On April 30, Vietnam celebrated the 50th anniversary of its reunification. On this day, 50 years ago, North Vietnamese tanks finally entered the Independence Palace in central Saigon, which is now Ho Chi Minh City, ending the two-decades-long Vietnam War and handing a rare defeat to the US.
That Independence Palace is now known as the Reunification Palace, and April 30 is celebrated as Reunification Day. April 30, which marked the victory of a third-world agrarian country over the US, the military superpower since the end of World War II, could have been called many things.
For instance, Vietnamese people could have remembered this day as Freedom Day, Victory Day, or Anti-Imperialism Day. However, strangely enough, they decided to call it ‘Reunification Day.’
The choice was strange since ‘Reunification Day’ made no reference to the decades-long heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against imperial powers, first the French and then the US.
It made no reference to the shameful US involvement in the internal struggle of a poor, agrarian society. It made no reference to how the Vietnamese people were able to defeat and humiliate the most advanced superpower of their day through their sheer determination.
In retrospect, however, ‘Reunification Day’ seems to be the most apt choice.
Had Vietnam not managed to stay fully reunified as a united, sovereign country, it would still be dealing with a perpetual conflict, an unstable border, an unsustainable arms race, foreign military bases, and a constant threat of missiles, even nuclear war.
The Vietnamese people understood that their struggle was not just limited to defeating imperialism but ensuring that imperial powers could not partition their country through arbitrarily imposed borders.
In fact, such an arbitrarily imposed border partitioning the country would have pushed Vietnam into a never-ending arms race, a continuous low-level conflict, and a gateway for outside powers for further interference in the internal matters of the country.
In other words, the Vietnamese people understood that absolute sovereignty is not possible without taking complete control of their borders.
In hindsight, it may seem surprising how the Vietnamese could have had this foresight. However, even a cursory look at the history of imperialism and its rollback in the 20th century would show that Vietnam had more than a few basket cases, India, Palestine, Germany, and Korea, to look at and learn from their mistakes.
Imperialism And Border Making
Imposing arbitrary borders on native societies has always been integral to modern imperialism. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish established coastal colonies in various regions of the Americas and Asia, thereby severing the connections between these coastal areas and their broader native societies.
The Portuguese colonies in Goa and Bombay, the Dutch colony in Galle (Sri Lanka), and the Spanish colonies in America come to mind.
Later on, the French and British also joined this bandwagon for colonies. However, the “Partition of Africa,” also known as the “Scramble for Africa,” at the end of the 19th century was a high point of colonialism.
Between 1880 and 1914, a handful of European colonial powers divided the continent of Africa among themselves, creating and imposing artificial borders on native societies and partitioning cultures and civilizations that had existed for centuries.
The 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, convened by Otto von Bismarck, formalized the partition of Africa. It led to a frenzy of treaties, conquests, and boundary-drawing, often disregarding African ethnic, cultural, or political realities.
This partition of Africa was also a significant contributing factor to the outbreak of the First World War.
The two World Wars were essentially a struggle between the old and new emerging European colonial powers over the re-division of colonies.
However, these World Wars considerably weakened the colonial powers, thereby indirectly contributing to the decolonization of the world.
Partition Of India And Palestine
Imperial powers had often deepened the existing ethnic or religious fault lines in the colonial societies under the policy of ‘Divide and Rule.’
Thus, in India, they fanned the divisions between Hindus and Muslims. Similarly, in Palestine, colonialism cemented the pre-existing divisions between the Jews and Muslims.
In India, the British Crown portrayed itself as the protector of Muslim interests and, in Palestine, as the protector of Jewish interests. At both places, partition was the parting shot of the dying British imperialism.
The Britishers partitioned India and Pakistan in 1947, creating a new nation-state, Pakistan, for the Muslims of South Asia. Similarly, in 1948, Israel was carved out of Palestine for the Jews of the Middle East and Europe.
