Dear friends,

The purpose of this open letter is to bring to your attention the actual painful reality of our  beloved  country. We are at the beginning of the year of 2020, which is allegedly believed to be the beginning of the process of making Viet Nam a part of China according to the agreement signed at the Chengdu Summit Meeting in 1990, between the leaders of the two Communist parties of China and Vietnam.  Our country has been on the edge of hell of being disappeared on the planet. Vietnam as an independent country would cease to exist.  The Vietnamese people would become just an ethnic minority of China and its multi-thousand-year culture would be lost.  According to Communism, the World should be an Universal World (Thế giới đại đồng) without border between countries as Nguyễn Văn Linh, former Head of the Vietnamese Communist Party (from now on referred to as VCP) from 1991 to 1997, once declared: It is better to lose the country than to lose the Party.

1. Looking back at some painful events in recent Vietnam’s history

On 17 February, 1979, without warning, 1/2 million Chinese soldiers, heavily armed with tanks and extremely powerful artilleries, crossed the 1281-km-border, which separated Vietnam and China, and invaded our country with the pretext «to teach Vietnam a lesson».  The order given to Chinese troupes by their superiors in Beijing was:  kill all, destroy all, destroy everything. The Chinese Army was commanded by two generals: Dương Dắc Chí and Hứa Thế Hữu.  (Hữu was a 7^th-generation descendant of Hứa Thế Hanh, who, as a general of the defeated expeditionary army of the Ching Dynasty under the command of Tôn Sĩ Nghị, had been executed by Emperor Quang Trung, after the Battle of Đống Đa Hill in 1789). Six border provinces were totally destroyed, all living beings including domestic animals, were brutally, wildly and savagely killed, beyond imagination by Chinese invaders. This is typically a form of genocide committed by China against innocent Vietnamese people.

Both sides, Vietnam and China, never announced their casualties during this war which lasted for about one month.  Nevertheless, public opinions all concluded it was a fiasco with regard to Chinese People’s Liberation Army (CPLA).

The author of this letter was born in 1945, just a few months before the August Revolution, as it was called with pride by Vietnamese Communists.  In reality, Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades have «robbed the power» of the legal Vietnamese Government led by the scholar Trần Trọng Kim in the same year.  So I was born and have grown up entirely during the wars. The Vietnamese Communist Party, led by Hồ Chí Minh, has succeeded in taking over the political power in Vietnam as they declared the VCP as the only party capable of bringing back the independence for our country from French domination for more than half of a century.

Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades in the VCP have seized half of the country in 1954 and the whole country on 30/4/1975 after a long and bloody invasion of South Vietnam (i.e. the Republic of Vietnam) in order to impose The Communist Doctrine on the whole country by force, terror and deliberate killing. As a matter of fact, Vietnam was the first step in the plan of International Communism to invade and spread the Communist doctrine into the whole Southeast Asian area.

2. Ho Chi Minh and the VCP: their Crimes of Genocide against their fellow-countrymen

Before talking about the crimes of Ho Chi Minh and his comrades-in-arms against Vietnamese people, we must try to understand the meaning of a crime of genocide.

The term GENOCIDE was coined in 1943 by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin,  who combined the Greek word genos (race or tribe) with the Latin word cide (to kill).  In December 1948, the term of GENOCIDE was adopted by the United Nations (UN), and the official use of the term came into effect in January 1951. The word genocide was well defined as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades of the VCP have waged the most devastating wars, wars of blood and tears in our country, from 1945 to 1975, in order to impose by force the Communist Doctrine over the whole Viet Nam.

– In 1930, Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese Communist Party officially entered the political panorama of Vietnam.  It was the beginning of The Great Flooding (Cơn Đại Hồng Thủy), which happened to the Vietnamese people and this the tragedy suffered by the Vietnamese people is still going on.

– During 30 years of a useless, absolutely unnecessary and costly war, 3 tọ 5 million  Vietnamese have lost their lives.  Hà Nội regime has been hiding the exact number of casualties in term of human lives.  So we will never know the exact number of human destructions.  On the other hand, to add to this number of deaths, we should be taking in account an equal number of families destroyed and of orphans whom father or mother  were killed in the conflict.

– Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades in the VCP have eliminated all other non-communist political parties. They systematically killed members of other Nationalist Parties in order to obtain the monopoly of spreading their Communist Doctrine over Vietnam, first step on their way to spreading Communist System to Southeast Asia following the order of International  Communism.

– The whole Vietnam has become an immense cemetery in which thousands and thousands  Vietnamese Youths and others would be summarily buried.

