The fall of Saigon, 50 years later

The end of April and early May are bookended by two major events commemorating the fall of Saigon and the ultimate end of the Vietnam War. April 30 marked the 50th anniversary since the fall of Saigon, and was solemnly observed with public ceremonies from Orange County, Calif. to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. May 11 is Vietnam Human Rights Day, a day of advocacy against Communist Vietnam’s ongoing violations of religious, press, speech, and other freedoms.

As an educator, I continually find that both the beginning and the ending of the war in Vietnam are misunderstood by students and many of our fellow citizens.

Let’s start at the beginning. One of the outcomes of the Second World War was pressure from the United States on the British and French colonial systems. In the context of decolonization it was not surprising that the use of partitions was seen as a way toward peace, such as in the break-up of British Indian into a Hindu-majority (India) and Muslim-majority (Bangladesh, Pakistan) states, or the UN-authorized two-state solution for Israel-Palestine. Where American armies of liberation met Soviet armies of conquest, such as in Germany or Korea, the result was the division into free Western Germany and South Korea vs. communist East Germany and North Korea.

With the French colonial empire collapsing and communist violence occurring across Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, a major international conference was held in Geneva in 1954. Its primary purpose was to reinforce the armistice that ended the Korean Conflict (where 4 million people died after the communists invaded South Korea).

An important outcome of the conference, which helps us understand what became the Vietnam War, was that the already-partitioned Vietnam would remain partitioned between a West-oriented South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam, capital: Saigon) and a communist-dominated North Vietnam (capital: Hanoi).

The United States’ opening negotiating position supported reunification through democratic processes. The United States rightly assumed that Vietnamese citizens, if given a choice, would choose personal freedom, limited government, the rule of law, fundamental legal and political rights and other things associated with the Western democratic system. The United States was not a colonial overlord.

In contrast, Moscow and Beijing pushed North Vietnam to block such a path and maintain partition between North and South. Why? To allow them to more firmly control the populace of North Vietnam while using subversion, propaganda, and violence to undermine and ultimately topple South Vietnam.

Thus, when it comes to the beginning of American involvement, the United States became a patron to South Vietnam after the French colonial apparatus was dismantled. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the United States and other Western powers tried to support South Vietnam primarily through economic and humanitarian assistance, to help modernize and buttress a semi-democratic, fledgling, poor country on its first steps toward sustainability. It took nearly a decade before the United States ramped up its military presence to help defend South Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Throughout this period, North Vietnam, as well as the insurgent Viet Cong within South Vietnam, played an increasingly destructive role, supported by the Soviet Union and China, attempting the brutal subjugation of South Vietnam.

Fast forward to the ending of this brutal conflict, one in which thousands of Americans, Australians, Filipinos, New Zealanders, and Thais sacrificed their lives alongside South Vietnamese troops. In 1973, under the auspices of international observers, the United States and North Vietnam agreed to pull out their militaries and stop fighting. All parties agreed to adhere to democratic norms for the future of South Vietnam. The United States honored its pledge and almost all U.S. troops had left Vietnam by September 1973.

The North and its terrorist allies in the Viet Cong never lived up to their commitments under the Paris Accords. Essentially from day one, the subversion and violence continued, with increasingly brutality over the next 18 months fueled by modern weapons and equipment provided by China and the Soviet Union. Moreover, South Vietnam’s Navy faced attacks at sea by China acting on behalf of its own interests. Tragically, South Vietnam received very little replacement material or weapons from the United States and the West after the Paris treaty.

Democratic South Vietnam eventually fell to brutal communist hordes on April 30, 1975. Americans often recall the images of our ambassador and other American civilians being evacuated by helicopter from the room of the embassy on that day of infamy, but it is the millions of victims of communism—including American and Vietnamese war dead—whom we commemorate in “Black April.”

Today, the U.S. Department of State summarizes Vietnam’s ongoing human rights crisis thus: “There were no significant changes in the human rights situation in Vietnam in the past year.” Communist Vietnam remains a regime that does not respect fundamental freedoms of expression, religion, private and intellectual property, or the press. After all this time, it remains a tragedy.