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Vietnam's hero

KENNY COYLE looks at the life of General Vo Nguyen Giap, an icon of Indochina's liberation

This weekend saw the state funeral of Vo Nguyen Giap, who died last week in Hanoi at the age of 102.

Giap was one of the 20th century's most inspirational revolutionary figures.

A national hero, he played a decisive role in the liberation and reunification of his beloved Vietnam by humbling the greatest of empires.

A strategic genius, Giap's defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu is regarded as one of the most skilfully directed battles in history.

As commander of Vietnamese forces in the anti-US struggle he successfully implemented his doctrine of "people's war," leading not only a million uniformed fighters but also rallying the support of the widest sections of the Vietnamese people to achieve victory.

Giap was born in 1911 in a small village in Quang Binh, Annam, one of three Vietnamese territories in what was then French Indochina.

His father was a minor mandarin, a local scholar in the Confucian tradition but with strong anti-colonialist leanings. He died in prison in 1919 after being jailed by the French colonialists for subversion.

Soon afterwards Giap's older sister died, just a couple of weeks after being released from a jail term handed down for her political activity.

Inhuman prison conditions had contributed to their early deaths. Less than 10 years old at the time, Giap had first-hand experience of the deadly grip of colonialism.

As a teenager in the late 1920s Giap joined the New Vietnam Revolutionary Party, a radical nationalist organisation with pro-communist currents, and was a regular writer for its paper People's Voice.

Like many others of his generation Giap gradually realised the limitations of "pure" nationalism. In a later interview with US journalist Stanley Karnow he told of how he came across an illicit collection of works by Marx in French at the home of a friendly schoolteacher.

"I spent my nights reading them, and my eyes opened. Marxism promised revolution, an end to oppression, the happiness of mankind.

"It echoed the appeals of Ho Chi Minh, who had written that downtrodden peoples should join the proletariat of all countries to gain their liberation. Nationalism made me a Marxist, as it did so many Vietnamese intellectuals and students."

By 1937 Giap had both gained a law degree and membership of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP).

He married a fellow student and communist activist, Nguyen Thi Quang Thai. Writing for a variety of ICP newspapers in French and Vietnamese, Giap neglected his legal studies and turned instead to teaching history to support his family.

In this period, the ICP attempted to make use of the greater political space temporarily afforded by the victory of Leon Blum's Popular Front government in France.

However the 1940 Nazi invasion of France and its installing of the Vichy collaborationist regime saw Vichy supporters take control of the Indochinese colonies and unleash a new wave of repression.

One prominent victim was Giap's sister-in-law Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, a leading ICP activist who was shot by the French in 1940. Her husband Le Hong Phong died two years later in the infamous "tiger cages" of the Con Dao penal colony.

Quang Thai, who had been jailed by the French for her resistance activities, died in captivity in early 1944 while Giap himself escaped death by fleeing to China, regrouping with other ICP exiles.

Here he met Ho Chi Minh, who wanted Giap to oversee military preparations despite his protest that "I wield a pen, not a sword."

In 1941 ICP leaders returned to Vietnam and established the Vietminh national liberation movement. In December 1944 Giap set up its military wing, the Armed Propaganda Brigade for Liberation of Vietnam.

He formed his first unit with 31 men, three women and scarcely any functioning weapons.

The Vietminh's declaration of independence in September 1945 was a dead letter as simultaneously the French, with British and Japanese assistance, returned.

The Vietminh was unable to translate its political strength into military power in time, having an armed force numbering little more than 1,000.

Reneging on their promises of negotiated independence the French re-established a colonial administration, but were now faced with a protracted war as the Vietminh swiftly trained and recruited its military forces - with Giap as supreme commander.

The victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 allowed Giap's forces, now known as the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), access to heavy arms supplies.

The war against France reached a turning point in 1954. French forces concentrated near the border with Laos at Dien Bien Phu, where they hoped to draw the poorer armed Vietminh forces into a trap.

However they had underestimated Giap's meticulous attention to logistical detail and the Vietnamese willingness to undergo any sacrifice to free their homeland.

Giap assembled forces twice the size expected by the French and strategically located camouflaged artillery in the heights surrounding the French base.

Patiently and methodically, Giap's forces wore the French down. After 55 days the base fell. The Vietminh took almost 12,000 prisoners and left the French empire humiliated. Within weeks France agreed to the partition of Vietnam into the communist-led Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the State of Vietnam, later the Republic of Vietnam, in the south.

From the liberated north Giap continued to help build up the military strength of the liberation movement, the PAVN in the north and the National Liberation Front (NLP) in the south.

In 1962 Frederick Praeger, a publishing house closely linked with the US intelligence community, translated and published a series of Giap's writings under the title People's War, People's Army - a sure sign of US nervousness about its growing involvement in the north-south conflict.

In an introduction by a US intelligence expert Giap's work was compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Two years later the Gulf of Tonkin incident would herald direct US intervention as South Vietnamese troops proved unable to cope and what Vietnamese people know as the American War would begin in earnest.

As with the French, the US consistently underestimated the tenacity and ingenuity of the Vietnamese.

Although US authorities were capable of recognising Giap's military brilliance they were unable to comprehend his world outlook or that of his compatriots and Giap's reputation as a military strategist often overlooks two key factors.

First, as a former history teacher, he researched the military traditions of Vietnam, particularly its feudal period, to develop a strategy that was rooted in its own soil.

Second, he brought the insights of Marxism to bear, especially Lenin's insistence on revolutionaries mastering a broad spectrum of tactics and methods.

As Giap wrote later in his memoirs: "Our party never had a purely military strategy. Nor had it restricted the war to guerilla tactics.

"The party's revolutionary war represented an overall strategy combining military, political and diplomatic struggles."

During the Vietnamese Lunar New Year Festival of 1968, the famous Tet offensive targeted the heart of the US war machine.

National Liberation Front units fought inside the grounds of the US embassy in Saigon and the US and its South Vietnamese satellite forces lost control of the key central Vietnamese city of Hue for several days.

The Vietnamese losses were substantial and strategic goals were not achieved. Yet devastating images of Vietnamese defiance helped turn decisive sections of US public opinion against a war that now seemed unwinnable as well as unjust.

Looking back, Giap noted that the revolutionary forces had sometimes failed to learn the need to make tactical retreats and had thus taken heavier losses than necessary.

Nonetheless the die was cast. Despite a last desperate murderous round of bombing by Nixon in Christmas 1972, the US cut and run in 1973.

By the early months of 1975, South Vietnam's army was on the ropes. Vietnam People's Army forces swept through the south linking up with the NLF underground. A campaign that had been scheduled to triumph in 1976 liberated Saigon on April 30 1975.

Giap flew to the southern city almost immediately. Inspecting the military technology left behind, Giap was astonished at its sophistication but noted that it hadn't saved either the US or the Saigon regime.

"In the end, human beings are the decisive factor," he said.

Giap's long and extraordinary life surely is proof of that.

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