- DATE & TIME
Friday, May 15 2015, 14:00―15:30 - Venue
Multipurpose Lecture Room(104), Okuma Memorial Tower(Bldg.#26),Waseda Campus - Speaker
Claire Tran, Associate Professor (Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7) - Language
English
This seminar focused on the role the Catholics in South Vietnam played in the peacemaking process during the last years of the Vietnam War. This is a timely subject as this year marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. Vietnamese Catholics has been considered as anti-Communist; this research, however, points out that they were not so monolithic. In fact, some of them preferred to carry out peace talks with the North Vietnam governed by the Communist Party than to continue the intra-racial fighting at the end of war. They mediated the negotiation between the North and the South, and led the South to surrender bloodlessly at the end. Prof. Tran calls them the “minorities among minorities” in Vietnam, whereas the Catholics had been the few. She demonstrated their unknown efforts in peace making in detail by referring to documents that have recently been made public.
Prof. Tran has found out the fertile ground of civil society and democracy in South Vietnam under the situation of restricted press freedom. This finding sheds light on the comparative perspective on countries such Thailand and Malaysia which were governed by similar political regime at that time.
【Q and A】
Prof. Tran states that the South Vietnamese Catholics’ experience of living in socialist societies in Eastern Europe had allowed them to collaborate with the Communists, and diplomatic documents mentioned that President Gho had tried to bargain with the North. The naïve view that the South Vietnam had been the puppet of the U.S. should be reconsidered.
