Make Vietnam prosperous: PM

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE, MAY 1. Identifying priorities for Vietnam in the context of the silver jubilee celebrations marking its victory over the U.S. in the legendary war, the Prime Minister, Mr. Phan Van Khai, said it was an ``urgent and important task'' to ``beat poverty and backwardness.''

To attain this, he called upon his compatriots to `push' for `industrialisation and modernisation.'

Treating the celebrations as a national occasion to look back to the future even while traversing down the memory lane, the Prime Minister said the victory in the war had opened vistas for realising the people's aspirations for building Vietnam into ``a peaceful, united, independent, democratic and prosperous country as wished by (the late) President Ho Chi Minh in his Testament.''

Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, a folk hero for his successful military strategies against both the French colonialists and the U.S. troops as also the former South Vietnamese units, not only graced the silver jubilee celebrations but also devised a variant of Abraham Lincoln's famous definition of democracy to explain how Hanoi triumphed in the long war that finally ended in 1975.

According to Gen. Giap, Hanoi's triumph was because it orchestrated a movement for `national liberation' as a `struggle of the whole people, for the people, by the people.'

He attributed the eventual success on the battlefield to the way the Vietnamese had, over `many centuries,' fashioned `original doctrine for military matters.'

He amplified this doctrine as a guide to `use benevolence to fight brutality, use small forces to fight larger ones, use little to defeat many and use rudimentary weapons to defeat modern ones.'

A `creative and intelligent mind' was also deployed to do this, he said after the celebrations.

Gen. Giap also recalled that he had some time ago told a former U.S. Defence Secretary, Mr. Robert McNamara, that he was a brave man as he had, in his memoirs, admitted his `faults.' The U.S., according to Gen. Giap, lost the war as its leaders reckoned with only the Vietnamese people's army with its `rudimentary weapons' and missed the calibre of `the Vietnamese nation and its culture.'

For Gen. Giap, what mattered in the final analysis was not the smoking gun but the smart mind.

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Section  : International
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