Category Archives: Southeast Asia

Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, emerged in the years immediately after the end of the Vietnam War with remarkably little physical change. The colonial-era buildings that gave the place its distinctive character still stood in the centre of the city untouched by anything like the madness that had occurred in Phnom Penh. In 1981 what was immediately apparent to a visitor who had known the city before was the absence of the chaotic traffic of yesteryear in this early period of communist rule. It was not hard to see other changes, from the police drafted down from the north in their ill-fitting uniforms, to the drabness of daily dress, particularly among the women on the street. Except on Sunday; when fashion consciousness triumphed over communist austerity; or in private homes, there were almost no women to be seen wearing the distinctive and graceful ao dai.

Yet beneath the clear signs that this was a city being ruled by a very different government, it was not hard to detect remnants of attitudes that harked back to the recent pre-communist past. Perhaps the most obvious, one that has been remarked on by many who visited at this time, was the determination of the city’s inhabitants to continue calling it Saigon. In doing so they enshrined the feeling of distinctiveness that cut across political boundaries. It was not surprising that Madame Nguyen Phuoc Dai, the former South Vietnamese lawyer, senator and renowned owner of the Bibliotheque Restaurant, insisted that the city’s name was Saigon. In a city where standards of service and cuisine had sharply declined, a visit to Madame Dai’s was almost de rigeur in the early 1980s, not least because she was ready to give free rein to her feelings about rule from the north. But to hear the city called Saigon by Dr Quong Quyen Hoa was another matter.

Dr Hoa had been the Minister for Health in the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government while the Vietnam War still raged. A pediatrics specialist, she had gone into the local maquis in 1968. When I met her in 1981 in a house full of beautiful antique furniture and porcelain, she consistently spoke of the city as Saigon and she was dressed in an ao dai of the finest silk. But more significantly she was vehement in her criticism of the way in which the government in Hanoi was treating those who had fought on its behalf in the south. ‘We have been recolonised by the north,’ she told me. The members of the Provisional Revolutionary Government had been discarded by a northern-dominated regime which formulated plans for Saigon, and southern Vietnam generally with little if any regard for local conditions. As for Vietnam’s Soviet friends, Dr Hoa said that like most southerners, indeed like most Vietnamese, she tolerated them for the moment because they were needed. But they too would only be transients on the Vietnamese stage.

Whatever Dr Hoa’s feelings about Hanoi’s errors, she was clearly not suffering materially and I felt that I gained a more representative assessment of life in Saigon from Phuong, a Vietnamese who had studied in Australia and now worked for the city government, earning what was then the equivalent of US$14 a month. He confirmed the tensions between northerners and southerners, a situation marked by the northerners’ arrogance and their doubts about the extent of revolutionary zeal among Saigon’s population. With a wry smile, Phuong observed that the northerners had good reason to have these doubts, not least because the population of greater Saigon, including Cholon, still counted upwards of 800 000 ethnic Chinese who had never identified their interests with any state, communist or otherwise. Phuong’s comment rang true, for only the week before in Hanoi the Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, had told me the government was going to ‘break’ Chinese control of commerce in the south. They did not do so then, and nearly twenty years later they still have not done so. The Chinese merchants are still there, and Thach is dead.

As for Saigon’s ethnic Vietnamese population, Phuong continued, of course there was dissatisfaction. You did not have to have held an important position in the pre-liberation government to dislike many of the changes that had taken place. But to think this was a sign that dissatisfaction would be translated into any serious action was absurd. Southerners, in any event, loved to grumble, and too many foreign journalists who were now visiting Saigon were ready to look at life in the city and wonder how ‘nice people’ like him could put up with the conditions that existed, and which were obviously less attractive than what could be found in the West. So much was unsatisfactory; he noted wryly, but it was far from insupportable. And, he concluded rather tentatively, even someone as apolitical as he was found the fact that the whole of Vietnam was now governed by a Vietnamese regime was important.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 217-219

How many “national” liberation movements end up being regional, ethnic, or religious recolonizations on a smaller scale? (Or, in Indonesia’s case, a larger scale.)

