Can the people of Vietnam and those of the diaspora patch things up?

Business Times

26-05-2025

VIETNAM is triumphantly celebrating the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and reunification of Vietnam (1975 to 2025) all through this year. But the event is remembered with deep anguish by the South Vietnamese diaspora scattered in Little Saigons across the globe.
The government of Vietnam describes reunification joyfully as the 'Liberation of South Vietnam', made possible after a long and hard-fought victory against the military power of the United States and its ally, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). At the same time, many Vietnamese living outside their home country have stayed loyal to the former RVN, a state that now exists only in memory, and they remember the reunification with disappointment. The event stirs recollections of gain and loss, happiness and hopelessness, and forgiveness and resentment, and even an extraordinary partial apology from an American wartime leader.
For small countries, the moment of reunification carries a timely warning to develop self-reliance and not fall into a dependency trap like the RVN did. While the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) relied heavily on its Communist allies for crucial military and economic aid, it remained independent by preventing either Moscow or Beijing from imposing their foreign policy agenda. But it was quite a different approach that was adopted in the South. The RVN depended entirely on the United States for its survival. It was unthinkable to many South Vietnamese that their staunch ally would suspend aid (which it did in March 1973), and withdraw its military forces. Some Southerners called it a betrayal.
The reunification of the traumatised country meant different things at different times. At the time of the fall of Saigon, many people in the north described it as the happiest moment in their lives. When the country was officially unified on Jul 2, 1976, ending their separation since 1954, Hanoi Radio announced that leaders of the new state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV, established in April 1976) were elected in the 492-member National Assembly by secret ballot. To uproarious applause, assemblymen approved the former North Vietnamese flag, anthem and emblem as symbols of the country.
To the new leaders of the SRV, reunification was extremely tenuous, with many believing that the United States may return to resume war, or that a regrouped South Vietnamese military would invade the country. In an atmosphere of uncertainty, the government created re-education camps to 'reform' and 'remould' South Vietnamese. It faced intense criticism for operating such camps.
A few years after reunification, the re-education camps were closed, and those South Vietnamese who remained, were further integrated into the country that appeared, like China, Communist only in name. From time to time, Hanoi cracked down on dissidents who spoke out, or criticised the state in speeches, books, and articles.
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There was a two-sided belief among foreign diplomats and journalists that Hanoi took an authoritarian approach because, first, it was uncertain about the political durability of the reunified state and the loyalty of the Southerners; and second, it was worried about renewed foreign intervention. The Hanoi authorities were still concerned about the intentions of the Western powers and their Asian allies in the years ahead. A continuing Cold War freeze did not help thaw the mood in Hanoi.
Far away in the West, to many South Vietnamese refugees, the reunification was a tearful moment, and an unwanted assimilation. Decades later, the Vietnamese ethnic enclaves in the United States had not put the war behind them. Military veterans of the former RVN armed forces still wore uniforms and marched at public events in Orange County, California. They sang the South Vietnamese national anthem and waved the old flag of the defunct state. Such nationalist displays still continue to the present.
Their nostalgia came in waves. In their new lives as diasporic persons, South Vietnamese remembered their lost homeland through political awareness and activism, and through poetry, literature and other media.
The American experience was very different. The defeat of the United States and its South-Vietnamese client-state became a familiar narrative of US ineptness to confront North Vietnamese guerrilla war tactics, as well as the war's debilitating impact on the US economy, growing opposition from an influential antiwar movement, and a vacillating US home front that was exhausted by the fighting.
North Vietnam's stoic war generation also experienced the conflict differently: The very reasons for US defeat were the reasons for North Vietnamese victory.
Not only did North Vietnamese military victory deliver a shock to the US political establishment, it was incomprehensible to many in America, and to the South-Vietnamese diaspora, that the reunified state of Vietnam survived, even though it was ringed by a US trade embargo and a US veto blocking World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans to rebuild its economy and infrastructure. Many expected the new state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to collapse under outdated Communist policies.
The Vietnamese government once again displayed a never-say-die attitude, and within a decade of the end of the war, it initiated doi moi (renovation) policies to rebuild and attract foreign investment. In 1994, the Bill Clinton administration lifted the trade embargo, giving Vietnam access to global markets, investments and loans. The two countries normalised diplomatic relations the following year. Vietnam remained a Communist state that showed it was possible to bring prosperity to its people by gradually opening its economy to foreign investment. It then went on to become one of South-east Asia's fastest-growing countries.
Yet, decades of peace and prosperity have not been able to completely erase the differences between the people of the north and those of the south living abroad in diasporic communities.
While the South Vietnamese people sought refuge in the West where they were welcomed to start new lives and put down roots, the Northerners too received the support of a segment of Western society.
For instance, the New Left in the United States – an elite, intellectual segment of society that supported North Vietnam – ardently believed that the United States should never have intervened in Vietnam, that the conflict was not a 'civil war' but a national 'resistance of righteousness' against rampant US imperialism, that Ho Chi Minh and his politburo were nationalists who were responding to the US intervention, and that the US bombardment of the North was tantamount to a war crime that killed countless innocent civilians, and destroyed schools, hospitals and agriculture and industry.
The American debacle in Vietnam led President Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defence, Robert S McNamara, to express an extraordinary regret for the US intervention with a candour heavily criticised by America's Cold Warriors. It is worth recalling McNamara's rhetorical words, 'How did this group – 'the best and the brightest' as we eventually came to be known in an ironically pejorative way – get it wrong on Vietnam?'
It was McNamara who had overseen the intensive bombing of North Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. But in retrospect he offered a partial apology.
The United States has never apologised for its war in Vietnam, in which an estimated 2.1 million to 3.8 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed during the American intervention and in the related conflicts before and after. The conflict also took the lives of more than 58,000 American soldiers between 1960 and 1975.
Both Americans and Vietnamese have put the war behind them. American visitors to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are delighted at the friendship and hospitality extended to them by the Vietnamese, who are widely praised for having moved past the war into a new reconciliation.
Time will tell whether the people of Vietnam, and those of the diaspora, can eventually patch things up.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Rising Asia Journal (http://www.rajraf.org)