General who led communist victory in Vietnam dies
HANOI - Van Tien Dung, the general who was commander-in-chief of
communist
forces in their final victorious offensive of the Vietnam War, has died,
a
Vietnamese military official said on Tuesday.
Dung, who was in his mid 80s, died earlier this week, an officer at the
army's General Political Department, told Reuters.
"He was taken to hospital on Sunday and died there," said the officer,
who
did not want to be identified. "The funeral will be on Thursday."
The official said the funeral would be held at the Defence Ministry
funeral
hall in Hanoi, and added that an announcement of the death would be made
in
the official media on Wednesday.
The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dung, who was officially appointed commander-in-chief in January 1975,
led
the "Ho Chi Minh Campaign", a 55-day communist offensive which
culminated in
the fall of Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, on April 30, 1975. Saigon
was
then renamed Ho Chi Minh City after Vietnam's late revolutionary hero.
Dung later rechristened the feat "The Great Spring Victory". It ended 30
years of war, which saw the defeat first of the colonial French, then
the
United States and finally the South Vietnamese government Washington had
supported.
After the war, Dung served for a time as defence minister, but was
dropped
from the elite party Politburo in 1986, after which he largely stayed
out of
the limelight.
It remains a point of dispute which communist general could rightly
claim to
be the victor of Saigon.
Dung put himself at the centre of the action in an officially sanctioned
memoir in 1976, but supporters of the most famous communist general, Vo
Nguyen Giap, the then defence minister, argue it was he who did most of
the
planning for the final push.
Giap, now in his 90s, still lives in quiet retirement in Hanoi.
Reuters - March 19, 2002
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