An interesting presentation on Hochiminh

From: Balazs Szalontai

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 1:56 PM

Subject: Re: [Vsg] an interesting presentation on Hochiminh

Dear All,

I hope I won't provoke a new conflict by making a belated comment on an earlier post:

"The truth is under Ho's leadership, in the land reform campaign from 1953 to 1956, more than 100,000 people fell victims to kangaroo courts; widespread public executions occurred."

I wonder how the verb "fell victim" should be interpreted in this particular case. If it was meant to include everybody persecuted during the campaign, referring not only to executed persons but also to imprisoned ones, it may be considered credible, though it still looks exaggerated. But if it was meant to refer to executed persons, it is not credible at all. The Hungarian archival documents I saw contained some very precise data about executions, and these figures were incomparably lower than 100,000. This is not to say that a few thousand executions were "acceptable." On the contrary, this number was still very high by East European standards.

Best,

Dr Balazs Szalontai

Mongolian University of Science and Technology

From: Balazs Szalontai

To: Vietnam Studies Group

Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 1:56 PM

Subject: Re: [Vsg] an interesting presentation on Hochiminh

Let me also make a comment on this issue:

"we are all on the list aware of the extent to which the Vietnamese state and the Communist Party has tried to portray Vietnam's history in selective ways."

We may or may not like Hanoi's glorification of HCM (I think most list members do not), but it is worth analyzing this socio-cultural-political phenomenon in a wider Asian context. Namely, the persistence of a state-sponsored HCM cult is by no means an individual Vietnamese case. Under Deng Xiaoping, the CCP leadership not only reversed Mao's disastrous policies but also publicly criticized him. Nevertheless, Mao's picture still "decorates" Tiannanmen Square (despite occasional private attempts to damage it), and the CCP leadership never went so far as to characterize Mao's policies as basically harmful. In Mongolia, the statue of Stalinist dictator Choibalsan still stands in front of the National University, and recently a brand-new statue of Tsedenbal, his successor, was erected in front of the National Library. In the Tuvan Republic, the statue of Stalinist dictator Salchak Toka is still kept in its place and treated with respect. The same is true for the mausoleum of Kaysone Phomvihane in Laos.

Such practices would be quite unthinkable in most East European countries, all the more so because in some cases, it is really difficult to comprehend, even for a historian, to comprehend why these leaders are respected at all. One may debate about the extent of HCM's patriotism, but his merits in this field were certainly much greater than that of Toka, whose political activity from 1929 to his death in 1973 was minutiously regulated by the bosses in Moscow, who obediently liquidated anyone whom Stalin wanted to get rid of, and who dutifully assisted the annexation of his own country by the USSR. Nevertheless, he is still regarded as a "great leader" by many Tuvans, and the same is true for Choibalsan in Mongolia. Thus a question emerges: why these cults are so persistent, even in countries that have undergone a process of democratization and privatization?

Best,

Balazs Szalontai

Vietnam Indochina Tours <info@indochinatours.com>

date May 24, 2007 10:44 AM

I would like to proceed along the lines you suggested.

Though I am uncertain, I do not believe your previous posting suggested a number of victims for the various waves of land reforms from the 1951 testing through 1956. Fall provides the figure of 'close 50,000' executed (The Two Vietnam's); Buttinger places the number at 10,000-15,000 killed and 50,000-100,000 imprisoned (Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled); Kolko estimates 5,000-15,000 killed, 'probably closer to the latter figure' with nearly 20,000 imprisoned (Anatomy of a War); Moise holds that something on the order of 5,000 but 'almost certainly' between 3,000 and 15,000 (Land Reform in China and NVN). None of these authors differentiate between those who were executed, those obliged to commit suicide (Ngo Vinh Long I believe has indicated that deaths in this category resulted in a number of substance) and those who optionally committed suicide for related reasons.

Your insight in the number of deaths and number of those imprisoned as well as any commentary of the categories of deaths would be much appreciated.

