Bui Tin

North Vietnamese colonel, in exile critic of Communist Party

Bui Tin, a North Vietnamese colonel who had a prominent role in the Vietnam War’s final moments but later fled the country and became an unlikely critic of its ruling Communist Party, died on Saturday in France. He was 90.

His death went unacknowledged by Vietnam’s state-run news media but was confirmed on Monday by his longtime friend Nguyen Van Huy, a fellow Vietnamese dissident who lives in France.

Huy said that the exact cause of death was unknown but that Tin had been in a coma and had received kidney dialysis.

Tin personally accepted the surrender of South Vietnam in 1975. He was also present at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated French troops to secure their country’s independence.

Though Tin was a high-ranking army officer and a onetime disciple of Ho Chi Minh, the founding president, he went into exile in France in 1990. For years afterward, he urged his former party comrades to embrace democracy and abandon what he saw as their moribund economic and political ideology.

“His exile embodies the tragedy of Vietnam, and Vietnamese intellectuals in particular, as they found themselves in the stranglehold of a corrupt and violent regime that at one point appeared to represent their aspirations,” said Tuong Vu, author of “Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology.” When Tin awoke on 30 April, 1975, he probably did not expect to play a direct role in a pivotal moment in Vietnamese history. Later that morning, he rode aboard a North Vietnamese tank to the presidential palace in Saigon. There, he walked inside to find General Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, in a conference room.

Tin was not a commander but the deputy editor of an army newspaper, Quan Doi Nhan Dan. As the highestranking North Vietnamese officer in the room, however, it made sense for him to formally represent the winning side.

“I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you,” Minh told Tin, according to a description of the scene in the 2002 book “Our Vietnam: The War 19541975” by A J Langguth. “There is no question of your transferring power,” was the colonel’s tart reply. “Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.”

Tin then reassured Minh that he had nothing to fear; it was only the Americans who had been beaten, he said.

“If you are a patriot, consider this a moment of joy,” he said, before making small talk about the general’s tennis game and orchid collection. “The war for our country is over,” he added.

30 April is now celebrated as Reunification Day in Vietnam, and commemorates the end of the war. The day also commemorates the change of Saigon’s name to Ho Chi Minh City.

Many South Vietnamese officials would be imprisoned for years after the war in what the Communist Party called “reeducation camps”. Nevertheless, debates within the party would rage for decades over the role that Marxist-leninist dogma should play in the country’s postwar development.

During a trip to France in 1990 – just as Vietnam’s main patron, the Soviet Union, was crumbling – Tin declared himself a political dissident and complained that his country was troubled by “bureaucracy, irresponsibility, egoism, corruption and fraud”.

But Vu, the historian, said that if Tin had hoped that his defection would bring broad political change in Vietnam, he miscalculated. “He underestimated the resilience of Vietnamese Communism and the regime’s tight control over its officials through a combination of fear and rewards for compliance,” Vu said.

Bui Tin was born on 29 December, 1927, in Nam Dinh, a northern Vietnamese city about 50 miles south of Hanoi. Tin, whose father had been a mandarin in Vietnam’s last royal court, became one of a small number of educated Vietnamese who rallied to Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary cause, Vu said.

Many of those intellectuals later turned against the Communist Party, which dragged a unified Vietnam through disastrous postwar experiments in collectivised agriculture.

Tin saw the Soviet bloc’s disintegration as the right moment for his own political about-face. The Communist Party’s leadership “failed to bring liberty and prosperity to Vietnam,” he wrote in The Washington Post in October 1991. “Rather than improve the abysmal condition of the population, they have blindly pursued sectarian policies designed to maintain their power,” he added.

Even before his defection, Tin was known as something of a maverick. Notably, he discovered and published Ho Chi Minh’s last will and testament, proving that Ho had wanted his ashes scattered around Vietnam. The discovery exposed what Tin said was the fraud behind the party’s decision to build a mausoleum in Hanoi for the country’s founder.

Huy, the colonel’s friend, said that Tin is survived by his wife, Le Thi Kim Chung; a daughter, Bui Bach Lien; a son, Bui Xuan Vinh; four siblings and five grandchildren.

Today, Vietnam is a haven for foreign investors seeking a place with cheap labour and a relatively stable political environment. And despite steady waves of online dissent from the Vietnamese public, the party has maintained its grip on power.

It apparently never forgave Tin, who forged a friendly relationship with the United States soon after going into exile.

In 1991, Tin traveled to Washington and testified before a Senate committee that dealt with American prisoners of war. He also met with Senator John Mccain, a former prisoner of war in Hanoi, to discuss what the senator later described as their “mutual interest in promoting democracy in Vietnam”.

After Tin spoke to the committee, Mccain approached him and stretched out his palm for a handshake. He got a hug instead.

MIKE IVES

“Tin underestimated the resilience of Vietnamese Communism and the regime’s tight control over its officials”