20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate

The Vietnamese Government has come up with a name for the momentous anniversary that this country will mark next Sunday. It has been formally declared "The 20th Anniversary of the Complete Victory in the War-Resistance Against U.S. Aggression for National Salvation."

But the name is about all that has been decided.

Although this Government's single-minded dedication once drove off a superpower, the soldiers who won the war cannot make up their minds about how to observe the anniversary of the Communist victory that unified this country.

There is still no final schedule of the events for next Sunday in Ho Chi Minh City, where the victory was sealed on April 30, 1975, when a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in the city then known as Saigon, only hours after the last evacuation helicopter lifted off the roof of the United States Embassy.

Earlier plans for a military parade through the city appear to have been scrapped. The guest lists have not been drawn up. It is not clear whether any of the nation's senior leaders will even show up in Ho Chi Minh City next week.

"There are many important anniversaries this year, and there is so much work for our leaders." said Tran Hoan, Minister of Culture and Information and a member of the organizing committee for the anniversary. "Exactly who will take part will be announced later."

For the Vietnamese, indecision does not equal indifference. Foreign diplomats and Vietnamese officials say that the Government appears to be playing down the significance of the anniversary out of fear that a large, boisterous celebration might offend the United States at a time when Vietnam is eager for normal relations with Washington. It was only last year that the United States lifted a trade embargo that had crippled the Vietnamese economy.

"And it's much more than that," said a senior Western diplomat in Hanoi. "I think the Vietnamese are worried that if they make a huge spectacle out of this anniversary, it will only serve to make the world continue to think of Vietnam only in terms of that horrible war. Who can blame Vietnam for wanting to be seen as a country, not a war?"

Apart from the question of how the anniversary is portrayed in the outside world, many Vietnamese are themselves torn about how to commemorate the end of a war that according to a newly publicized survey by the Government, took the lives of 1.1 million Communist soldiers and two million Vietnamese civilians. (The Government says it has no way of estimating the number of dead from the former South Vietnamese Army.) Should it be a celebration?

"When I hear the firecrackers explode on the anniversary, I will feel happy about our victory, the victory of Uncle Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party," said Nghiem Xuan Tue, deputy director of the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs. "But also on this day we will light the incense for the dead, and we will feel so very sorry for all of our dead comrades."

Mr. Tue, a retired army captain who fought for the Communists in the jungles of South Vietnam in the 1970's, oversaw the final tallying of the dead from the war, a project that required him daily to ponder the human devastation of the war. And he insists it was not just the Vietnamese dead that he mourned.

"I have been to Washington D.C. four times and have seen the black-marble monument," said Mr. Tue, who acts as a Government liaison to groups of American veterans.

"In the numbers, your losses are not as large as ours. But I know that your anguish is not small. It is like in Vietnam. When a soldier dies, he leaves behind family and friends who mourn. The situation is the same for the Americans as for the Vietnamese."

If Vietnam's leaders are trying to discourage publicity about the anniversary, they will have little cooperation from the army of foreign reporters who have descended on Vietnam to cover the event, many of them silver-haired American war correspondents returning to Vietnam for the first time since the war.

Meeting last week with scores of reporters in Hanoi, Mr. Hoan, the Culture Minister, quickly reminded his guests that the anniversary of the end of the war was one of only several notable anniversaries this year -- and not even, he insisted, the most important.

"There are many great anniversaries in 1995," he said, offering an extended list: the 105th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh, the 125th anniversary of the birth of Lenin, the 65th anniversary of both the Vietnamese Women's Union and the Vietnamese Farmers Association.

The most important anniversary of the year, he said, will take place on Nov. 2, National Day, when the country will mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the government of Ho Chi Minh.

"We'll pay special attention to all the anniversaries," Mr. Hoan explained. "But much more attention will be paid to National Day."

The anniversary next Sunday, he said, will be carried out "in a spirit of thrift and economy."

And many of the decisions about the celebration, he suggested, had yet to be made, including a decision whether to invite American diplomats to the events in Ho Chi Minh City. In February, the United States opened a diplomatic mission in Hanoi, the Americans' first formal diplomatic presence in Vietnam since the war.

Asked whether it might be awkward for Vietnam to invite American diplomats to an event that recalled the final humiliation of the United States here, Mr. Hoan said, "This celebration would do good for the relationship because it would help the American people to understand the situation of Vietnam."