We will discuss in detail the crimes of genocide committed by Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades against Vietnamese people from then  until  right now.

Hồ Chí Minh was an agent of International Communism.  He returned to Vietnam in the 1920s after having lived many years in Russia. His mission was to spread the Communist doctrine among the Vietnamese people and then among the people of all the surrounding countries of Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia….  He was responsible for the death of millions of peoples. His bloody hands were responsible directly or indirectly for the crimes of genocide in Vietnam.

The Polish newspaper, THE POLASKA TIMES, in its issue of March 15, 2011,  compiled a list of 13 most blood-thirsty dictators, who were responsible of the death of millions people around the world in the 20th century.  In this select group, among notorious killers  such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, etc. was Ho Chi Minh, the most «venerable hero»  of the  Vietnamese  Bolcheviks.

Communist Terrors from 1954 to 1975 in North of Vietnam.

The war, from 1945 to 1954, to liberate our country from the French colonization was a very patriotic war involving Vietnamese people from all walks of life but Hồ and his comrades claimed the victory theirs when the French Army was defeated at the Battle of Điên Biên Phủ.  In the fight of the Vietnamese people against French Occupation, Ho Chi Minh and his comrades, backed by International Communism, especially China, have taken all control.

In 1949, the Chinese Communists under Mao Tsé Tung defeated the Chinese nationalist army commanded by Chiang Kai-shek and took control of the whole Chinese territory.  China, therefore, became a huge rear base for the troupes of Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades.  After the defeat in the Fall-Winter Campaign of 1947 (Chiến dịch Thu Đông 1947), French Army has retreated from the border region.  Consequently, Hồ Chí Minh and his Communist Army have controlled a very large safe zone. With advices from the Chinese, Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades have applied Communist regime on the population under their control.

The Geneva Accords, signed on July 20, 1954, has given up the Northern half of the country to the VCP, from the 17th  parallel up to the border with China. After their occupation of that half of the country, Ho Chi Minh and his Communist Party have taken a tight control over the whole population on whom, a brutal dictatorship of the proletariat was applied.  A number of programs, starting from 1949-1950, were put in place:

• Land Reform ( Cải Cách Ruộng Đất )

This totally cruel and deadly land reform was carried out exactly like the one in China because Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades were strictly following advices from the advisors sent by the Chinese Communist Party.  During the whole time of this program, the VCP was called The Labor Party of Vietnam (LPV).  Originally, the real name of LPV was Indochina Communist Party which was founded on June 17, 1929.  After 1930, facing the boycott of the word Communism, and in order to keep the Party alive, Ho Chi Minh and his comrades had to change the name of their Party and in the same time, Ho has declared  The Indochina Communist Party was no longer existed, being replaced by a Society by the name: Association of Marxist Research, run by none other than Trường Chinh (Đặng Xuân Khu), who was the right hand of Hồ Chí Minh.

Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades entered Hà Nội on October 9, 1954 to officially declare half of Vietnam, from 17th parallel to the border with China, as a Communist country.  It was a very closed society in which its citizens were not allowed to get in touch with the outside world.  Hồ and his comrades in the VCP’s Politburo have continued the deadly land reform. The land reform program has continued until 1956-1957 before being abolished by Hồ and his Politburo mainly because of protests of all Vietnamese people against this deliberate, barbarian killing like the Middle Ages.

The land reform was, indeed, a massacre of innocent people.  Using the contemporary term, we must say it was a genocide trigged by class discrimination. From 1949 to 1956, according to Hà Nội’s official statistics, the land reform was responsible for the death of more than 172,000 innocent, honest people.  But according to  Nguyễn Minh Cần, former Hanoi Government Official, the death number could reach easily 1 million people.

–  Program to reform industry and trade (Cải tạo công thương nghiệp) The purpose of this program was to abolish the difference between rich and poor people.  Nobody was allowed to be rich.  In Communist society, there is only one class.  This is the class of the proletariat. The others classes had to be destroyed. The Communist Government would confiscate all the assets of rich people because in a Communist society, no one is allowed to be rich.

• Reform of armed forces ( Rèn cán chỉnh quân)

This reform has begun in the early 1950’s.  The purpose of this reform was for the army to get rid of all individuals who did not belong to the class of the proletariat.  It was a blunt act of class discrimination.  A few thousand members of The People’s Army were eliminated.  We do not have the exact number.  Another program happened in the The People’s Army and was called Movement of Three Steps to Make the People’s Army Perfect (Phong trào Tam Phản), very similar to a movement by the same name in China .

