General Le Duc Anh
President of Vietnam who normalised relations with the US
GENERAL LE DUC ANH, the former president of Vietnam, who has died aged 98, was an old-school communist veteran of Vietnam’s wars against both French and American forces, but later presided over the restoration of diplomatic relations with former enemies.
Blind in one eye, Anh, a secretive figure in Vietnam’s leadership, became best known for commanding troops that, from late 1978, invaded neighbouring Cambodia to oust the regime of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, beginning a 10-year occupation of the country. As defence minister from 1987 to 1990 he then presided over a large-scale demobilisation of the army as Vietnam withdrew its troops.
Under Pol Pot’s four-year reign of terror, about two million Cambodians died from execution, disease or starvation – nearly a quarter of the population at the time – yet the invasion led to international isolation for Vietnam. Suspicious of its neighbour’s imperial ambitions in the region, China withdrew aid and in 1979 briefly occupied territory in the north of the country, ushering in a series of border conflicts during the 1980s.
Meanwhile, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, together with Japan and western Europe, joined the Us-led boycott imposed after the Communist North took the South in 1975. These moves forced Vietnam to rely on the former Soviet Union and its allies for economic and military assistance.
In 1990, however, with the unravelling of communism in Eastern Europe, Soviet aid dried up. Anh advocated maintaining tight party control over domestic policies, and his appointment in 1992 to the new post of state president, replacing a collective presidency, signalled to many that the Vietnamese regime had little intention of following its erstwhile allies down the road of greater political openness.
Yet, albeit reluctantly, Anh presided over moves to a free-market economy and did much to normalise relations with old foes.
A secret visit by Anh to China in 1991 cleared the way for normalisation of relations between Hanoi and Beijing, which led to his being invited to make an official visit as president in
1993. The same year France’s President François Mitterrand became the first Western leader to visit Vietnam since 1975. Then, in February 1994, the US lifted its economic embargo and in June 1995 full diplomatic relations were restored. The same year Anh became the first president from Hanoi to visit the US when he travelled to New York to attend the UN’S 50th anniversary celebrations.
Le Duc Anh was born in the central province of Thua Thien, then in French Indochina, on December 1 1920. He joined the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1938 and in the 1930s and 1940s participated in the labour struggles of the French-owned rubber plantations. He then fought the French as a Viet Minh guerrilla from 1945 until 1954 when communist forces captured northern Vietnam.
After training in the military academies of the former Soviet Union and serving at army headquarters in Hanoi, in 1969 Anh was sent to South Vietnam as commander of the military region that included the Mekong Delta, serving for a decade as deputy commander of the army of the Hanoicontrolled Viet Cong against the Americans and the Us-backed government in Saigon.
In 1974, Anh, by now a lieutenant general, became deputy commander of the Ho Chi Minh Campaign that ultimately resulted in the capture of Saigon by North Vietnamese forces in 1975, ending the Vietnam War.
From 1982 to 2001 he was a member of Vietnam’s powerful Politburo.
Anh stepped down as president in 1997, a year after suffering a major stroke.
Anh was twice married and had three daughters and a son.