Separately, if you have an estimate for the number of those killed beginning 2 November 1956 in the Nghe An uprising I solicit your views.

Thanking you in advance for your insight,

Courtney Frobenius

Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 19:31:29 +0100 (BST)

From: "Balazs Szalontai" <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk>

Dear Courtney,

thanks a lot for your interest! In reply to your question, let me quote a few paragraphs from an article I recently published in "Cold War History" (November 2005). The Hungarian diplomats heard the data enumerated below from the North Vietnamese cadres, who were fairly willing to tell them confidential information:

The Hungarian documents do not contain data about the victims of each land

reform wave, but they do include some informative figures that reveal the scope of the terror. For instance, by December 1955 the rent-reduction campaign had involved 7,775,386 people in 1,875 xa (administrative villages). Of the 44,444 ‘landlords’ identified by the land reform cadres, 3,939 were tried publicly; of the latter, 1,175 were executed. The second stage of the campaign (the land reform proper) had involved 4,079,000 persons in 1,594 xa by December 1955, of whom 18,738 were ‘revealed’ as

‘landlords who had managed to disguise themselves as rich or middle peasants during the rent reductions’. These ‘revelations’ led to 3,312 public trials and 162 executions. The stage that took place early in 1956 may have claimed more lives than the previous ones, since it proved particularly intense. That intensity can be gauged from the fact that this part of the campaign was carried out by an unprecedentedly high number ofcadres (over 32,000 persons).

Still, these data seem to refute those statements which estimate the total number of victims at 50,000 (or even higher). Instead, they support the claims of Moise, who concluded that ‘the total number of people executed during the land reform was probably on the rough order of 5,000 and almost certainly between 3,000 and 15,000’. One may also take into consideration that by September 1957 as many as 23,748 political prisoners had been released (‘of whom most were innocent’), and in all probability the number of imprisoned persons substantially exceeded that of the executed.

During the ‘corrections’ the Hungarians were told that:

the groups of the land reform cadres . . . had discussed the correct guidelines they

received from the Central Land Reform Committee with the county and district landreform committees, and so when they arrived in the villages, they already had‘schedules’ and concrete instructions: what percentage of the population in thevillage in question should be declared exploitative landlords; of the latter, how manyshould be tried and sentenced; how many hectares of land should be confiscated anddistributed, etc.

True, this interpretation does not explain the events in their entirety. Still, if one

analyzes the abovementioned data about the pre-1956 land reform waves, it appears that the number of trials per xa was almost the same (about 2.1) during the rent-reduction campaign and the land reform proper. In contrast, the percentage of ‘revealed’ and executed landlords did not remain constant. A possible explanation of this phenomenon is that the VWP leaders (and their Chinese advisers) may have regarded the staging of trials in every community and the involvement of the whole local population in the ‘struggle meetings’ as the most important element of the campaign against ‘class enemies’. That is, they may have laid an even greater stress on the political mobilization of the masses than on the elimination of real and potential

opponents.

The Hungarian documents also mention that many suicides occurred during the campaign, but without providing any information about their number. Actually, I doubt if the DRV authorities ever tried to count the number of such suicides. Distinguishing political suicides from non-political ones would have been somewhat difficult anyway.

As for the Nghe An uprising: the VWP cadres told the Hungarian diplomats that "several hundred peasants" participated in the Quynh Luu uprising. They did not mention the number of persons killed during the disturbances, though I vaguely remember a reference to a soldier killed by the "rioters." The DRV cadres seem to have tried to hush up the whole affair, and thus these figures may have been lower than the real ones. Still, the claim that as many as 6,000 peasants were "killed or deported" after the protests (if I remember correctly, I saw this figure in Karnow, "Vietnam: A History") may have been exaggerated.

Please forgive me for the aforesaid imprecise references. For the time being I am in Mongolia, quite far from my books and copied documents, and thus I cannot check every data right now.

All the best,

Balazs Szalontai

Mongolian University of Science and Technology

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