• Suppression of Humanist Movement among the class of intellectuals, journalists and writers (Đàn áp Phong Trào Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm )

This movement, appearing in the late 1950’s (in short NHÂN VĂN GIAI PHẨM), was a North Vietnam’s cultural-political movement, which fought against the tight control by Hồ Chí Minh and the LPV.  It broadly included free-lance journalists, writers and intellectuals of North Vietnam who demanded more democracy, more freedom of speech, more freedom in their writings, creativity and human rights.  The government decided to suppress this movement. Their activities were denounced as counter-revolutionary crimes. The government has crushed this movement without mercy, imposing tight control of press and putting those people in jail.  Their hope for more freedom was over.  Hồ Chí Minh and his Communist Party would never untie the whole population living under their control.

• The Uprising in District of Quỳnh Lưu, Province of Nghệ An in 1956

The District of Quỳnh Lưu is located in the Province of Nghe An, birthplace and hometown of Hồ Chí Minh, founder of  the VCP.

Since July 1954, Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades have been in total control of North Vietnam.  In 1955-1956, the Land Reform, starting in 1953, was in full swing.  The reform has caused a lot of resentment everywhere.  The whole society was turned upside down by the Land Reform imposed by local authorities.

Being cornered against the wall, the people of Quỳnh Lưu had no other choice than to stand up, demanding their rights to exist. They have surrounded and neutralized all local authorities, demanding to live as of human beings.  Hồ Chí Minh and his Politburo have ordered General Văn Tiến Dũng to bring to Quynh Lưu two full  divisions  of the People’s Army to squelch the uprising as fast as possible. The so called People’s Army has deliberately opened fire, without discrimination on the protesters, killing on spot a good number of people.

There were no official number of casualties in term of human lives but according to different sources of information, the number of deaths and wounded people could reach easily over 10,000.

3. The invasion of South Vietnam – Republic of Vietnam (1959-1975 ): blood & tears caused by deliberate killing of innocent people and by massive destruction of the infrastructure of South Vietnam’s society.

According to the Geneva Accords, signed on July 20, 1954, Vietnam was temporarily divided into two parts.  A general election would be organized in 1956.  Hồ Chi Minh and his comrades in the VCP have prepared very carefully for this election.  But the election never happened because the Government of the late President Ngô Đình Diệm refused to honor the Geneva Peace Accords under the pretext that the Republic of Vietnam had never signed it, and, therefore, the Republic of Vietnam had no obligation to hold that election.

Hồ and his comrades of the VCP have predicted this refusal and have prepared to seize the South by force.  Their followers were given order to stay behind, and go into hiding,  waiting order to start the war in the South. The Commander of Communists in the South was Lê Duẩn.  In 1958, Lê Duẩn submitted to the Politburo his view about the Communist Revolution in the South.  In his memoir Outline of the Revolution in South Vietnam (Đề Cương Cách Mạng Miền Nam ), Lê Duẩn has declared firmly : Using force is the only way to conquer South Vietnam.The Ho Chi Minh trail which was located alongside of the Chain of Mountains Trường Sơn, and inside the Laos-Vietnam border, was reopened by Communist Forces, led by Communist General Võ Bẩm.  Thereafter, Ho and his comrades in the VCP were able to infiltrate soldiers, weapons, and supplies to the South in order to prepare for the invasion.

The invasion of the South was a total war in many fronts: military, political, economic, terrorism, propaganda especially on the international level, destabilizing the lives of all people in the South from the city to the remote countryside.  The National Front for the Liberation of the South, or National Liberation Front (NLF), a puppet political organization of Vietnamese Communist, was created in December 1960 in the jungle under their control.  In the same year, Communist Guerrillas have intensified their terrors over the country sides, deliberately killing innocent people.  The first military battle (Decrember 26, 1960 ) was the Battle of Trãng Sụp in Tây Ninh Province, not very far from the Capital City of Sàigòn.  Trãng Sụp was defended by the 32nd Regiment of the 21st Infantry Division. The war has intensified between the “so called” Communist insurgents and the Republic of Vietnam Army.

From 1959 to the fateful day of April 30, 1975, the day the Republic of Vietnam ceased to exist, the Vietnamese Communists have waged a brutal, total war of invasion.  After having finally occupied the whole Republic of Vietnam, Lê Duẩn, First Secretary of the VCP, has openly declared: «We have been fighting hard, but not for us. As the matter of fact, it was for Russia, for China». It was therefore a pure proxy war, no more no less, and Vietnamese Communists were the invaders.

