Ho Chi Minh: Faultless As The Leader Of North Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh is the Father of modern-day Vietnam, as a radical nationalist, communist and “Uncle Ho”. His fatherly persona, care and affection for his fellow Vietnamese and his devotion for the Reunification of Vietnam are the defining traits of his leadership. Saigon was renamed after him; statues were built for him; and millions love and worshipped him. Yet few have raised his faults, and fewer have criticized him. Was Ho Chi Minh really that perfect, that loving to his people? This essay will determine Ho’s weaknesses through his actions.

Ho Chi Minh was inexperienced in governance of North Vietnam. He did not foresee the effects of North Vietnamese domestic policies, causing suffering amongst the North Vietnamese and raising doubts against the Ho government.

The Vietminh have had many goals in mind as both a nationalistic and communist party. One of the deep-seated concerns and problems were of a domestic nature – the ownership of land and the power of the landlords. Land reforms were the means to solve them, through it the prosecution and condemnation of landowners and redistribution of land to the peasants.

Vietnamese landlords, who were depicted as the evil, exercised almost total authority over the people who worked in their domains. They possessed a complete economic hold over two-thirds of the population. It should be noted that the Vietminh enlisted the help and support from landowners against the French in the First Indochina War, and many of them are, despite Vietminh being communist, loyal veterans who helped Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues.

In 1953, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) launched the Land Rent Reduction Campaign. This would force landlords to reduce land rent rate for peasants. Defiance would spell arrest and a tribunal court case. Chinese-trained Vietnamese cadres were tasked with information assemblage and ascertaining the identities of landowners. The People’s Court was set up in accordance to the Ordinance 233/SL, which was signed by Ho Chi Minh. This was an amendment to the Ordinance 150-SL, and established the People’s Courts “especially in places of mass mobilization”. As a result, convicted landlords were tried, and sentences ranged from hard labour to execution.

However, one controversial and notable example was the execution of patriotic female landowner, Nguyen Thi Nam. She was a fervent supporter of the Viet Minh, contributing 20,000 Indochina coins (equivalent to 700 taels of gold), donating 100 gold coins to the government during the “Golden Week”. Even more notable was that she “once concealed, fed and helped the biggest men of the Communist Party at that time, Truong Chinh, Hoang Quoc Viet, Le Duc Tho, Pham Van Dong, Le Thanh Nghi and Le Giang.” However, she was deemed as an ‘evil’ and ‘wicked’ landowner, whose nationalistic and pro-Vietminh actions deemed “false in order to deepen and climb into the revolutionary ranks to sabotage”. The Vietminh and Chinese advisors were reportedly arguing on Nguyen Thi Nam, with Ho Chi Minh protesting her execution, but relented to the Chinese. This showed that Ho Chi Minh did not have an active stand against the undeserved punishment of supporters, albeit a landowner. He could not bother to reciprocate her actions of defending and protecting despite the enormity of contribution towards the current Vietminh regime. It truly raises doubts on whether Ho Chi Minh cared about his people, and showed he believed that the fulfilment of Communist Ideals (namely land reform) supersedes any form of loyalty and contribution.

In 1954, the Vietminh launched the Land Reform Campaign. Its main objective was to have agricultural land occupied by the landlords seized and redistributed to the peasants, and an extermination of anti-communist voices. A total of 3,245 xa (villages or communes) were covered through five different waves from 25 May 1954 to 30 July 1956 and saw more violence and liquidation of the landlord class. Despite the small minority of peasants in North Vietnam possessing more than 3 or 4 acres of land, the Vietminh decided that the “landlords” and “feudal elements” represented 5 percent of the rural population. The Vietnamese cadres were hence tasked to another mission – to liquidate these people.

The Vietminh designation of representation translated into “landlord quotas”, where for example, in a village of two thousand inhabitant, cadres had to indict at least twenty alleged “landlords” in an Agricultural Reform Tribunal. One group of cadres, reporting that it could only discover two “landlords” in a certain village, was ordered back to find six more, which was done by selecting half a dozen peasants randomly. It is believed that many cadres spared their own relatives and took the land for themselves, which led to a lack of effectiveness in the Campaign and raised suspicion regarding the Vietminh regime amongst the people.

In fact, many of the convicted were normal peasants and loyal Vietminh veterans. Simply because Ho Chi Minh’s government set a quota on each village rather than a cumulation, many innocents and devout supporters were killed. Varying death estimates of the brutal reform ranged from 15,000 to 50,000. Thousands more were interned in forced labor camps. In several villages, peasants repudiated directives and orders; the whole country sinking in suspicion and apprehension. The official Hanoi newspaper, Nhan Dan, reported that “brothers no longer dare to visit each other, and people dare not greet each other in the street.”

Ho Chi Minh and the architect of this campaign, Truong Chinh, was unable to foresee that the methods used to detect and exterminate the “landlords” could have such devastating impact onto the country’s people and climate. Cadres have wrongly classified many to be “landlords”. Tens of thousands suffered as a result of erroneous ways to determine the identities of landowners. It is unbelievable that “Uncle Ho”, the personification of nationalism in North Vietnam, would allow and support such untenable and ill-conceived means. His inexperience in these matters caused undeserved suffering amongst its people, from faithful Vietminh supporters to the normal peasant. It can be inferred that his approval of the features of the land reform raised doubts towards the Ho gover

Ho Chi Minh’s actions were incautious and not effective in his Vietnam Reunification cause. These partly resulted in an extension of the Vietnam War, impeding the potential of an earlier realization of his objective

After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, 1954, French leaders conceded to put the Indochina issue on the table in the upcoming Geneva Conference. Ho Chi Minh and his Party occupied approximately 75% of Vietnam, with French strongholds being the major cities. The French lost the desire to control Vietnam under the French Union and were busy removing their Expeditionary Corps from Vietnam. General Giap of Vietminh believed if the U.S. were not to interfere, complete victory could be achieved in 5 years. Both French and American officials at the time believed that any political settlement would have “left Ho Chi Minh in control of the entirety of Vietnam”. However, the Vietminh was persuaded to negotiate Vietnam within Geneva Conference. This meant that the colonial war between France and Vietminh would be settled within the context of other cold-war disputes. This gave Ho Chi Minh and his Party a disadvantage in the negotiating table, as the struggle for freedom brings a muchly different conclusion in relation to the struggle for communism.

