VIETNAM, NEWS ANALYSIS, MAY 6, 2000

On May 2, 2000, the Vietnam Communist party and its government announced that Mr. Pham Van Dong, former Politburo of the party, former prime minister, died in Hanoi on April 2, 2000 after several months of serious illness at the age of 94. Commemoration and funeral service were held on May 6, 2000 in Hanoi.

According to Hanoi official announcement, Mr. Pham Van Dong was born into a civil servant family in Duc Tan village, Mo Duc district, in Quang Ngai province on the central coast on March 1, 1906.

In 1925 at the age of 18, he joined patriotic students to stage a school sit-in to mourn the death of the famous patriotic scholar Phan Chu Trinh. In 1926, he traveled to Guangzhou in southern China to attend a training course run by Nguyen Ai Quoc (later to be known as Ho Chi Minh) before being admitted as a member of the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association, the predecessor of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).

In 1929, he worked for the association in Saigon. In the same year, he was arrested, tried by the French colonial authorities and was sentenced ten years in prison. One source alleged that he was charged with murder along with Ton Duc Thang, who succeeded Ho Chi Minh in 1969 as North Vietnam president. The "Barbier Street case" as it was known, was the murder of a Communist local leader who was sentenced to death by the party local committee who accused him of treachery.

He served the term in Poulo Condor Island Prison until 1936 when he was released thanks to the general amnesty granted by the government of the Popular Front in France after its electoral success.

He then continued to take part in activities of Ho Chi Minh's Indochinese Communist Party. After Ho Chi Minh rose in power on August 18, 1945, Pham Van Dong was appointed minister of finance of the newly established government, the so-called Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). But he has been better known to people outside since he was appointed the head of the Ho Chi Minh government delegation to the Vietnam-France negotiations at Fontainebleau (France) in May 1946.

In May 1954, he was leading the delegation of Ho Chi Minh government to the Geneva Conference on Indochina.

At the 5th session of the DRV First National Congress, Dong was appointed prime minister. (This assembly had been elected Jan. 4 1946 and only half of the members remained after 1954. The others left for the nationalist side or assassinated in the late 1940s). He stayed in this position for the next 32 years until 1987 when his retirement was approved by the 6th Party National Congress.

As an advisor to the Party Central Committee from 1987 to 1997, he often urged the party to have more efforts to stop corruption. He kept giving advice on the similar issues even when he was no more the advisor of the central committee and became so ill that he had to have someone else write down his words on papers.

His father was a medium ranking mandarin serving the imperial court in Hue. However, according to his biography released by the VCP Central Committee, "he was born into the family of a civil servant." The Communist leader might have decided that the political background of a "civil servant's" family sounds better than that of a "mandarin" to the communist's ears.

During the 32 years serving the Communist regime as prime minister, there was 6 years from 1981 to 1987, his job title was changed to "Chairman of the Council of Ministers," as Hanoi's Constitution was modified after the new Soviet Union Constitution.

Actually, Mr. Pham Van Dong did not have the full authority of a prime minister. He was doing his job under the great influence exerted by VCP General Secretary Le Duan and Politburo most powerful member Le Duc Tho. Since 1955, once in every few years, his government raised the issues of anti-corruption and simplifying the administration system, red tape and personnel. So far, his legacy in the Communist administration still is not much different than in the 1950s.

Under him, any change in administrative procedures took a lot of time. Since a policy was decided, the related minister took full authority to implement, Dong wouldn't interfere however much necessary.

His power was further dwindling in the 1980s. In a personal visit with his friend, a Communist army general in 1983, Mr. Dong said to him, "We've reached complete deadlock. When I tell them anything, they nod approval. But after that they are doing nothing at all."

Though not so loquacious as Mr. Vo Nguyen Giap, Mr. Pham Van Dong sometimes paid lip services to his regime's victims. In the early 1980s when the wave of Vietnamese fleeing their beloved country rose high, he responded to a foreign reporter's question, saying that "Every time I heard of a boat sunk in the sea and boatmen drowned, I was moved to tears..."

He proved how his administration was running the education system when he noted that "Our officials and cadres are attending complementary general education courses at too short time: they often graduated 4 grades in one year. We should slow them down." So far, they haven't been slowed down. In this system, a party cadre who had been a 2nd grade drop-out could attend complementary courses in two years to be awarded a high school diploma of the 10-year system, or 36 months to get a diploma of 12-year system. Such diplomas are necessary to secure a high and profitable job.

On another occasion, he told a group of party members that "Foreign aid is a dose of poison coated with sugar. Taking it leads to death, but not taking it leads to death as well." His comment came at the time when the VCP regime fell in serious economic downfall in the early 1980s, forcing his government to turn to non-communist powers for assistance.

As formal education is concerned, Mr. Pham Van Dong completed his junior high, but flunked in the Baccalaureate First Part (11th grade) exam before he joined the Communist movement. Anyway, he and Vo Nguyen Giap are the only two who reached that high at school. Ninth graders and higher at that time were fluent in reading and writing French language. Most of the other VCP top level leaders dropped out of school at fifth-grade or lower.

Mr. Dong was not an eloquent speaker. His thick voice with unattractive countenance and gesture partly undermined his well-prepared speeches. His portrait published in Hanoi newspapers following articles about his death is one taken many years ago when he still looked not too old and rather healthy. The same trick has been done with Ho Chi Minh's portrait.

His family life seems somewhat abnormal. His wife suffers some kind of mental illness and has been hospitalized many times for psychiatric treatment.

Rumors in North Vietnam run that Mr. Pham Van Dong was a major participant in a corruption scheme in the late 1970s, in which he got a kickback of several thousand dollars in exchange for the release and repatriation of each of the thousand Taiwanese citizens and government officials who remained in South Vietnam after April 30, 1975. The rumor, however, has not been confirmed by independent sources or by more credible hearsay evidence.

The biggest unremovable stain he left in the Vietnam history is probably his diplomatic message sent to Beijing on September 14, 1959. On behalf of the North Vietnamese government, Mr. Pham Van Dong recognized and supported Beijing's territorial claim on the Paracel Islands and Spratly Islands, then under legal control of the Republic of (South) Vietnam.

In general, Mr. Pham Van Dong has been a staunch communist leader, the most faithful disciple of Ho Chi Minh. All his life he is maintaining his neutral position in every internal conflict in the party. A majority of well-informed people in Hanoi believe that Mr. Dong might be the only top leader who is not (or least) corrupt.

Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan were somewhat sex-starved old men. Truong Chinh and Le Duc Tho were extremely authoritarian power addicts. But Pham Van Dong was none of those. Moreover, Mr. Dong involved the least in the bloody purges and massacres committed by the Communists from 1945 to 1975.

Among all VCP leaders including Ho Chi Minh, Mr. Pham Van Dong is the only one whose soul might deserve to be prayed for.

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