The longest wars Indochina 1945 to 1975

The Longest Wars: Indochina 1945-75 Author(s): Stein Tønnesson Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 9-29 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/423583 Accessed: 03/01/2010 16:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sageltd. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Peace Research. http://www.jstor.org

ISSN 0022-3433 Journal of Peace Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 1985 The Longest Wars: Indochina 1945-75* STEIN TONNESSON International Peace Research Institute, Oslo In 1981-82, as a graduate student of history, Stein Te0nnesson was lucky enough to be admitted to the Indochina files of the French archives, where secret cables and reports had been conserved since the outbreak of the first Indochinese war in late 1946. In the first part of this article he presents a new version of the process that led to the Franco-Vietnamese war, based on this previously unpublished material. New light is thrown on French actions and motives and also on the Indochina policy of the United States at that time. The French sources show how the high commissioner in Saigon, with backing from the French premier and foreign minister Georges Bidault, deliberately provoked war. This was done at the same time as Bidault's government was replaced by a Socialist government under the veteran Leon Blum. Once taking office, Blum sent a peace proposal to Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh and ordered the French troops to negotiate a cease-fire. His order was ignored by the French army, however, and in the face of vigorous nationalist sentiments in France, Blum had to give in. In the second part of the article Stein T0nnesson compares the first and second Indochinese wars and finds notable parallels in the ways they escalated and in the reasons why they lasted so long. 1. Introduction Indochina occupies a central place in the history of modern war. In Small/Singer's index of 224 wars 1816-1980, the 'Indochinese war' (1945-54) and the 'Vietnamese war' (1965-75) belong to the longest. Only two civil wars were longer than the Vietnamese war. They took place in China 1860-72 and in Colombia 1949-62. This presents us with a precise reason for giving priority to the wars in Indochina as a subject in the study of drawn out wars, and particularly how they begin. There are other, less precise but more important reasons for con- * The article is drawn from the author's dissertation The Outbreak of War in Indochina 1946, which can be identified as PRIO Report 3/84. The dissertation is based on sources in: - Archives Nationales (Paris), file F60 C3024. - Archives Nationales Section Outre-Mer (Paris), telegrams, Affaires Politiques', Moutet's papers. - Archives Nationales Depot des Archives d'Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence), CP-, IMIF- and HC-files. - Archives du Ministere des Relations Exterieures (Paris), file E 162-1. - National Archives and Records Service (Washington D.C.), file 851G.00. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Professor Philippe Devillers at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Paris) for the kindness with which he received a Norwegian student in Paris and for his many valuable comments on the dissertation and on this paper. sidering the wars in Indochina as a major theme in modern history: 1. They are central to the understanding of the two most important events in international relations since World War 2, the disruption of the colonial empires and the cold war. 2. They led to important changes not only in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and all of South- east Asia, but also in the political situation in France, the United States and elsewhere. In this article I shall prefer to speak of two Indochinese wars instead of distinguishing between Vietnamese, Laotian and Campuchean wars. Developments in those three countries were closely interrelated and the sequence of wars ultimately (1978-79) led to a Vietnam- dominated Indochina. The focus of the article will be on Vietnam, however, not on Laos and Cambodia. The focus will further be on political decision-making related to the outbreak and end of the wars, not on military, economic, or social matters. The article is in two main parts. Part one presents the findings of my own research on the outbreak of the first Indochinese war. Part two compares the two Indochinese wars

10 Stein Tennesson and shows some striking similarities between the ways first the French and later the American government consciously sent the young men of their nation to a war they did not really expect to win. Yet they only pulled out when forced to by domestic public opinion. Before entering the history of how the first war broke out in 1945-46, some words must be said to characterise the wars in Indochina. The two Indochinese wars were neither interstate nor civil wars, or rather they were both. The fight was directed against foreign military forces, but the foreigners were present in the country from the outset. They were backed up by a political and administrative apparatus and had excellent relations with parts of the population. War was in fact a result of a process where a political struggle gradually became more and more violent. The conflict that produced the wars in Vietnam centred on two main issues; foreign dominance and the separation of the Vietnamese nation into a northern and a southern political entity. From an official Vietnamese perspective the two wars are seen as one long war, 'the long resistance', and the goals were the same all the time: liberation from foreign rule and national unification. The official Vietnamese version is of course ideological, but this is the same ideology that served the cause of Vietminh, the Democratic Republic Vietnam (DRV), and the National Liberation Front (NLF) all the way from the August revolution 1945 to the conquest of Saigon 1975. This ideology is an important part of these wars. If wars were classified according to the main goals of the victor, then the wars in Vietnam should belong to the classes of 'wars of liberation from foreign dominance' and 'wars for national unification'. That classification would, however, tend to draw our attention away from the fact that in all three Indochinese countries there were also civil wars between rivalling political, ethnical and religious factions. The wars in Laos and Cambodia were to a large extent side effects of the war in Vietnam, and the issue of foreign dominance took a different form than in Vietnam because all factions could claim to fight it. One faction fought the Vietnamese dominance, the other fought the American. Khmer Rouge was able to combine both. The wars were thus fought on three levels: 1. The civil level. This was the dominant aspect durin