On the occasion of the 54th death anniversary of late Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh (September 2, 1969 – September 2, 2023), there is interesting news, that is, from 2019, Nguyen Dinh Bin, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, sent the “Proposal on the correct implementation of President Ho Chi Minh’s will.”
According to Nguyen Dinh Bin, this petition was sent to Chairwoman of the National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan and many other senior officials of the country’s highest legislative body.
The petition reads, “Recently, I submitted to General Secretary and President Nguyen Phu Trong, the Politburo of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the National Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, proposing to the foregoing…”. And, “I have received Official Letter No. 299/BDN dated August 13, 2019 from the National Assembly’s People Opinion Committee, signed by its Chairman Nguyen Thanh Hai, notifying that the “Chairman of the National Assembly has received a petition letter.”
But since August 2019, this proposal of former Deputy Minister Nguyen Dinh Bin has also fallen into oblivion, and no one has noticed or mentioned this sensitive issue.
Up to now, 54 years have passed, after the day President Ho Chi Minh – the Communist leader who laid the foundation for the Communist regime in Vietnam – passed away, but his body is still on display in the mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square, despite his will to be cremated that he wrote in his Will.
Ho Chi Minh’s will states his wishes:
“After I have passed away, don’t hold a grand funeral, so as not to waste people’s time and money. I asked that my body be burned, that is, ‘cremated.’ I hope that the ‘cremation’ method will be popular in the future. Because of that, for people who live well in terms of hygiene, they do not waste land. When we have a lot of electricity, the ‘electric burial’ is better.”
Admittedly, this is a matter of history, at a time when the Communist movement of nations took up half of the globe, as a counterweight to the US-led capitalist bloc. At that time, in communist countries, the leader was a very important spiritual symbol. Belief in the leader and the leader’s symbol is the power to gather forces, to create strength for the Communist regime in general, and the Vietnamese Communist regime in particular.
Lenin’s Mausoleum, or the mausoleum of the Bulgarian Communist leader Gueorgui Dimitrov, built in 1949 and so on, all had the same purpose.
Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum was started construction in Hanoi in 1973, after nearly 9 months since the Paris Agreement was signed. At that time, the Americans had withdrawn their troops from South Vietnam, but the North and South were still in a state of war.
That is one of the reasons why, although Ho Chi Minh’s will written in his will was to be cremated, the Party Central Committee at that time decided to preserve the body of President Ho Chi Minh. They gave the reason, because people in the South have not been able to meet and see President Ho Chi Minh in person. Therefore, First Secretary Le Duan and the Central Committee of the Vietnam Workers’ Party decided to build a mausoleum to preserve the body of President Ho Chi Minh.
If so, by now, it is clear that people in the South have stopped wanting to meet President Ho Chi Minh with their own eyes. Moreover, Mr. Ho’s remains are actually just a lifeless wax block. So why, his cremation will after 54 years has not been implemented by the Vietnamese Communist leadership? Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, in 1999, the mausoleum of Communist leader Gueorgui Dimitrov was demolished.
According to Radio Free Asia, a female expert on Ho Chi Minh, Olga Dror, said: “The Party and Government [of Vietnam] want to maintain the legacy of the regime. The leaders want to show that they are the center of political religion in those countries.”
Still according to Ms. Olga: “The Party must keep the connection between the founder of the Socialist State of Vietnam and the people. This is necessary to maintain the socialist system while the situation is changing.”
Another reason why Vietnamese Communist leaders try to preserve Ho Chi Minh’s body is because, the bodies of some other Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong, Lenin, Kim Jong il of North Korea… still exist. Vietnam will be very awkward if it is the first country to bury Ho Chi Minh.
In fact, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the communist countries have collapsed and lost their role. “In 1991, Russian public opinion began to talk about the burial of Lenin. In 2015, more than half of the Russian population agreed with this idea. The Russian Culture Minister even stated that ‘It’s time to bury Lenin’.”
Meanwhile, in Vietnam today, Ho Chi Minh’s image as well as his morality is gradually withering, in a society where the Party has become exhausted. Most of the highly corrupt officials who recently went to court were once “elite, imbued with Ho Chi Minh’s morality and ideology.”
Therefore, maintaining the symbol of Ho Chi Minh is very outdated and expensive, and it has been denied by reality in all respects.
Vietnamese Communists often follow Ho Chi Minh’s moral example. Mr. Ho Chi Minh had a wish to be cremated, why is it that the leaders of the Party and State of Vietnam over the years have not yet fulfilled his wish?
Please allow Ho Chi Minh to have the right to die with his eyes closed, to be buried, like a normal human being.
Tra My – Thoibao.de