During these 16 years of this crazy proxy war, Vietnamese Communists have committed numerous crimes against Vietnamese people, such as:

– Deliberate, massive killings of innocent people.  All the civil servants, even at the very lowest level of the government of South Vietnam (i.e. the Republic of Vietnam) were systematically assassinated.  The Communists, between 1967 and 1973, have killed from 45,000 to 80,000 people, of whom about 20% were government officials, self defense forces, and policemen. All vicious tactics were used such as: shelling, mortaring the strategic hamlets and refugee camps, and laying mines on highway.  When those mines went off, they caused extensive slaughter of people on board of the vehicles in traffic.

The US Department of Defense estimated that the VC / PAVN (Vietnamese Communists.  People’s Army of Vietnam) had conducted 36,000 murders, and more than 58,000 kidnappings from 1967 to 1973.

Notable Communist atrocities included the massacre of Huế during the Têt Offensive 1968  in which more than 6000 civilians were murdered in cold blood by them using the most barbarous methods of killing of the Middle Age such as : burying people alive, stabbing them, killing them by using bamboo sticks, etc.  More than 155,000 civilians were killed by Communist artillery when they have tried to flee the war zones during the Spring Offensive in 1972.  A segment of no more than 19km of Highway Number 1, from Quảng Trị toward Huế, was littered with corpses of civilians on their way to escape the VC attacks.  This segment of Highway No 1 was baptized: Boulevard of Terror and Death (Đại Lộ Kinh Hoàng)

Communist suicide agents spread terror, deaths and destructions … everywhere such as:

*Explosion and destruction of hotel Brink

*Explosion of the famous floating restaurant Mỹ Cảnh in Saigon Harbor.

*Daily blocking highway, transport routes, laying roadside mines, destroying bridges…, thus causing insecurity among the civilians which would have negative consequences on the economy of the South.

*Spreading terror and death everywhere by deliberate firing cannons into populous areas  such as school, markets…. For example, on 10/3/1974, a primary school in Cai Lậy District Province of My Tho, was bombarded by VC Artillery. The school was completely destroyed and a good number of students got killed and many students sustained severe injuries which would cause death later or became handicapped for the rest of their lives.

In summary, the invasion of Republic of Vietnam by the Vietnamese Communists was an unprecedented disaster:

* the whole country was almost destroyed by the war.  The bombs used in the Republic of Vietnam during those years of fighting (1959 to 1975) were much more than the ones used in World War ÌI

* the invasion of Republic of Vietnam was a very costly war:

– the whole country, from the 17th parallel to Cap of Cà Mau, was destroyed, not a single inch of land of our fatherland was not bombed.

–  hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers were killed in 16 years of fighting. The exact casualties of the Republic of Vietnam Army were published by the US Department of Defense: 310,000 KIA and MIA, and 1,170,000 wounded.   For each soldier, we should count and include 4 or 5 civilians.  Millions and millions of families were broken and millions and millions of children have become orphans overnight.

4. The killings in the South of Vietnam committed by the Vietnamese Communists right after April 30, 1975.

The fighting in the battlefields was ended but the Communists continued to kill people in the South in many ways:

* More than a million of former military servicemen, government officials of the Republic of Vietnam were send to hundred of prisons scattered in the remote jungles around the country. The Communists called those prisons re-education camps.   More than 167,000 «trainees» in those re-education camps have died by different reasons such as:

– different diseases without any medical cares

– starvation, hunger, hardship, torture, long solitary confinement, recapture after trying to escape from the prison.

– one million people in prison are equivalent to one million of broken families, one million families were in extremely misery. The whole society was in trouble and turned upside down.

According to The Victims of Communist Memorial Foundation, nearly 850,000 prisoners have died in different re-educations camps- in reality the hardship prisons- erected by the Vietnamese Communists. By imprisoning millions of officials, soldiers of the Republic of Viet Nam without legal process, the VCP has committed 5 of 11 Crimes against Humanity which were defined by International Law, Article 7 of The Roma Statute.

*  The healthcare system of South Vietnam, before April 30, 1975, was very effective in taking care of a population of about 20 million.  Obviously, there were some private healthcare institutions in big city like Saigon but people still, with trust, rely on healthcare system being provided by the Government.  Immediately after their takeover of Saigon, Communists closed all military hospitals.  All patients, wounded soldiers, even severely wounded, were all pushed out of the hospitals in a very cruel, inhuman way beyond imagination.The “winners of the war’’ have dismantled all modern, sophisticated machineries in all hospitals of the South, and brought those stolen equipments to the North, i.e. North of the 17^th parallel by many columns of convoys of Molotova.