During the Second World War a pro-Vichy regime, headed by Admiral Decoux as Governor-General, continued to exercise administrative control over the countries of French Indochina. It did so at the pleasure of the Japanese, who permitted this exercise of apparent French sovereignty in exchange for what Tokyo saw as a vital concession to its interests: the unfettered opportunity to move troops unhindered through the countries of Indochina and to use their territory for the stationing of its aircraft. The Japanese aircraft that sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941, leaving Malaya and Singapore without naval protection, took off from airfields in Cambodia. Then, as the tide of battle began to swing decisively against them, the Japanese in March 1945 no longer saw any benefit in allowing the French to exercise even the constrained power they had retained to this point. In a swift and effective coup de force they overturned the Decoux regime and embarked on a belated effort to promote ‘independent’ states in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, while maintaining effective control over all three countries.

This was a climactic moment, for it was recognised, most particularly in Vietnam, as a sign that French colonialism’s days were numbered. From this point on, and with the Vietnamese communists led by a remarkable set of talented individuals of whom Ho Chi Minh was only one, the stage was slowly being set for three decades of bitter hostilities, the years of the First and Second Indochina Wars. First the French and then the Americans sought to stem the tide of communist revolution but, as hindsight has made crystal clear, their efforts failed and the countries along the Mekong that once made up Indochina all finally came under communist control in 1975.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 177-178

In the space of fifteen years, from 1966 to 1981, the character of the three countries of former French Indochina that bordered the Lower Mekong changed dramatically; Many of the changes were tragic, almost all were irrevocable. In Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam the bitter years of the Second Indochina War ushered in a period of deeply flawed peace before, in the case of Cambodia and Vietnam, former comrades-in-arms became sworn enemies. The communist victories of 1975 were the prelude to a series of events far different from those most observers had predicted as likely to occur. It was not just that the names of cities and countries changed, so that in a unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, while Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea. The changes that took place were much more fundamental than those associated with nomenclature. And in the case of Cambodia what took place was scarcely believable.

The bloodbath that many had thought likely to follow a communist victory in Vietnam never took place. Certainly, there was retribution. Of a million persons singled out for ‘re-education’ because of their links to the defeated regime, more than 100 000 endured harsh conditions as they were locked away for long periods in remote and unhealthy labour camps. There they were expected to reflect on their ‘sins’, absorb Marxist thought, and open new areas for agriculture. Yet it seems unquestionably the case that the 30 000 or 40 000 Lao sent for re-education–a dramatically higher proportion of the population–suffered even harsher treatment at the hands of the victors than those who were interned in Vietnam. It was as if the Lao communists were determined to show that their country’s legendary reputation for gentleness and an easygoing approach to life no longer had a place in the new; ideologically oriented scheme of things. But neither in Vietnam nor in Laos did anything take place to match the tyranny and slaughter that overtook the population of Democratic Kampuchea once Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and the victors began their radical restructuring of society.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 194-195

Asiapages finds that ultra-Maoist Pol Pot’s cremation site has turned into a tourist attraction.

Between 1881 and 1887 France steadily, and in many cases bloodily, moved to assert its control over the whole of Vietnam…. Yet France’s position in Cambodia was only assured after three uncertain years between 1884 and 1887, after French gunboat diplomacy on the Mekong led to a major rebellion against French control.

Ever since the conclusion of the treaty granting France a ‘protectorate’ in 1863, French officials in Phnom Penh, and their superiors in both Saigon and Paris, had looked on King Norodom with an ambivalent eye….

By the early 1880s French officialdom’s patience with Norodom was wearing thin. French troops had had to put down a rebellion led by one of Norodom’s half-brothers, Si Vatha, who then retreated to the jungle fastnesses beside the Mekong near the Sambor rapids. In actions that echoed King Satha’s attempt to gain support from Manila in the sixteenth century; the king himself had tried unsuccessfully to enter into a secret treaty with the Spanish government. And, against strict French direction, Norodom had allotted the rights to the kingdom’s opium farm to one of his court cronies, without consulting his ‘protectors’. This last act he sought to excuse as the result of his having been drunk at the time. Two factors finally brought a French decision to act against him in 1884. There was renewed concern that the British were seeking to increase their influence in Siam, a prospect that prompted French officials to tighten their grip over Cambodia. At the same time, the newly appointed Governor of Cochinchina, Charles Thomson, decided to increase French control over the kingdom and that an end had to be put to Norodom’s financial profligacy. To achieve this goal Thomson told the king that, henceforth, France would be responsible for collecting the kingdom’s customs duties….

