KYQ4: Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh (Saigon)

Ho Chi Minh City Post Office

We arrived in Saigon quite early in the morning after the short flight from Danang. Ho Chi Minh airport had a well-modulated style and efficiency. We soon collected our luggage and drove on the crowded roads into Saigon or Ho Chi Minh to give it its Sunday name. The renaming of the city in 1975 was a political statement and, whilst the majority of people we spoke to took a relaxed view on the name, they still called it Saigon in everyday conversation.

Saigon had been a lead item on the news for a decade or so during my teenage and university days and I had some trepidation about visiting the city that had been the epicentre of fighting between the Communist world and the American-led Western capitalism during the Cold War. It seemed ironic that after the most expensive war effort by the USA, South Vietnam had eventually capitulated to Communist-ruled North Vietnam. The United States may have rejected the Imperialist ambitions of the European nation-states but replaced it with an explicit anti-communist vendetta under Kennedy, Johnston and Nixon that was both costly in resources, to life and reputation and doomed to eventual failure.

The 7 million Vietnamese killed in the fighting, the bombings on a scale never before or since repeated, and the dropping of deadly chemicals such as Agent Orange had been against the Viet Cong forces led by Ho Chi Minh. Until 1945 he had worked with American forces to drive out the Japanese occupation. He had high hopes of gaining the support of the United States as was evident from his stated aims of the Viet Minh in a speech on 2 September 1945.

"All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French Revolution made in 1791 also states: All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.
Those are undeniable truths.

Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.

They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center, and the South of Viet-Nam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united."

Ho Chi Minh concluded with the following words:

"The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer the country.
We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Viet-Nam.
A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent!

For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, solemnly declare to the world that:
Viet-Nam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact, it is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty."

Unfortunately, the opportunity was missed and the United States and the United Kingdom supported the recolonisation of Vietnam by the French as part of the post-war settlement. The consequences were devastating for the Vietnamese people and severely damaged the reputation of France and the United States. What was surprising was how the relationships with some countries, notably the United States, Japan and Australia had recovered whereas there seemed a more lasting enmity against China and France who had occupied Vietnam for most of the last thousand years. Having said that, the younger generations seemed to want to move on and not become mawkish or bellicose about Vietnam's turbulent past.

Saigon had grown rapidly and its road network was almost at a standstill. All the streets seemed to specialise in certain types of goods: refrigeration, generators, cement mixers, timber, and then there were markets. We visited the largest one in Cholon (Chinatown) which was awash with every type of food and swarming with thousands of sellers and buyers. We visited a museum of Medicine and began to understand why herbal medicine and acupuncture are still widely used; the Health service is privately run and beyond the means of most families.

We had decided to visit the war remnants museum which harboured a comprehensive photographic record of the horrors of the war along with miscellaneous weaponry. It was a stultifying experience and whilst many have criticised the propaganda style of the exhibits, they did represent an Asian holocaust that is a horrific reminder that when democracies decide to challenge those seeking independence or authoritarian regimes the losers are inevitably the indigenous population. The images of the effect of Agent Orange were chilling but there were so many powerful images including the shot of the mother with her children crossing the river to escape the shootings. We visited the former Presidential Palace afterwards where the puppet leader, President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, held court from 1965 to 1975 until the fall of Saigon following the decision by the United States to no longer support Thieu. The tanks crashed into the grounds of the Presidential Palace and a couple of tanks are still there in what is now known as the Reunification Palace.

We walked back through Saigon passing landmarks such as the Post Office which looked more like a railway terminus, the Continental Hotel, the Rex Hotel where the foreign correspondents stayed, the Opera House, Maxim's Club and the high-end shops before reaching the Saigon River where our hotel was located. There was a chance to take some photos from the roof terrace and cross the road by walking through 1001 motorbikes, I remembered to keep walking as the traffic slipped past me at 20mph. I then had a run in the gym, the prospect of fighting the traffic in Saigon made it one of the few places where I have ever declined to go for a run.

Saigon was a genuine metropolis, a sophisticated and diverse city sprinkled with new multinational business HQs but it lacked the intrinsic charm of the capital Hanoi. We ate out at a local Vietnamese restaurant but it was a food aimed at the international palate and as such bland and pricey compared to the healthy indigenous food that we had enjoyed elsewhere on the trip. Saigon may have been renamed Ho Chi Minh but rampant international businesses had eroded any charm and made it the only disappointment during our visit to Vietnam.