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India Gazette
4 days ago
- Politics
- India Gazette
"Our relationship with Algeria is very old": All-party delegation member Nishikant Dubey
Algiers (Algeria), June 1 (ANI): BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, a member of the all-party delegation led by BJP MP Baijayant Panda, said India's relationship with Algeria is very old. He said India supported Algeria's freedom struggle, and they remember this help. Speaking to ANI, Nishikant Dubey said, 'Our relationship with Algeria is very supported the National Liberation Front (FLN)...France had threatened us at that time. Then, the Indian government and the opposition decided to support the freedom struggle of Algeria. Algeria acknowledges it.' The all-party delegation is in Algeria from May 30 to June 2 to strengthen global cooperation in counterterrorism efforts. Before arriving in Algeria, the delegation spent two days in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where they held extensive discussions with senior government officials, policy think tanks, media representatives, and the Indian diaspora. Baijayant Jay Panda told ANI that the talks were open and candid, particularly on the challenge of terrorism. 'Saudi Arabia has a policy of zero tolerance towards terrorism, like us. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Saudi Arabia following the Pahalgam attack and the joint statement by both governments made it clear that there is no tolerance for any kind of terrorism,' Panda said. He also highlighted the strengthening ties between India and Saudi Arabia in defence, counterterrorism, and trade, describing Saudi Arabia as a major regional power. The delegation also visited Diriyah, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its traditional mud-brick architecture. The delegation, led by BJP MP Baijayant Panda, also includes Nishikant Dubey MP, BJP; Phangnon Konyak, MP, BJP; Rekha Sharma MP, NJP; AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi; Satnam Singh Sandhu MP; Ghulam Nabi Azad; and former Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla. The delegation aims to brief international partners on India's response to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack and its broader fight against cross-border terrorism while engaging with leaders in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Algeria. India has sent several all-party delegations to showcase India's resolve against terrorism and garner international support for a united stand against this global threat. The Indian government's diplomatic outreach efforts aim to strengthen partnerships with countries in East and Southeast Asia, emphasising the need for a collective response to the threat of terrorism. (ANI)
El Chorouk
06-05-2025
- Politics
- El Chorouk
Driencourt: 'The relationship with Algeria is based on ambiguity and undeclared things'
The former French Ambassador to Algeria, Xavier Driencourt, admitted that the Algerian state with which France signed the Evian Agreements in 1962 is no longer the same in 2025, a description that reflects the level of parity reached in relations with the Algerian state after nearly six decades of independence. In his new book, titled 'France Algeria, Double Blindness,' Driencourt wrote, puzzled: 'We cannot understand anything about the period that is beginning if we do not remember that France's partner in Algeria since 1962 was not the one France chose in Evian: it was a one-party system, headed by the National Liberation Front…' In his new book, the author of 'The Algerian Enigma' tried to distance his country from interfering in the internal affairs of its former colony, in a desperate attempt to disclaim a practice that cannot be denied no matter how much he and others like him try: 'It is clear that France did not wish to interfere in the internal political choices of independent Algeria: it did not wish to do so, because it was very happy to put an end to the Algerian conflict, and it could not do so, because power had now passed to the new Algerian authorities.' He supported his statement with an approach that General Charles de Gaulle had established and committed himself to, which was the necessity of 'finishing as quickly as possible in order to finally move on to something else.' However, he quickly doubted what he was writing when he admitted that 'the relationship that has developed since 1962 between Paris and Algiers was a relationship based on ambiguity and fueled by undeclared things.' Le Figaro newspaper chose excerpts from the book based on a specific angle in its view of the nature of relations between France and its former colony, a relationship that arose from the suffering of the French from the loss of a dream that was a lived reality for them before it evaporated at some point in 1962, which explains the focus on painful aspects and the attempt to demonize Algeria and its symbols. These excerpts contained some descriptions that were outside the norms and decency, such as those that affected some Algerian diplomats who were not pleased with the suspicious role played by the author of the book, who worked in Algeria in two phases (2008 and 2012, then 2017 and 2020). The insult was disgusting towards the prominent and honorable diplomat, Amar Bendjama, who currently holds the position of Algeria's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and who previously served at the Algerian Embassy in Paris between 2013 and 2016. As is his custom in attacking Algerian interests, the retired diplomat did not hesitate to target the 1968 agreement, which he believes provides privileges to Algerians over other Maghreb and African nationals, despite its revision three times, which has stripped it of its specificity. He began looking for ways to revise or unilaterally cancel it in light of the Algerian side's refusal to discuss it. To incite his country's authorities against the agreement, Driencourt spoke about Article 56 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which allows for unilateral withdrawal, even if it requires resorting to Article 12 of the agreement, which, as he said, stipulates the establishment of a joint committee to study any difficulties that may arise over time, especially since the justification is no longer valid with the displacement of about one million 'pieds-noirs' towards France immediately after Algeria's independence. Driencourt did not digest the Algerian presence in France as he touched upon what he described as: 'Algerian family migration represents more than 60 percent of residence permits, compared to 40 for Tunisian and Moroccan citizens. This makes Algerians represent the largest segment of immigrants who come for family reasons and not for professional reasons,' according to him, in addition to what he called the privileges provided to them by the 1968 agreement, which are data that have increased those who are hostile to Algeria and its interests.
