in Asia, but compared with the misery of the past, it is going through a golden age. The economy has doubled in 10 years, the streets buzz with mopeds, and the proportion of the population living in poverty has declined from 85 per cent in 1998 to 15 per cent today.

The change is most evident on the 17th Parallel, the former demilitarised zone (DMZ) which once divided the communist north and the capitalist south. During the war, the 5 km band on either side of the Bien Hai river was a free-fire zone where anything that moved was killed. Today it is an idyll of lazy water buffaloes, paddyfields and children laughing as they paddle canoes under the Hien Luong bridge, once one of the most bombed structures in the world, now rumbling only with buses and lorries that ferry tourists and commodities across the old dividing line.

The Ho Chi Minh trail — the communists' wartime supply route from north to south — is being upgraded to a national highway and renamed. "We're supposed to call it the Ho Chi Minh Road now," said our guide. "But nobody does. There's too much nostalgia still for the old name."

It is now as much of a tourist trail as a supply route, traversed by an increasing number of former veterans returning to their former battleground and a generation of younger foreign sightseers drawn as much by glorious beaches as the grim history of Hamburger Hill.

North of the DMZ, a child of the war sells drinks and chewing gum to tourists who come to gawk at the Vinh Moc tunnels, where her entire village sheltered from U.S. bombs for six years.

"I spent most nights of my third year underground," recalls Nguyen Thihong Xiem. "It was hard. Our family had one dark, little room. There were other children, but we couldn't meet. There was nowhere to play. We just sat in the room waiting for the next meal and listening to the planes and the bombs."

When they heard news of the fall of Saigon, her father swam across the DMZ to buy clothes for his family. But life has only really improved in the past five years, since Xiem set up her stall. "I only earn enough to feed and educate my four sons, but this is the most money I've ever had in my life," she says.

Risks remain in the form of the 300,000 tonnes of ordnance that the U.S. rained on Vietnam — more than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War.

Xiem's brother was one of 17 babies born 15 m underground in a dark, clay-walled "maternity ward" barely wider than a coffin. Seven years after the war, he lost a toe and his friend died when they set off an unexploded bomb. Five thousand people have suffered a similar fate in and around the old DMZ since 1975, a third of them under 16.

For the increasing numbers of American veterans who return, clearing ordnance is one way to reconcile mixed emotions about the war. Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, has helped to persuade the U.S. Congress to provide $5 million to the clear-up operation and programmes to raise awareness among local people.

Open wound

"We are here to commemorate the end of hostilities between our two countries and remove the things left over from the war that continue to have a heavy human and economic cost," he says at the end of a day taking a group of old soldiers back to their former battlefield near the DMZ in Quang Tri province.

"Vietnam continues to be an open wound for the United States. It is an undigested experience for the country and it is going to stay that way for a while."

On the tour, they have met and hugged Vietnamese veterans they once shot at and wandered around roads and villages where they lost friends and killed enemies.

Christos Cotsakos is returning for the first time since he was wounded in house-to-house fighting during the Tet offensive in 1968. "The smells bring back the flavour of war," he says. "The water buffaloes, the sight of the hillsides. It made it very real. It was not painful, but thoughtful — a good but strained experience."

Perhaps the biggest unresolved problem from the war is continuing discrimination against former supporters of the south, who find it difficult to get jobs in the government or army.

Several of their cemeteries have been turned into parks and industrial centres. "I'm glad there is peace, but I won't be celebrating on the anniversary," says a veteran from the south's army who asks to remain anonymous. "We were promised jobs and equal treatment, but it was a lie."

There are signs, however, of a rapprochement. Hundreds of thousands of former boat people who fled the country in the 70s and 80s return annually to celebrate the lunar New Year. They are also one of the bigger boosts to the economy, having remitted about $3.8 billions in 2004.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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