Both the Chinese (mainland) and Vietnamese delegates were wary of pushing for a complete take-over of Vietnam in fear of possible American intervention. While the caution is not unfounded, it would have been more effective for the Vietminh to continue the conflict, especially after a huge victory at Dien Bien Phu. The French did outnumber the Vietminh, but the latter was more experienced in jungle and guerilla warfare and supported by neighboring China, as compared to the conventional warfare the French were familiar with and the vast inexperience of the recruited Vietnamese under the French Flag whose American endorsement was thousands of miles away. It should be noted that the U.S.-led Military Assistance and Advisory Group had been sent in 1950 to assist in training Vietnamese soldiers, and advise on strategy. However, the French disregarded them which led to a weak French military force.

This showed that had Ho Chi Minh pursued the war instead of negotiations, the probability of complete victory in Vietnam would have been high, owing to the divided French and Americans’ collaboration, the fall of morale and withdrawal of troops after Dien Bien Phu and the not-much-superior French army. Ho Chi Minh should not have agreed to the Conference because this would leave the Vietminh in a disadvantageous negotiating position. His decision hence impeded the potential of an earlier realization of Vietnam Reunification.

Ho Chi Minh repressed the people and violated the Geneva Accords. He did not put his people in front as a Nationalist, but instead tried to remove anti-government voices through violence and unjust means.

On November 2, 1956, in the district of Nghe An, an uprising started in Ho Chi Minh’s native province of Quynh Luu. This was a localized event in reaction to the abuses and grievances as a result of the execution of the land reform campaign of 1954-6. The violation of Geneva Accords by impeding movement to the South was also a catalyst to the discontent.

Prior to the uprising, Nghe An experienced several killings of Vietnamese cadres (who were tasked with the agrarian reform). It had a revenge motive, against those who singled out local Catholics as “conservatives”. It created discord based on religious views. According to Nhan Dan, the Hanoi newspaper, “reactionary gangsters” attempted to use Catholic grievances for their own ends. Their plan included enlisting youths for paramilitary training and building defensive barricades around villages. Local peasants also petitioned to Canadian members of the International Control Commission regarding the planned protest. They obtained weapons and the uprising begun.

Ho Chi Minh sent PAVN 325th division to quell the rebellion. One reported that “twenty thousand peasants armed with sticks and other crude weapons, had fought against a whole division of regular troops”. Through violent means, an estimate of 6,000 peasants were killed, arrested or deported. It is disputed on whether the uprising spread to other parts of the province, but the Nghe An uprising is the largest and most brutally suppressed.

Ho’s government policies and Geneva Accords violation caused the built-up of dissent within the people, yet he employed force and violence to suppress the dissidents when he was supposed to protect them. He did not show empathy to the very people he fought for, and willfully deployed the army against peasants.

Nhan Van-Giai Phan was a political protest movement in the late 1950s. In 1955, there were protests over the limitations of content produced by writers and artists. The Government had placed restrictions on what can be published, leading to discontent within the intellectual community. Nhan Van journal – and subsequently the Giai Phan journal – was published in 1956 by these intellectuals to publish criticisms of the Ho regime. The Vietminh eventually encouraged intellectuals, reactionaries and pro-democracy activists to criticize and speak out against the government without fear of reprisal.

In November 1956, the Party began to “retaliate” by publishing content condemning these journals for their anti-communist elements. It is believed that the Vietminh harassed the editors of Nhan Van and Giai Pham by inculpating them of charges as trivial as not delivering three copies of the journal with the Central Press Office before publication. Nhan Van was alleged to have “distorted the truth, exaggerated facts, made up stories, sowed doubts and pessimism in the Ho regime, the Vietminh and government, and created an atmosphere of mistrust and division”.

By January 1958, Nhan Van, Giai Phan and other journals were forced to shut down, with the government dictating the removal of “anti-Vietminh elements” from literary establishments, and the intellectuals were subjected to Marxism-Leninism re-education and hard labor. Hundreds of writers and artists were forced into a re-education course, “self-criticism”, and some were even imprisoned and forced into labor camps.

This showed that Ho Chi Minh had deliberately attempted to remove anti-government voices through reprisals, despite once encouraging them. He repressed the intellectuals just because they believed otherwise on his government and leadership. It is unjustified because he was supposed to strengthen the unity of the country as a Nationalist, instead he penalized them for actions thought to be acceptable.

Although Ho Chi Minh is respected as the faultless being who helped reunify the two Vietnams, an in-depth analysis unearths evidence of his flaws and misdeeds in contrary to the belief of his perfection. His approval of inherently flawed policies and methods, suppression of anti-government movements and actions which impeded the reunification of Vietnam are obvious faults that could be avoided. While his weaknesses brought suffering and subjugation of his citizens, it is undeniable that he was quintessential in the road of reunification under the banner of the Vietminh.