Background to the Founding of the South Viet-Nam National Front for Liberation

Abstract

It has been acknowledged the South Viet-Nam National Front for Liberation was a organ of the Vietnam Workers' Party during the war against United States in the 1960's. What this paper points out is how the NFL was founded and how the southerner supported this mass organization through out the 60's and 70's.First, the Vietnam Workers' Party Central Committee at its Fifteenth Enlarged Plenum in January 1959 decided to launch a political struggle combined with a armed struggle to liberate the South. It was the first attemptby the Party to open the way to liberate the South with violence since the signing of the Geneva Agreement in 1954. The draft of the Fifteenth Resolution was written by General Vo Nguyen Giap consulting with Le Duan.Ho Chi Minh in his directive stated that the immediate task was to overthrow the Ngo Dinh Diem regime, to form a coalition democratic government in the South for the purpose of securing national independence and achieving national unification.The Party re-opened its second Fifteenth Plenum in May 1959 and directed the implementation of the Fifteenth Resolution. On May 18, Bo Tu Lenh 5-59 was set up to open logistic lines to the South, which would become popularly known as Ho Chi Minh Trails.The Party set up the Central Office of South Vietnam and the Vietnam People's Revolutionary Party before the formation of the NFL. This party was actually indentical to the Central office organization. Then the Party Politbureau decided to found a mass organization in the South.The NFL held its first ordinary Congress in February of 1962 with participation by mass organizations in the South. However, the the Front was led by Party members including Nguyen Huu Tho, chairman of the Front.Second, there were the anti-colonialism resistance movements, clandestine communist activities in particular, in the Deep South during the French colonial regime through 1930's to 40's. Tran Van Giao and Nguyen Thanh Son, both eminent Party leaders in control of almost all southern revolutionaries including Cambodian communists, led the protracted resistance movements against both the French and Americans. Tran Van Giao, leader of the Hau Giang Committee, had been operating during the 30's to 40's, in the Deep South as far as Phnompenh, the capital of Cambodia.Just after the August Revolution, when they failed to topple the Saigon regime, they fled to Cambodia and organized resistance movements urging the people in the South to join patriotic movements to unite Vietnam under a national democratic revolution.Meanwhile, Nguyen Thanh Son led Vietnamese and Cambodian communists in launching a war of resistance against the French in Cambodia. These two cores worked together to achieve national democratic revolutions in Vietnam and Cambodia.These clandestine movements in the South reappeared with the participation by many patriotic people in the NFL founded in 1960. The NFL itself was an oragan of the Workers' Party, yet many southerners still joined the Front and played an important role in fighting the United States.Soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam and the Viet-Nam Alliance of National, Democratic and Peace Forces were united to the Government of North Vietnam, and to the National Fatherland of Vietnam respectively. The NFL, which was the core of those two organs, was dissolved in 1977. However, among the Party members in the South, there are some leaders who still claim that the Front was not an absolute organ of the Party and remain at odds with the North over the dissolution of PRG.