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FINANCIAL TIMES
Do Muoi, Vietnamese communist leader, 1917-2018 Political career
spanned independence, bloody conflict with US and modern statehood Jeremy Grant Do Muoi, the former
Vietnamese leader, has died at the age of 101, after a political career
that spanned the birth of Vietnam’s struggle for independence, a bloody
conflict with the US and the country’s painful search for modern
statehood. Muoi, who died in a
Hanoi hospital on Monday, was one of a last generation of Vietnamese
leaders that could boast a revolutionary pedigree stretching to the
guerrilla movement against French colonialists in the 1930s. He became Communist
party leader in 1945, and by the time he retired as general secretary in
1997, he was, at 80, older than any other serving communist leader in
China, North Korea, Cuba or Laos. Yet he was scarcely
known in the west. A unique political arrangement made sure of that:
ever since the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, Hanoi has clung to a
collective leadership that prevents any one figure rising to prominence. As a result, outsiders
could rarely name him. Often, they would mix him up with doi moi, the
label given to the tentative, perestroika-style economic reforms that
began in the late 1980s. This was the era in
which Muoi made his mark, steering Vietnam on to the international stage
after years as a virtual pariah state. Breaking with Hanoi's
isolationist past, he was the first party boss to travel to
non-communist states. In 1995, he made his first trip to western,
democratic countries with a state visit to Australia and New Zealand at
the age of 78. His fondness for
tightly buttoned Mao suits and a spartan lifestyle made him seem like a
tough ideologue. In fact, he was a wily pragmatist who never lost his
crude faith in the primacy of party rule as he tried to balance economic
liberalisation with continued political control. Muoi was born into
peasant stock in northern Vietnam and spent his teens as a freelance
housepainter. His itinerant lifestyle
helped him to recruit peasants to the revolutionary cause and he was
admitted to the Communist party of Indochina in 1936. Five years later he was
arrested by the French and jailed in what became the infamous “Hanoi
Hilton” — Hoa Lo — prison for downed US fighter pilots. He escaped to
the jungles of northern Vietnam, masterminding the harassment of French
troops along a highway linking Hanoi with the strategic port of
Haiphong. After the partition of
Vietnam in 1954 into Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam and the French-backed
Saigon regime, Muoi set about purging private businesses and
nationalising factories in Haiphong.
Then, his biography falls virtually silent. Nothing is known of his role
if any in the Vietnam war. There is some evidence that he may have
suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown, shuttling to and from China for
treatment. With the fall of Saigon
in 1975, however, he re-emerged to mastermind “industrialisation” in the
southern part of a now-unified Vietnam. Muoi led convoys of youths into
the centre of the city, smashing into factories, seizing assets and
taking control of banks in a frenzy of nationalisation that made him
instantly and enduringly unpopular in the south. Despite the failure of
nationalisation and the great economic cost to Vietnam in the year that
followed, Muoi rose, unremarkably, through the ranks. One of his tasks
as minister of construction was building the grim, granite mausoleum
where the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh is displayed to passing tourists. He never lost his drive
or his belief in the communist system, even after the shock of the
Soviet collapse. Asked in 1997 whether
the Vietnamese Communist party would ever tolerate the existence of a
small opposition party, he told a rare gathering of foreign journalists:
“If a bee colony has two queens it will split apart. And in a football
match you can only have one referee . . . with two . . . you cannot
control the match.” It was a fitting image
for Muoi himself. His final two years in office were spent juggling the
factions in the party as it struggled with the classic contradiction of
communist states in the late 20th century: how to reconcile creeping
western influence with tight political control. |