Biography of Ho Chi Minh

Partners genocide, document film in Khmer - French

Ho Chi Minh, Birth name Nguyen Sinh Cung, also called Nguyen Tat Thanh, Nguyen Ai Quoc (1890-1969), Vietnamese Communist leader and the principal force behind the Vietnamese struggle against French colonial rule. Ho was born on May 19, 1890, in the village of Kimlien, Annam (central Vietnam), the son of an official who had resigned in protest against French domination of his country. Ho attended school in Hue and then briefly taught at a private school in Phan Thiet. After Ho's mother was thrown in jail for stealing weapons from a French barracks, Ho's father gave him and his brother Khiem jobs working as messengers for the revolutionists.

Ho first really learned about the French Revolution when he was fifteen years old. He was going to a French high school in HuŽ. He could not understand how a country with the expression "Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!" could oppress Indo-China. At the time, the French were building their own schools(like the one Ho was going to), hospitals, roads and technology improvements to the area. While he was taught that they were trying to improve the area, Ho taught the other students that they were only doing this for the French people and their relatives. When the French were living well, they would attack Indo-China. He also taught the other students of how Vietnam has been invaded constantly for the past 2,000 years and that France was no different. He was getting this information from banned books that he was able to get hold of. He was kicked out of school one day in 1910, after being caught giving out copies of banned papers. He then went out in search of a job. Ho found a job as a teacher in the small village of Phan-Thiet, which was in Cochin-China.

In 1911 he was employed as a cook on a French steamship liner and thereafter worked in London and Paris. After World War I, using the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), Ho engaged in radical activities and was in the founding group of the French Communist party.

After seeing the Manchu dynasty of China overthrown, Ho decided that Indo-China needed foreign support to help win the revolution against the French. He quit his job and went to Saigon to learn to be a cook. Being a cook would help him get a job anywhere. In 1912 Ho, twenty-two years old at the time, found a job as a galley hand on the French ship Latouche-TrŽville, which he held for two years. In the two years at sea, Ho did more studying than in all the years that he was in school. He read the works of great authors and mastered many languages.

In 1914 Ho got a job as a cook in the Carlton Hotel in London. While working there he noticed how Asian workers at the hotel were being over-worked and under-paid, so he started a Workers' Association to help improve working conditions in England for Asians.

Ho soon found his way to the United States. He was really impressed. He liked the way the country was run. His only problem was with the way that the Americans treated the blacks.

In 1921, Ho Chi Minh began a group known as Le Paria, which means "The Outcast." Le Paria's goal was try to stop the French colonialism in Indo-China. After finding out that the French sent spies to follow him, Ho just laughed and sent them his daily schedule, to make their lives easier:

"Morning: from 8 to 12 at the workshop.
Afternoon: in newspaper offices (leftist, of course) or at the library.
Evening: at home or attending educational talks.
Sundays and holidays: visiting museums or other places of interest.
There you are!

Ho Chi Minh was soon known by many people from Indo-China as their main spokesman. They were amazed by a person who was not afraid to laugh at the French, yet stood up for the people of Indo-China. Many people thought that Ho Chi Minh was no more then a legend!

Ho Chi Minh decided to take the pseudonym name Nguyen-O-Phap, which meant Nguyen who hates the French, but changed it to Nguyen Ai Quoc, which was Nguyen the Patriot, since it was a little bit less offensive. He was summoned to Moscow for training and, in late 1924, he was sent to Canton, China, where he organized a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles. He was forced to leave China when local authorities cracked down on Communist activities, but he returned in 1930 to found the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). He stayed in Hong Kong as representative of the Communist International.

When Sun Yat-sen, leader of China's nationalist army, died in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek of Moscow was put in charge with military strategist Mikhail Borodin. Chiang chose Ho to be Borodin's advisor and interpreter. Ho took this position, but began to secretly plan Indo-China's first communist organization, set in Canton. Most of Ho's followers were young Annamese rebels who were sick of being in the Vietnamese Nationalist party and their leader, Pham Boi Chau. The group set up Chau by hurling a bomb at the governor of Indo-China's car. Chau disappeared after this.

