The All-Vietnam National Assembly: Significant Developments

Abstract

ON APRIL 30, 1975 North Vietnamese tanks rumbled through the gates of former South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu's palace in Saigon, completing the military conquest of South Vietnam that had been the Vietnamese Communists' goal ever since Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietnamese Communist movement, drove the French out of the North in 1954. The fortunes of war in South Vietnam had changed extraordinarily rapidly, and it had taken a bare seven weeks for the Saigon regime to slide precipitately to abject defeat. The speed of the collapse of the Thieu regime surprised everybody, including the North Vietnamese leaders.' During the long war against the United States and the Americanbacked Saigon regime, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) had asserted that the National Liberation Front and the Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Vietnam-the Viet Cong as the Americans called them-were a separate, indigenous southern movement, free of the North's control. As soon as the final Communist victory was achieved in April 1975, however, the Hanoi regime abandoned the earlier fiction of a separate, independent southern movement. Immediately after the Communist victory in the South, the DRV leaders made it very clear that their eventual goal was to reunite the two parts of Vietnam in accordance with the dream of Ho Chi Minh. In fact, the process of merging North and South Vietnam under Hanoi's domination began unofficially on April 30, 1975. With characteristic reverence for calendar milestones, the Vietnamese Communists scheduled the election of a joint National Assem-