At both places, arbitrary borders were imposed on native societies by the colonial masters. In the process, British imperialism gave the world two perpetual conflicts with no easy solution in sight.
India and Pakistan have fought four wars (1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and are currently engaged in a tense standoff on the border at the time of writing this report.
Similarly, Israel and Palestine are locked in a never-ending conflict, and military operations are currently ongoing in Gaza.
Cold War And Partition Of Germany
The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of the Cold War, a period in which the world was divided into two opposing ideological camps.
However, if there was one place where the effects of this ideological battle were felt most acutely, it was Germany.
Following the defeat of the Third Reich, Germany was divided into two halves: East and West. East Germany was under the influence of the Soviet Union, while West Germany was under the influence of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Even German capital, Berlin, was divided into East and West.
The Berlin Wall was the most literal symbol of this division. Thus, Germany, an economic, industrial, and military powerhouse of Europe, was kept down for many decades.
For the next four and a half decades, Germany’s immense resources were spent competing internally, with East Germany against West Germany, Communism against Capitalism, and the Soviet Union against the US.
Germany became the physical manifestation of the intense ideological battles of the Cold War. In effect, Germany could never fully realize its potential and utilize its resources, manpower, and energy to compete externally against adversarial European powers.
Only after German reunification in 1989 could it realize its full potential and re-emerge as Europe’s major economic and industrial powerhouse. Currently, Germany is the largest economy in Europe and the third-largest in the world.
Korea: The State Of Perpetual War
The Cold War’s second ideological division manifested in the Korean War. Korea was under Japanese occupation during World War II. Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided by the Soviet Union and the United States into pro-communist North Korea and pro-Western South Korea.
The two Koreas fought a war (1950-1953), but neither side was able to overwhelm the other, resulting in an armistice in 1953. Technically, the two Koreas are still at war.
North Korea has developed Ballistic missiles and even nuclear weapons. South Korea hosts a US military base on its territory. The two sides are engaged in a never-ending arms race and live in the constant fear that the frozen conflict could turn into a hot war at any point.
Vietnam: Complete Reunification
Imperial powers tried to employ similar tactics in Vietnam.
The country was under French occupation. During the Cold War, it was occupied by the Japanese.
After World War II ended, a power vacuum emerged. While the French tried to reassert their dominance over Vietnam once again, this time they were repelled by Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who was a communist supported by the Soviet Union.
Ho Chi Minh declared independence in North Vietnam in September 1945 and announced the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). However, the French, supported by the US, continued fighting the Communists.
In 1954, the Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into North Vietnam and South Vietnam along a border known as the 17th parallel. At this time, it appeared that Vietnam was another Korea in the making, and the country would end up in two opposing ideological camps.
However, Ho Chi Minh refused to accept the partition of his country and continued fighting. By the early 1960s, the US soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. In February 1965, the US forces officially entered the war.
However, the vastly superior US military power could not bog down the communist forces in the north, who continued their heroic struggle despite unimaginable losses.
It was due to this struggle that, despite the involvement of the US, the strongest military power on earth, the Vietnamese were able to reunify the whole country in 1975, after almost two decades of armed conflict.
On April 30, the world watched as a T-54 tank entered through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, marking the end of the painful war.
The Unimaginable Pain Of Reunification
The Vietnamese people had to undergo unimaginable pain during this two-decades-long conflict.
The United States unleashed an estimated 30 billion pounds of munitions in the country. At least 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war. Over 11 million Vietnamese were displaced, and up to 4.8 million were sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange.
Many times during this two-decades-long conflict, the Vietnamese must have wondered if all this loss and pain was even worth it. However, the subsequent history of wars and constant conflict in India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, and between the two Koreas, has proved them right.
While these countries are still suffering from the scars of partition and arbitrarily imposed borders, unable to realize their true potential, Vietnam stands, fifty years after the Reunification, fully united, fully sovereign, and entirely at peace.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
- VIEWS PERSONAL OF THE AUTHOR.
- He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com
