People's Democracy

Prakash Karat

All over the world, the 50th anniversary of the battle of Dien Bien Phu is being celebrated on May 7. Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam witnessed one of the greatest battles of the 20th century. Beginning on March 13, 1954, the 55-day siege of the French fortified garrison in a valley in the north-western part in Vietnam near the Laos border became an epic battle between the Communist-led People’s Army (Vietminh) and the French colonial army.

After one and a half months of bitter fighting, the fortified camp fell to the Vietminh soldiers on May 7. The French troops under General de Castries surrendered. Dien Bien Phu marked the death throes of French colonialism in Vietnam. A small colonised nation took on the might of the French empire and defeated it decisively. The reverberations of this battle sounded all over the world.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary commander-in-chief of the People’s Army led the troops in the battle. In a recent seminar in Hanoi, Giap described the historic victory in the following words: "The Dien Bien Phu victory shook the globe, resounding even in remote areas where people still lived in slavery, waking them up and bringing them confidence to rise up."

In August 1945, under the leadership of the Communist Party, the national liberation movement had succeeded in setting up the first revolutionary government in the North. In the post-war period, the French returned and waged war to crush the Vietminh and recapture its colony. The victory in Dien Bien Phu resulted in the Geneva conference recognising the setting up of a government under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam.

The French had built up its fortified base in Dien Bien Phu hoping to draw the Vietminh into a set-piece battle and annihilate them. The Americans had provided military support. The People’s Army took up the challenge. Under the leadership of Giap, meticulous preparations were made for the siege of the French garrison. The French had augmented their troops to 16,000 by March 1954. Giap deployed 50,000 regular Vietminh troops and guerillas to surround the base. In a feat of human endurance, thousands of people worked to haul up the artillery guns up the forests and mountainsides from where the French garrison came under attack. Hundreds of kilometers of trenches and tunnels were built by the people to reinforce the siege.

Giap, writing about the significance of the People’s Army, pointed out that "Our army is a people’s army, the army of the toiling people, essentially of the workers and peasants led by the party of the working class". Such an army was an expression of the will of the entire Vietnamese people for national liberation and hence proved invincible.

Dien Bien Phu marked the end of the first phase of the protracted struggle of the Vietnamese people led by the Communist Party for national liberation. It was the same army and the people who continued their struggle against American imperialism when it directly intervened to prop up a puppet regime in South Vietnam. It took another 21 years of arduous and death-defying struggles to liberate the whole country and reunify South and North Vietnam.

That historic movement arrived on April 30, 1975. The Vietnamese people are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 29th anniversary of the liberation of the south. It is a joyous moment for the Vietnamese people and the Communist Party.

It is an occasion for people all around the world to express their admiration for the heroism and revolutionary feats of the Vietnamese people. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) joins all the progressive forces around the world to greet the Vietnamese people and the Vietnam Communist Party on this historic occasion.