Bùi Tín

Template:Vietnamese name Former People's Army of Vietnam Colonel Bùi Tín is a Vietnamese dissident. He was born near Hanoi in 1927, and was educated in Huế.

During the August Revolution in 1945, he became an active supporter to politically pressure the government of France to cede Vietnam its independence.

He later joined the Việt Minh along with General Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh. He would fight on two sides of the line, using weapons and also using his pen and paper as journalist for the Vietnam People's Army newspaper.

He enlisted in the Vietnamese Peoples Army at the age of eighteen. He was wounded during the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. He served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army. During the Vietnam War, he had authority from Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap to visit any of the camps where American POWs were held, meet with the camp officers, look at the POW files, and interview the POWs. During at least one such occasion, he was involved in an interrogation of John McCain.

Bui Tin went on to serve as the Vice Chief Editor of the People's Daily (Nhân Dân, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Vietnam), responsible for the Sunday People's (Nhân Dân Chủ Nhật). He became disillusioned in the mid-1980s with postwar corruption and the continuing isolation of socialist Vietnam.

In 1990, Bui decided to leave Vietnam and live in exile in Paris, France, in order to express his growing dissatisfaction with Vietnam's Communist leadership and their political system.

In November 1991, Bui Tin became involved in the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue when he appeared before hearings of the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. He stated that, "I can say that I know as well as any top leader in Vietnam and, in my opinion, I state categorically that there is not any American prisoner alive in Vietnam." After his testimony, he and John McCain embraced, which produced a flurry of "Former Enemies Embrace"-style headlines. Tin's testimony was the subject of anticipation: when he had arrived at Dulles International Airport three weeks earlier, former U.S. Congressman Bill Hendon and a staff assistant to committee vice-chair Robert C. Smith confronted Tin and tried to convince him that there were live prisoners in Vietnam; Tin felt it was an intimidation attempt.

Tin subsequently published two books, Following Ho Chi Minh: The Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel (University of Hawaii Press, 1995) and From Enemy To Friend: A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2002). In a 2000 PBS American Experience forum, he maintained that no American POWs had been tortured during their captivity in North Vietnam during the war.

Controversies

In his books and talks,Bui Tin claims that during the 1975 fall of Saigon, he was with the first tank unit to smash through the gates of the Presidential Palace, signalling the end of the war, and he accepted the surrender from the last South Vietnamese leader, Dương Văn Minh. However, no other eyewitness of the event confirmed his claim.

Parallel Life to Ton That Thien

It is historically intriguing to compare Bui Tin's life history with that of Ton That Thien, Tin's neighbour, who also grew up in Hue, and whose father was also a Minister in the imperial cabinet of Emperor Bao Dai. In August, 1945, they both went to Hanoi. While Thien served in the office of the President, the younger Bui Tin joined the Viet Minh as a soldier in the first unit of the newly formed army and at one point served as a guard at the presidential office in which Thien worked. Bui Tin went on to serve the communist regime in the north of Vietnam as journalist, writer and government officer, much as Ton That Thien was serving in the south. United by common beginnings in the central and perhaps most traditional region of the country, for thirty years their two lives followed parallel paths on either side of the communist North - nationalist South political division of the country.

When their life histories are considered together it is evident they singly or jointly were present at all of the major political and historic events of Vietnam’s tumultuous history. They were both present at the declaration of independence in Hanoi on 2 September 1945 and narrowly missed meeting again upon the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, at which Bui Tin took the surrender of Duong Van Minh, then President of South Vietnam. Thien had departed shortly before.

While Ton That Thien came to recognize and reject the aims of the Communist Party-led Viet Minh in early 1946, Bui Tin did not begin to question Party orthodoxy until after the unification of Vietnam under communist rule in 1975. When Bui Tin claimed asylum in France in 1990 his life’s path once again became conjoined with that of Ton That Thien in their common experience of exile and their shared political beliefs in multi-party democracy, individual freedoms and traditional cultural values.

Quotes

• "There is an alarming deterioration of traditional ethical, moral and spiritual values (and) confusion among the youth on whom the country's future depends."
• "The roots of the Vietnam War — its all-encompassing and underlying nature — lie in a confrontation between two ideological worlds: socialism versus capitalism for some, totalitarianism versus democracy for others. It was a conflict born of the Cold War…"
• "[The American anti-war movement] was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us."
• "The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."

External links

• A copyright photo taken by John Spragens in 1989