The stage was now set for one of the best known tableaux in nineteenth century Cambodian history. On 17 June 1884, Thomson strode into the king’s private chambers within the palace in a brusque display of lèse-majesté, waking Norodom with the noise of his entry. He then read aloud the terms of new administrative arrangements for the kingdom which gave France much greater power over Cambodia’ s affairs than it had previously exercised. Hearing these terms, Norodom’s interpreter, Coi de Monteiro, a Cambodian of Iberian ancestry who had once also acted as an interpreter for [Mekong explorer] Doudart de Lagrée, is said to have cried: ‘Sire, this is not a convention, it is an abdication’. Thomson’s aides hurried de Monteiro from the room, leaving a furious Thomson confronting a worried Norodom.

At this point, if one of the accounts of this dramatic encounter can be trusted, Thomson pointed to the gunboats moored within sight of the palace. If Norodom refused to sign the new convention, Thomson told him, he would be confined aboard one of the gunboats. ‘What will you do with me aboard the Alouette?’ the king is supposed to have asked. ‘That is my secret,’ was Thomson’s reported reply.

Literally outgunned, knowing that his half-brother Sisowath was a French pawn, and recognising that Thomson would indeed force him from the throne if he failed to sign the new convention, Norodom buckled under. The gunboats returned down the Mekong and the kingdom seemed, for the moment, at peace. It was an illusion, and within less than a year a full-scale rebellion against French control was in force. Given the fact that gunboats on the Mekong were vital to Thomson’s having gained Norodom’s acquiescence, there is historic irony in the fact that a French army post sited on the Mekong just below the Sambor rapids was the first target for a rebel attack when the rebellion began. More than two years were required before the French, making major concessions to Norodom, were once more able to claim that their ‘protection’ of Cambodia was untroubled.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 125-129

In June 1866, a French expedition began exploring the Mekong, heading upriver from Saigon.

[T]he explorers were increasingly anxious to reach the once important city of Vientiane. They knew it had been sacked in the 1820s, but they thought it just possible that there might be some some trace of the rich market described by van Wuysthoff more than two hundred years earlier. Vientiane, after all, was set in unknown territory; outside the area explored by Mouhot in his travels in Laos. Their hopes were not very high, not least because they had already found how hollow were the claims made about the supposed riches of Laos by two of the most erudite geographers in France, Cortambert and de Rosny. Writing in 1862, these pillars of the Ethnographic Society had suggested that Laos might hide riches beneath its soil that could make it another California. At this stage the explorers hoped for rather less, yet even for their more modest commercial hopes the sight of an almost deserted river that greeted them as they drew nearer to Vientiane was depressing. And when they reached the site of the formerly important city; on 2 April 1867, any remaining expectations of its providing commercial opportunities vanished.

It was immediately clear how thorough had been the destruction wrought by the Thai king in 1828. Yet the vestiges that remained of the city’s former greatness impressed the explorers. The royal pagoda, Wat Pha Kaew, still preserved its basic form, with delicately carved wooden panels, fading gold leaf on the pillars supporting the roof and decorative chips of glass that glistened in the sun like a gigantic setting of diamond brilliants. Wat Si Saket was virtually untouched by time or the advancing forest, having been the one temple spared by the Thai invaders, and That Luang, the most famous monument in Vientiane, had only recently been restored when the explorers saw it. They had some sense of this great stupa’s importance, but they could scarcely know how deeply it was held in reverence by the population of the Lao principalities. Nor, of course, could they have predicted that That Luang was to become in the twentieth century a potent symbol for Lao identity; So much so that when Laos was caught up in the Vietnam War the communist-led Pathet Lao forces used the monument as one of the decorative motifs on their banknotes, aligning the traditional past alongside such decidedly modern scenes as delicately engraved soldiers shooting down American aircraft over the war-torn Plain of Jars.

SOURCE: The Mekong: Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future, by Milton Osborne (Grove Press, 2000), pp. 92-93