Nguyen Huu Tho (July 10, 1910 - Dec. 24, 1996) was the chairman of the National Liberation Front #NLF - the South Vietnamese political organization formed in 1960 in opposition to the U.S. backed Saigon government.
He was born in the same Chinatown district (Cho Lon in Saigon) that my patriarch family lived & where we had our large incense factory.
The son of a rubber-plantation manager who was later killed during the First #Indochina War (1946–54), Nguyen Huu Tho studied law in Paris in the 1930s. Returning to #Saigon, he set up practice, remaining politically inactive until 1949, when he led student demonstrations against the French; he also organized protests in 1950 against the patrolling of the southern Vietnamese coast by U.S. warships. He was imprisoned & won popular acclaim for his prolonged hunger strike in protest of the war.
After the Geneva Agreements divided Vietnam into northern & southern zones in 1954, Tho cooperated with the southern regime of Ngo Dinh Diem until he was arrested for advocating nationwide elections on reunification. Except for a short period in 1958, Tho remained in prison from 1954-1961, when he escaped with aid of some of his anti-Diem followers. These men, who had recently formed the NLF, made Tho, a noncommunist, provisional & then full-time chairman of the NLF.
In 1965, he delivered an anti-imperialist speech, a booklet was later published in English, entitled SPEECH. His title was given as: President of the Presidium of the Consultative Council of the South Viet Nam National Front for Liberation on the 5th founding anniversary of the NFL.
Tho served as a figurehead leader. Real power in the NLF was held by its military arm, the #VietCong & by veteran communists who reported directly to the North Vietnamese leadership. Tho helped attract a wide spectrum of South Vietnamese supporters to the NLF. In June 1969, the NLF established a Provisional Revolutionary Government with Huynh Tan Phat as president & Nguyen Huu Tho as chairman of its advisory council. The PRG became the government of South Vietnam in April 1975, when Saigon government’s troops surrendered to the North Vietnamese & PRG forces. Tho was made a vice president of Vietnam in 1976, a post he held until 1980, when he became acting president. In 1981, Tho was made vice president of the Council of State & chairman of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly.
Thọ was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize (1983–84).
Between 1988 & 1994, he was chairman of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front (Mặt trận Tổ quốc Việt Nam), an umbrella organization for mass organizations in the country.
Ref: Jacques Dalloz : Dictionnaire de la Guerre d'Indochine, Paris, 2006, S. 171
Christopher E. Goscha : Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954), Kopenhagen, 2011, S. 323
Ref: Kiernan, Ben. How Pol Pot Came to Power. London: Verso, 1985. pp. 170-71.
Ref: Nghia M. Vo - Saigon: A History (2011)
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