The Hindu
30-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
From The Hindu, May 1, 1975: War ends in Vietnam
Saigon, April 30: South Vietnam surrendered unconditionally to the communists to-day, ending generations of war against the Japanese, French and Americans and among Vietnamese themselves. One street scene perhaps epitomised Saigon's abject fall to-day — tank of the National Liberation Front smashed through the main gates of the presidential palace disregarding the attempts of an unarmed South Vietnamese soldier trying to open them first. Minutes later, the flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government — red and white with a gold star — was waving from the palace. The surrender was announced by President Duong Van 'Big' Minh, in office for only two days, who urged his troops to stop fighting and appealed to the PRG to avoid bloodshed. The collapse came only hours after the Americans completed their disorderly pullout. The PRG, in a broadcast, said, 'We, the representatives of the liberation forces of Saigon, formally proclaim that Saigon has been totally liberated. We accept the unconditional surrender of the President of the former Government.' It also called upon all Government employees to return to work and on students and other youths to participate in a demonstration at a place to be announced later. In his broadcast over Saigon Radio, Gen. Minh said, 'We are here waiting for the Provincial Revolutionary Government to hand over the authority in order to stop useless bloodshed.' The Republic of Vietnam policy is the policy of peace and reconciliation, aimed at saving the blood of our people. I ask all servicemen to stop firing and stay where you are. I also demand that the soldiers of the Provincial Revolutionary Government stop firing and stay in place.'
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
How We Oversimplified the History of the Vietnam War
People flee Saigon April 1975 with the help of the U.S. military. American involvement in the Vietnam War came to an end when troops from communist North Vietnam invaded Saigon, the capital of the Republic of Vietnam in the South in April 1975. Credit - Dirck Halstead—Getty Images At 7:53 a.m. on Wednesday, April 30, 1975, a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter ascended from the rooftop of the United States embassy in downtown Saigon carrying ten Marine Security Guards toward the waiting deck of the USS Okinawa. Its departure marked the final mission of the massive helicopter-borne evacuation that began less than 24 hours earlier and heralded the end of America's once-mighty military presence in South Vietnam. Two hours later, North Vietnamese tanks carrying the flags of the southern revolutionary National Liberation Front smashed through the gates of the Republic of Vietnam's presidential palace. Fifty years later, the scene of retreating helicopters and advancing tanks has become imprinted on the popular imagination of both the United States and Vietnam. And in both countries, a certain inevitability has attached itself to the capture of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. As the modern-day Socialist Republic of Vietnam prepares to celebrate half a century of victory in what it refers to as the 'Resistance War Against America to Save the Country,' the Vietnamese state promotes a history that remains unchanged since 1975: the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was an 'American-Puppet' regime destined to crumble in the face of popular mobilization and Vietnam's 2,000 year tradition of resisting foreign invaders. Yet, in the United States, as in much of the Western world, the narrative looks remarkably similar: Vietnam was a 'bad war' propelled by American hubris, doomed by ignorance and thwarted by unreliable and corrupt South Vietnamese allies against an adversary that many still believe was 'more nationalist than Communist.' Indeed, 'Vietnam' remains our most evocative shorthand for geopolitical miscalculation and military misadventure. Such popular memory, however, misconstrues a more complex historical reality about the Republic of Vietnam and the nature of the Vietnam War itself. Read More: Discovering Joy After My Family's Traumas During the Vietnam War In the past two decades, the Republic of Vietnam's reputation has undergone extensive revision by historians. While South Vietnamese politics were often beset by instability and corruption, the idea of a non-Communist republican government based in the South enjoyed widespread support from the general public—even if that public often bemoaned their political leaders. Protests in South Vietnam were a regular occurrence, but they represented the desire of the South Vietnamese to resolve the war—and many other issues—on their own terms. For example, when the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself alive on June 11, 1963, he represented a Buddhist revivalist movement that was critical of both Vietnamese Communism and