Archives par mot-clé : Troisième force

« Y a-t-il eu une troisième force au Viêt-Nam, 1947-1948 ? ». Réponse à M. Nghiêm Phong Tuân

Le 15 mai 2018, il y a un peu plus d’un an, le journal Diễn Đàn Forum en ligne publiait les remarques  de M. Nghiêm Phong Tuấn concernant mon ouvrage sur l’histoire du Đại Việt paru aux Indes savantes en 2012. Cet ouvrage est issu de ma thèse de doctorat soutenue en 2003 à l’EPHE à Paris à l’issue d’un travail de cinq ans (1998-2003) sous la direction du Professeur Nguyễn Thế Anh. Il aura donc fallu neuf ans pour que ce travail sur le mouvement nationaliste non communiste, précisément sur l’histoire du parti Đại Việt Quốc Dân Đảng, soit porté à la connaissance public et je dois remercier les Indes savantes pour cette initiative courageuse car les ventes de ce type de grosses monographies (738 p., 39 euros) sont souvent anecdotiques dues à un public relativement limité. L’ouvrage ayant reçu une vive critique de M. Nghiêm Phong Tuấn (fils de Nghiêm Xuân Thiện, ancien Gouverneur du Nord Viêt-Nam en 1947-1948), j’ai décidé de répondre à la fois sur la forme de la critique et sur le fond, ce qui me paraît plus intéressant à travers une question posée en titre de ce billet.

NB : Deux notices biographiques courtes accompagnent notre réponse.

François Guillemot

Lire la suite : Dien Dan Forum

 

Christopher Goscha : Peace matters [book review]

[ndlr] Signalement de la recension de l’ouvrage de Sophie Quinn-Judge (The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace, 1954-75) par Christopher E. Goscha. En accès libre pendant quelques jours sur Mekong Review. Lecture vivement conseillée.

Sophie Quinn-Judge landed in central Vietnam in 1973 as a member of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). She served in the AFSC-run Rehabilitation Centre in Quang Ngai province until the end of the war in 1975, providing prosthetics and relief help to war-injured civilians coming from all sides of the conflict ripping Vietnam apart. Quinn-Judge grew up in Quaker country in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Although she was not initially a member of this breakaway Protestant faith, she took part in their youth camps as a youngster and felt at home working in the AFSC in France and Vietnam.

The Quakers established the AFSC upon the United States’ entry into the First World War in 1917. The Quakers refused to take part in war as an article of faith. So instead of sending their sons into the trenches of the Western Front, the AFSC mobilised their young people to help civilians hurt and displaced by the conflagration. The AFSC did more than provide humanitarian aid, however. Drawing on centuries of Quaker pacifism, the organisation actively promoted “lasting peace with justice, as a practical expression of faith in action”. Educational programs, youth camps and exchanges helped nurture “the seeds of change and respect for human life that transform social relations and systems”. In 1947, the AFSC received the Nobel Prize for Peace for its humanitarian relief efforts during and after the Second World War and its promotion of world peace. The Quakers continued their work during the Cold War, dispatching people to work in war-torn areas of the Afro-Asian world, including Vietnam.[1]

Quinn-Judge carried these values with her to Quang Ngai, working tirelessly in the rehabilitation centre. Arriving shortly after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, she also became an advocate of peace. The Paris Agreement, signed by the Vietnamese and US sides in January 1973, called for the creation of a coalition government in South Vietnam that would eventually replace the embattled Republic of Vietnam. The coalition would include members from this state, a host of non-communist religious, neutralist and democratic leaders, as well as the communist-backed National Liberation Front (NLF) and the People’s Revolutionary Government for the south. This southern coalition would then decide the south’s destiny via negotiations with the north.

Lire la suite : Mekong Review

Image “à la une” : With journalists from Van nghe quan doi, Quinn-Judge, far right. Photograph : Claudia Krich © Mekong Review

 

Sophie Quinn-Judge : The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75 [parution]

[ndlr] Avis de parution d’une nouvelle étude l’historienne Sophie Quinn-Judge. Présentation de l’éditeur.

It was the conflict that shocked America and the world, but the struggle for peace is central to the history of the Vietnam War. Rejecting the idea that war between Hanoi and the US was inevitable, the author traces North Vietnam’s programs for a peaceful reunification of their nation from the 1954 Geneva negotiations up to the final collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. She also examines the ways that groups and personalities in South Vietnam responded by crafting their own peace proposals, in the hope that the Vietnamese people could solve their disagreements by engaging in talks without outside interference. While most of the writing on peacemaking during the Vietnam War concerns high-level international diplomacy, Sophie Quinn-Judge reminds us of the courageous efforts of southern Vietnamese, including Buddhists, Catholics, students and citizens, to escape the unprecedented destruction that the US war brought to their people. The author contends that US policymakers showed little regard for the attitudes of the South Vietnamese population when they took over the war effort in 1964 and sent in their own troops to fight it in 1965.

A unique contribution of this study is the interweaving of developments in South Vietnamese politics with changes in the balance of power in Hanoi; both of the Vietnamese combatants are shown to evolve towards greater rigidity as the war progresses, while the US grows increasingly committed to President Thieu in Saigon, after the election of Richard Nixon. Not even the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement could blunt US support for Thieu and his obstruction of the peace process. The result was a difficult peace in 1975, achieved by military might rather than reconciliation, and a new realization of the limits of American foreign policy.

Sophie Quinn-Judge is the Associate Director of the Centre for Vietnamese History at Temple University. She was for many years a South East Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and for The Guardian. One of the foremost scholars of the Vietnam War, she taught for many years at the LSE and SOAS.

Ref. : Quinn-Judge, Sophie, The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace 1954-75, London, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2017, 336 p. ISBN: 9781784535971

Source : I.B.Tauris