• By their policy of money exchange in less than 24h and by very limited amount allowed, Communist Authorities have robbed ti the last cents in the pocket of the ordinary citizens .
• Their policy of commerce / trade reform has pushed everybody to the bottom of poverty. The Communist Government has confiscated everything, all the money. People’s properties were confiscated and peoples were pushed out of their businesses. They have no other choices except to go to the “new economic zones,” a form on confinement created by the Government.
• When the Republic of Vietnam was about to fall to the hands of the red monsters, South Vietnamese began to escape the imminent Communists takeover by any means: boats, flight, etc. Those freedom seekers have preferred to risk their life than living under Communist regime.  More than half a million people were drowned in the Pacific Ocean., a real tragedy of the Vietnamese people.  The escape for freedom has continued until the late 1990.  Now, more than 3 million Vietnamese are living in many democratic countries around the world including USA, Canada, France, Europe, Australia, etc…. They are thriving in those adopted countries.
• The whole country has become a huge prison, well controlled by a very large police force. Everything such as moving from one place to another even closed by, freedom of speech, freedom of press, etc. are in a very tight control by the Government.

5. Vietnam: a besieged country.

Vietnam today is entirely inside China Orbit on many aspects:

– Economically speaking, Vietnam is heavily dependent on China.   More than 90% of imported merchandises came from China.  The whole country has been flooded with toxic and poisonous foods and goods.  So we are not surprised by the fact that Vietnam is among the group of country which have a very high rate of cancer.  Toxic foods, toxic materials from China could be found everywhere in the whole country and the government in Hà Nội has been ignoring or seems to ignore this severe danger for the whole population.

– With regard to international politics, Vietnam has been an absolute obedient valet of   China.  Vietnamese Communist leaders, before going abroad, has to go to Bejing for instructions and orders.

– Militarily speaking, Vietnam has been surrounded on all sides:

* in the East, the powerful Chinese Navy has become an absolute master.  If any conflict happen, Chinese military force stationed close to Vietnamese seaside could easily attack, occupy Đèo Cả Hill and divide Viet Nam in two separate parts

* in the North, with its numerous dams alongside Mekong River, and Hồng Hà River, China can use water as a weapon to attack Vietnam.

Millions and millions of Chinese are now living in Vietnam.  With a column of Chinese servicemen alongside the Trường Sơn Mountain, they would be the 5^th column which would attack the whole country from this side.

6. Vietnam would it be a part of China? Are we losing our beloved country?

This danger is real and imminent. Communist China with the collusion, the complicity of the VCP, has been slowly swallowing our beloved Vietnam.  In the early 1990’s different Communist Parties in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union were disintegrated.  Communist Regimes everywhere were falling like autumn leaves.  In order to survive, the VCP did not have other choice than to rely on China, which was one Communist country that has survived this «Communist disaster».  After many negotiations, many talks, Vietnam and China have reached a secret pact in September 1990 called  Agreement  of Chengdu (Thành Đô).

Both sides have tried to keep the Agreement secret but quite a bit of information has been leaked. According to those leaking information, Vietnam would become a part of the China, starting in 2020.  The proceedings to join China would be progressive and would be lasted for 40 years.  So, in 2060, Vietnam would officially become a province of China.  The country named Vietnam would cease to exist, so would the Vietnamese people.

 Conclusion

With the complicity and the treason of the VCP, we are facing the danger of losing our beloved country on the hands of our vicious and extremely ambitious neighbor.  Overseas Vietnamese people are the only group of Vietnamese  capable of:

• Preserving our identity
• Preserving and developing our multi-thousand-year culture, including our language
• Building a Vietnam as a country outside the S-shaped land in Southeast Asia.

We say :

Vietnam YESTERDAY: was from 1930 to 1975. The VCP of Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades launched a war which they called war for independence.  In reality it was a real proxy war by order of International Communism and Hồ Chí Minh and his comrades have executed the order like a bunch of mercenaries.   It was an unnecessary and costly war.  It was, indeed, a genocide, no more no less, in the history of our country.

Vietnam TODAY: The conquest of the Republic of Vietnam by the Communists is not finished on April 30, 1975.  The VCP kept destroying the country, killing the people of the South and considered them as second citizens.  On the other hand, they have tried to abolish the culture, the language of Vietnam.  Once occupied completely by China, the killing would continue like in Tibet, in Xinjiang.

Vietnam TOMORROW: Under Communist Regime, Vietnam has no future.  The future of our beloved country is very dark in the perspective of becoming a part of China. Vietnam, as a country, will disappear on the map of the world.  The Overseas Vietnamese People are the only hope for the survival of our country.

Nguyễn Lương Tuyền MD, CSPQ, FRCSc
McGill University, Canada
March, 2020