the RVN. The Buddhists who took to Saigon's streets did not want to topple the government; they advocated for the reversal of restrictive laws on religious practice. Yet the Buddhist cause has since become wedded to that of the Communists—a misunderstanding that the modern Vietnamese government continues to promote. Not one year later, Saigonese high school students rioted at the prospect that South Vietnam might consider a reconciliation with the North. Taking the role that the Republic of Vietnam played seriously helps us rethink the very nature of the war. In the United States, Hollywood depictions of guerrilla fighters and claustrophobic jungle firefights coupled with Internet memes of 'trees speaking in Vietnamese,' reinforce the sense of a hopeless quagmire in which the United States had no business. In Vietnam, dusty provincial museums and newer, sleeker ones inaugurated for the 50th anniversary echo the sentiment in reverse, displaying mannequins of wily peasant farmers taking on the U.S. war machine. These renderings obscure just how much conventional warfare took place in Vietnam. North Vietnamese soldiers, armed with Chinese-manufactured Kalashnikovs and supported by Soviet tanks, regularly engaged American and RVN forces (not to mention those provided by Australia, South Korea, and Thailand). In April 1969, the U.S. military deployed more than 500,000 service members—a size comparable to Napoleon's Grande Armée. By 1975, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had the world's third largest military. The Vietnam War was no tropical brushfire. Most importantly, the war was not only between Vietnamese and Americans, but rather between two independent Vietnams locked in civil war. While the conflict became a Cold War superpower showdown, its main participants were Vietnamese who fought and died for their respective ideas of sovereignty. Today these dimensions of the war go overlooked in both Vietnam and the United States, albeit for different reasons. In Vietnam, April 30, 1975 is seen as 'the result of the Vietnamese people's unwavering determination to build a unified nation that could never be divided by any force.' But this telling hides the inconvenient reality that large swaths of 'the Vietnamese people' actively rejected the National Liberation Front and unification under Communist rule. To admit that the 'Resistance War Against America' was also a war against fellow Vietnamese would be to admit that a non-Communist alternative was a legitimate outcome of the conflict. Such an admission not only upsets the conventional framing of the war, but strikes at the very heart of the Vietnamese Communist Party's own legitimacy to govern the country. Read More: What Hostage-Taking During the Vietnam War Can Teach the World About Hamas In the United States, to take seriously the agency of the RVN entails possibly defending U.S. military intervention—something that feels not just patently archaic, but would demand reopening old wounds within American society. Given that the war implicated both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, the blame for U.S. failure is widely shared and it is far easier for modern American audiences across the political spectrum to accept that intervention was a misguided tragedy destined to fail then to think about the actual dynamics of the conflict. The narrow lens of these popularly accepted narratives has limited our understanding of subsequent history, especially given the tendency in the United States for the Vietnam War to become the preferred historical analogy for current events. In the early 2000s, discussions over the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq and reflections about patriotism and the treatment of returning troops were steeped in Vietnam War-era comparisons. Commentary about recent protest movements including the harsh crackdown on student protesters over the war in Gaza have evoked grim comparisons to theKent State massacre in 1970. The frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 invited literal side-by-side montages of Chinooks in Kabul and Sea Knights in Saigon. Everything seems to remind us of some cultural moment of the Vietnam war. America's seeming inability to escape the pull of Vietnam's symbolic weight shifts the focus away from the issues at hand by invoking the distant world of Vietnam-era America in which criticisms of misguided foreign military intervention or prejudiced domestic policies can be safely contained. It is telling, therefore, that the Trump Administration has ordered American diplomats in Vietnam to avoid participating in the upcoming anniversary. Half a century after the fall of Saigon, the versions of the conflict that many Americans and Vietnamese adhere to are strikingly similar. They mirror one another in their presentation of the war and the inevitability of the outcome. But, by oversimplifying the historical reality, these narratives sanitize the past and prevent us from properly understanding