Vietnam pays respects to general who took Saigon
HANOI - Old comrades, leaders and ordinary people gathered in Hanoi on
Thursday to pay their respects to General Van Tien Dung, commander of the final communist offensive
that captured Saigon to end the Vietnam War.
Dung died on Sunday aged 84 after a long illness associated with hypertension and heart disease.
After lying in state at the Defence Ministry funeral hall in Hanoi, Dung was to receive a state funeral in the
afternoon before being taken for burial at the state cemetery on the outskirts of the capital.
Dung, officially appointed army commander-in-chief in January 1975, led the "Ho Chi Minh Campaign", a
55-day communist offensive that culminated in the fall of Saigon, the capital of U.S.-backed South
Vietnam, on April 30, 1975.
The victorious communists called it "Our Great Spring Victory", the title Dung took for his controversial
memoirs published the following year that put him firmly at the centre of the action.
The fall of Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honour of North Vietnam's independence hero, ended 30
years of war.
The communists first defeated the colonial French, who Dung had fought at the decisive 1954 battle of
Dien Bien Phu, then the United States, and finally U.S.-backed South Vietnam.
While he commanded the final push of the long and bloody struggle that cost three million Vietnamese
lives, Dung was rumoured to have been criticised by the army for taking too much credit, a perception
shared by many Vietnamese.
Supporters of the most famous communist general, Vo Nguyen Giap, say it was he who did most of the
planning, and it is Giap who is still revered as Vietnam's foremost military commander.
Protege who became rival
Dung, once Giap's protege, became his rival and in late-1978 took over from him as defence minister,
although this appointment was not announced until 1980.
This made him responsible for Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in late 1978 and subsequent long and
controversial occupation, as well as a brief but bloody border war with China a year later.
Dung, described by one historian as a "formidable conservative" had fallen out of favour by the Communist
Party congress of 1986 that adopted market-orientated reforms.
His family name was tainted by corruption allegations and he was sharply criticised in the People's Army
congress for being too autocratic. He was replaced as defence minister in 1987.
Dung's death came less than a year after that of Duong Van Minh, who he toppled as the last president of
U.S. backed-South Vietnam. Minh died in exile in California in August, aged 86.
Dung's revolutionary credentials were indisputable, having joined the Communist Party when it was
founded in the 1930s, and being arrested three times by the colonial French and sentenced to death by
them in absentia.
Since his death, Vietnamese historians and comrades including Giap have paid tribute to his generalship
both in the final 1975 campaign and at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Speaking to a Vietnamese analyst on Wednesday, Giap, who is now in his nineties, called Dung an
"outstanding general".
While Dung and Giap were always regarded as rivals, they were usually seen side-by-side at official
functions, with the latter always attracting most attention.
Dung largely dropped from the limelight after his fall from grace, but made a rare public appearance in
March 2000, when he attended an exhibition of photographs taken by Vietnamese and Western
photographers killed during the war in Indochina.
And in October last year, he issued a warning to his former American enemies about the conduct of their
war in Afghanistan, saying he was certain they could not beat Osama bin Laden and it could be difficult for
Washington to extricate its troops.
Dung said he fully supported action against terrorists but not through war, which kills innocent civilians.
"War doesn't end the hate, it just adds more fuel to the fire," he said.
In his memoirs, Dung called the Vietnam War the "biggest failure in the history of the United States" and
said it was the communist's bloody Tet offensive in 1968 that "destroyed America's will".
"A small nation, with a small land mass and a small population which knows how to consolidate and
knows its leadership could defeat a greater power," he wrote.
By David Brunnstrom - Reuters - March 21, 2002.
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