Ho was soon accused of taking a bribe from the French, in exchange for revealing Chau's where-abouts. Chau was said to be exucuted, but really died naturally while in jail. Pointing this out got Ho out of trouble for a while.

Once Ho's Communist party got going, he set up a training camp for guerrilla techniques. It was called the Whampoa Military Academy. At the academy, the followers were trained in suicide missions. They did strikes on the schools, plantations and mines of Vietnam, hoping to stir up French authorities.

On 18 February 1930, Ho released the plans that his party had -- to overthrow the French colonism, to make Indo-China free, to establish a group of government workers, to stop taxing on the wrong things, to have an eight-hour working day, to restore the freedoms of speech and press and to provide educating and to have equality of the sexes. One plan that he did not have was to have freedom of election. He said that the French brought election to Indo-China.

On 12 September 1930, there was a march on the city on Vinh by the Indo-China Communist Party(ICP). Ho managed to escape, but was sentenced to death, should he ever be caught. Ho hid out in Hong Kong for the next year, but heard the news of his father's death. He stopped taking care of himself, since he was so saddened by the news. He was caught a year later but Sir Stafford Cripps, his defender in court, was able to bring his sentence down to imprisonment.

In June 1931 Ho was arrested there by British police and remained in prison until his release in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he reportedly spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938 he returned to China and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces. When Japan occupied Vietnam in 1941, he resumed contact with ICP leaders and helped to found a new Communist-dominated independence movement, popularly known as the Vietminh, that fought the Japanese. In August 1945, when Japan surrendered, the Vietminh seized power and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh, now known by his final and best-known pseudonym (which means the “Enlightener”), became president. The French were unwilling to grant independence to their colonial subjects, and in late 1946 war broke out. For eight years Vietminh guerrillas fought French troops in the mountains and rice paddies of Vietnam, finally defeating them in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Ho, however, was deprived of his victory. Subsequent negotiations at Geneva divided the country, with only the North assigned to the Vietminh. The DRV, with Ho still president, now devoted its efforts to constructing a Communist society in North Vietnam. In the early 1960s, however, conflict resumed in the South, where Communist-led guerrillas mounted an insurgency against the U.S.-supported regime in Saigon. Ho, now in poor health, was reduced to a largely ceremonial role, while policy was shaped by others. On September 3, 1969, he died in Hanoi of heart failure. In his honor, after the Communist conquest of the South in 1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Chi Minh was not only the founder of Vietnamese communism, he was the very soul of the revolution and of Vietnam's struggle for independence. His personal qualities of simplicity, integrity, and determination were widely admired, not only within Vietnam but elsewhere as well.

Ho Chi Minh was born on 19 May 1890 in a small straw hut in the town of Kimlien, in the province of Ngh**e** An. Ho Chi Minh was born under the name of Nguyen Van Thanh, which means Nguyen, who will be victorious. His father was involved in the revolution to push the French out of Indo-China. After Ho's mother was thrown in jail for stealing weapons from a French barracks, Ho's father gave him and his brother Khiem jobs working as messengers for the revolutionists.

Reports came in 1933 that Ho died while in jail. This caused great mourning in Vietnam, until rumors began that people had seen Ho in different areas. These rumors were true. Somehow Ho had escaped, or secretly been set free. Ho was reunited with his party and laid low for a while.

In 1938, Ho returned to China as advisor for the Chinese Communist Red Army, where he was known as "Uncle Ho." While he wished to return to his ICP, "I am a professional revolutionary," he said. "I am always on strict orders. My itinerary is always carefully prescribed - and you can't devite from that route, can you?"

Because of the plans going on between Russia and Germany in 1939 regarding Fascism, most of the Communist groups, including the ICP, were being hunted down and the remaining members imprisoned. Many of the ICP members were put in jail.