the historical actors involved and their motivations. Only by understanding the complexity of the war on the ground as one foremost between Vietnamese can we truly begin to grapple with the real legacy of Vietnam: a war with many different narratives—and possible outcomes. As the famed Vietnamese writer and former North Vietnamese Army veteran, Bảo Ninh, writes in the closing pages of The Sorrow of War, 'Each of us carried in his heart a separate war… Our only postwar similarities stemmed from the fact that everyone had experienced difficult, painful, and different fates.' April 30, 1975 is not an endpoint closed to further interpretation, but an opportunity to start anew and to better understand the separate wars that its participants experienced. Andrew Bellisari is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University and a faculty fellow at Purdue's Center for American Political History and Technology (CAPT). Previously, he was a founding faculty member at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City and a Vietnam Program Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Write to Made by History at madebyhistory@
Time Magazine
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
How We Oversimplified the History of the Vietnam War
At 7:53 a.m. on Wednesday, April 30, 1975, a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter ascended from the rooftop of the United States embassy in downtown Saigon carrying ten Marine Security Guards toward the waiting deck of the USS Okinawa. Its departure marked the final mission of the massive helicopter-borne evacuation that began less than 24 hours earlier and heralded the end of America's once-mighty military presence in South Vietnam. Two hours later, North Vietnamese tanks carrying the flags of the southern revolutionary National Liberation Front smashed through the gates of the Republic of Vietnam's presidential palace. Fifty years later, the scene of retreating helicopters and advancing tanks has become imprinted on the popular imagination of both the United States and Vietnam. And in both countries, a certain inevitability has attached itself to the capture of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. As the modern-day Socialist Republic of Vietnam prepares to celebrate half a century of victory in what it refers to as the 'Resistance War Against America to Save the Country,' the Vietnamese state promotes a history that remains unchanged since 1975: the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was an 'American-Puppet' regime destined to crumble in the face of popular mobilization and Vietnam's 2,000 year tradition of resisting foreign invaders. Yet, in the United States, as in much of the Western world, the narrative looks remarkably similar: Vietnam was a 'bad war' propelled by American hubris, doomed by ignorance and thwarted by unreliable and corrupt South Vietnamese allies against an adversary that many still believe was 'more nationalist than Communist.' Indeed, 'Vietnam' remains our most evocative shorthand for geopolitical miscalculation and military misadventure. Such popular memory, however, misconstrues a more complex historical reality about the Republic of Vietnam and the nature of the Vietnam War itself. In the past two decades, the Republic of Vietnam's reputation has undergone extensive revision by historians. While South Vietnamese politics were often beset by instability and corruption, the idea of a non-Communist republican government based in the South enjoyed widespread support from the general public—even if that public often bemoaned their political leaders. Protests in South Vietnam were a regular occurrence, but they represented the desire of the South Vietnamese to resolve the war—and many other issues—on their own terms. For example, when the monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself alive on June 11, 1963, he represented a Buddhist revivalist movement that was critical of both Vietnamese Communism and the RVN. The Buddhists who took to Saigon's streets did not want to topple the government; they advocated for the reversal of restrictive laws on religious practice. Yet the Buddhist cause has since become wedded to that of the Communists—a misunderstanding that the modern Vietnamese government continues to promote. Not one year later, Saigonese high school students rioted at the prospect that South Vietnam might consider a reconciliation with the North. Taking the role that the Republic of Vietnam played seriously helps us rethink the very nature of the war. In the United States, Hollywood depictions of guerrilla fighters and claustrophobic jungle firefights coupled with Internet memes of 'trees speaking in Vietnamese,' reinforce the sense of a hopeless quagmire in which the United States had no business. In Vietnam, dusty provincial museums and newer, sleeker ones inaugurated for the 50th anniversary echo the sentiment in reverse, displaying mannequins of wily peasant farmers taking on the