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Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace Gabriel Kolko London: Routledge, 1997

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Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace Gabriel Kolko London: Routledge, 1997 Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace Gabriel Kolko London: Routledge, 1997 Reviewed by Kenneth J. Hammond Northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, in Long Anh province lies the district of Cu Chi. Here, during Vietnam's long war against the Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s, a massive system of tunnels was constructed which allowed major forces of the Liberation Army to operate in close proximity to the nerve centre of the American military-sponsored regime. Thousands of soldiers and cadres of the National Liberation Front worked and lived in these tunnels, suffering under harsh jungle conditions, repeated incursions by American and ARVN units, and relentless bombing from unseen 8-52s. In July 1997, I visited Cu Chi and observed two very different legacies from the wartime era. The tunnel complex has been turned into a kind of theme park for tourists, mostly foreigners. The tunnels themselves have been widened to accommodate the girth of Western visitors, and lined with concrete to spare travellers the dirt and dampness of the underground world. A firing range has been set up to allow returning veterans or the merely curious to shoot off bursts of bullets, getting the 'feel' of war, and lending a surreal soundtrack to the scene. Cu Chi was the only place in Vietnam, North or South, where physical signs of the war could stilI be seen - craters from B-52 bombs dot the jungle, looking almost as if they have been preserved to maintain the ambience of battle. The tunnel site is a favourite, almost a mandatory destination for tourists, and the souvenir stands and soda stalls were packed with sweaty Caucasians. Just next to the tunnel site, but not on the itinerary for visiting foreigners, is a brand new memorial to the 50,000 or so Vietnamese who died in the Cu Chi district during the war. Built in the style of traditional village dien, or spiritual halls, but on a much larger scale, this imposing edifice was a beautiful but sobering reminder of the reality of war, and the incredible suffering and sacrifices endured by the Vietnamese people. It was sacred space, not to be profaned by the cameras and sneakers of casually curious travellers. It stood in stark contrast to the scene at the tunnels. This contrast reflects the deeply divided reality of Vietnam today, a reality presented in clear and sombre prose by Gabriel Kolko in his new book. Kolko has long been a scholar of Vietnam and its struggle for independence. His earlier masterwork Anatomy of a War is an excellent overview of the war between Vietnam and United States, tracing in exhaustive detail the course of the war and the political and military complexities on both sides of this epic conflict. Kolko maintains high standards of evidence and objectivity, while nonetheless clearly Historical Materialism supporting the Vietnamese in their quest for freedom from foreign domination - French, American, or Chinese. The victory of the Vietnamese in this protracted war in 1975 was seen by Kolko, and by progressive forces around the world, as a great moment, and as setting the stage for post-war reconstruction and socialist development. The reality of Vietnam in 1997, however, is very different from what might have been expected in the wake of the triumph of April 1975. In the course of two weeks in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, the Mekong Delta and Tay Ninh province that summer, I was repeatedly told by representatives of the Vietnamese government, members of the National Assembly, local officials, and boosters of the Ho Chi Minh City chamber of commerce, that Vietnam has embarked on a course of economic 'reform' which takes as its foundation the creation of a free market, with foreign investment aggressively sought under the guiding hands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In Hanoi, and much more so in Ho Chi Minh City, petty capitalist enterprises were to be seen everywhere. Small shops, restaurants, repair services for bicycles or watches, flower vendors, fruit hawkers, and the ever present cyclo drivers all testified to the dynamism and extent of profit-seeking hustle in Vietnam's cities. Construction cranes, looming office blocks and hotel towers showed that international capital was also pouring in to the country. Bars and brothels catering to foreign businessmen and returning Vietnamese or ethnic Chinese have sprung up as well. How has this come about? How did the promise of socialist revolution, which fuelled the liberation struggle in Vietnam and the solidarity of people around the world, come to be replaced by this explosion of capitalism? And how complete has this change of course been? These are some of the questions Kolko seeks to address in his new book. The key to this puzzle for Kolko is the problematic nature of the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Ironically, in Kolko's view, the same factors which helped the Party win victory in the war undermined its ability effectively to construct a socialist society once the war was over. The geography of Vietnam, the extreme conditions of decentralisation enforced by prolonged warfare, and the rapidity of the final collapse of the Saigon regime once American military support was withdrawn, combined to create a situation by mid-1975 in which the Party found itself in possession of all the territory of Vietnam, but without either a sufficiently large body of cadres or a coherent plan for administering and developing the newly recovered provinces of the south. The central leadership of the Party had grown used to delegating large degrees of autonomy to provincial and local-level Party committees during the war, and this made strong central leadership difficult to create in the new conditions of post-war Vietnam. Large numbers of new Party members were recruited in the months and years immediately after liberation in the south, and many of these proved to be opportunists or worse, using their new status as Party members to 2)0.
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