U.S. war machine. These renderings obscure just how much conventional warfare took place in Vietnam. North Vietnamese soldiers, armed with Chinese-manufactured Kalashnikovs and supported by Soviet tanks, regularly engaged American and RVN forces (not to mention those provided by Australia, South Korea, and Thailand). In April 1969, the U.S. military deployed more than 500,000 service members—a size comparable to Napoleon's Grande Armée. By 1975, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had the world's third largest military. The Vietnam War was no tropical brushfire. Most importantly, the war was not only between Vietnamese and Americans, but rather between two independent Vietnams locked in civil war. While the conflict became a Cold War superpower showdown, its main participants were Vietnamese who fought and died for their respective ideas of sovereignty. Today these dimensions of the war go overlooked in both Vietnam and the United States, albeit for different reasons. In Vietnam, April 30, 1975 is seen as 'the result of the Vietnamese people's unwavering determination to build a unified nation that could never be divided by any force.' But this telling hides the inconvenient reality that large swaths of 'the Vietnamese people' actively rejected the National Liberation Front and unification under Communist rule. To admit that the 'Resistance War Against America' was also a war against fellow Vietnamese would be to admit that a non-Communist alternative was a legitimate outcome of the conflict. Such an admission not only upsets the conventional framing of the war, but strikes at the very heart of the Vietnamese Communist Party's own legitimacy to govern the country. In the United States, to take seriously the agency of the RVN entails possibly defending U.S. military intervention—something that feels not just patently archaic, but would demand reopening old wounds within American society. Given that the war implicated both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, the blame for U.S. failure is widely shared and it is far easier for modern American audiences across the political spectrum to accept that intervention was a misguided tragedy destined to fail then to think about the actual dynamics of the conflict. The narrow lens of these popularly accepted narratives has limited our understanding of subsequent history, especially given the tendency in the United States for the Vietnam War to become the preferred historical analogy for current events. In the early 2000s, discussions over the conduct of U.S. forces in Iraq and reflections about patriotism and the treatment of returning troops were steeped in Vietnam War-era comparisons. Commentary about recent protest movements including the harsh crackdown on student protesters over the war in Gaza have evoked grim comparisons to theKent State massacre in 1970. The frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 invited literal side-by-side montages of Chinooks in Kabul and Sea Knights in Saigon. Everything seems to remind us of some cultural moment of the Vietnam war. America's seeming inability to escape the pull of Vietnam's symbolic weight shifts the focus away from the issues at hand by invoking the distant world of Vietnam-era America in which criticisms of misguided foreign military intervention or prejudiced domestic policies can be safely contained. It is telling, therefore, that the Trump Administration has ordered American diplomats in Vietnam to avoid participating in the upcoming anniversary. Half a century after the fall of Saigon, the versions of the conflict that many Americans and Vietnamese adhere to are strikingly similar. They mirror one another in their presentation of the war and the inevitability of the outcome. But, by oversimplifying the historical reality, these narratives sanitize the past and prevent us from properly understanding the historical actors involved and their motivations. Only by understanding the complexity of the war on the ground as one foremost between Vietnamese can we truly begin to grapple with the real legacy of Vietnam: a war with many different narratives—and possible outcomes. As the famed Vietnamese writer and former North Vietnamese Army veteran, Bảo Ninh, writes in the closing pages of The Sorrow of War, 'Each of us carried in his heart a separate war… Our only postwar similarities stemmed from the fact that everyone had experienced difficult, painful, and different fates.' April 30, 1975 is not an endpoint closed to further interpretation, but an opportunity to start anew and to better understand the separate wars that its participants experienced. Andrew Bellisari is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University and a faculty fellow at Purdue's Center for American Political History and Technology (CAPT). Previously, he was a founding faculty member at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City and a Vietnam Program Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
