Indochinese Congress
The 1936–1937 planned but ultimately banned Indochinese Congress (vietn. Đông Dương Đại hội ) was an unsuccessful attempt to reform French colonial rule in Indochina from below.
Background: Front populaire and colonial reform
When the leftist party alliance Front populaire under Léon Blum won the election in France in May 1936 , this aroused the hopes of the Vietnamese national movement in Indochina; especially since the SFIO politician Marius Moutet, a well-known critic of the methods of French colonial rule, was appointed head of the colonial ministry. The members of the Popular Front supported the continued existence of French rule overseas by a large majority, but they held out the prospect of a reform of the repressive colonial administrative apparatus and internal autonomy .
The hopes of the Vietnamese seemed to be fulfilled after the Moutet Ministry issued a far-reaching amnesty in June 1936 and released thousands of political prisoners throughout the colonial empire. In the Vietnamese areas alone ( Tonkin , Annam , Cochinchina ) 2028 prisoners were released, of which 1352 were officially considered political prisoners . The majority of these were Vietnamese who had been imprisoned as actual or suspected participants in the 1930/31 uprisings. Moutet also had prison conditions improved, colonial police dossiers declared invalid, and local jury members installed in local courts. Governor General René Robin protested against these measures, but was replaced a little later by the more liberal Jules Brévié .
Indochinese Congress Movement
On July 29, the anti-colonial Saigon journalist Nguyễn An Ninh published an article in the Trotskyist newspaper La Lutte in which he proposed the creation of a new representative body for the population of Indochina (i.e. primarily the Vietnamese). This organization - the Indochinese Congress - should first list the abuses of colonial rule in a kind of petition and then negotiate political reforms with the French government. In terms of a grassroots democratic people's assembly , every Vietnamese should have the opportunity to participate directly. The proposal was enthusiastically received by almost all Vietnamese groups and sparked a mass political movement in Cochinchina (at that time the center of Vietnamese political activity) . This Indochinese Congress Movement (viet. Phong trào Đại hội Đông Dương ) or Indochinese Democratic Movement ( Phong trào Dân chủ Đông Dương ) quickly developed into the most prominent legally organized movement in the colonial history of Vietnam.
The main actors were the Indochinese Communist Party and the Trotskyists , who were still cooperating with each other at the time. In addition, the bourgeois-national- liberal constitutionalist party and even some local branches of the French SFIO also took part.
In line with its grassroots aspirations, the congress movement started at the grassroots level and set up so-called “action committees” in villages, neighborhoods, schools and factories all over Cochinchina - a novelty, as political participation was previously a matter for the urban elite. Within two months, 600 such committees were set up, in March 1937 there were an estimated 1000. Each committee was supposed to define local problems and opportunities for improvement and to select representatives for the Congress, but also served as a general forum for discussion of the political future of Indochina. About a quarter of the members of the action committees were previously released prisoners. Around 450,000 copies of 200 different political leaflets were printed and distributed, and the committees also put on plays to bring their goals closer to the often illiterate rural population.
In the following months, the congress movement expanded northwards, from autumn 1936 there was also a section in Tonkin under Trần Huy Liệu (the editor of Le Travail ) and in Annam under the former prisoner Nguyễn Khoa Văn . For the first time in the colonial era, Vietnamese from all parts of the country worked together in an organized manner.
Communist infiltration and prohibition
Moutet's colonial ministry was at first benevolent to the Vietnamese reform proposals and tolerated the movement. After several months, however, it became clear that the communists were the dominant force behind the movement and had infiltrated the action committees for their own ends.
At the time, the Communist Party in Cochinchina comprised two forms of organization: a publicly moderate, legal group under Nguyễn Văn Tạo and Dương Bạch Mai , which worked with the Trotskyists and constitutionalists in the congress movement, and an underground organization (led by Lê Hồng Phong , Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai and Hà Huy Tập ), which called for an armed revolutionary struggle against the colonial power out of illegality.
After it became clear that this radical wing of the Communist Party dominated the Action Committees, the Constitutionalist Party withdrew from the Congress movement. In September 1936, Moutet announced that no investigative commission of the French government would come to Indochina (only the former labor minister Justin Godard was dispatched in January 1937) and that all work of the congressional movement should therefore be stopped. The communists ignored this ban and continued to create new underground action committees. In the spring of 1937 Moutet was finally forced to instruct the colonial authorities to take active action against the congress movement and to smash its structures. Many leaders of the movement were (again) imprisoned, including the initiator - who was not involved in the radicalization - the journalist Nguyễn An Ninh.
In the end, only the Indochinese Communist Party had benefited from the congressional movement, as it had taken over many of the action committees as underground cells and thus significantly expanded its influence in the rural areas. Both the French socialists and the moderate reform forces in Vietnam, on the other hand, had lost much of their credibility. The Trotskyists - weakened by the new arrests - increasingly lost their influence in the following years, after the Communist Party ceased all cooperation from mid-1937 under pressure from Moscow.
From 1939 the liberal Daladier government intensified the repression measures in Indochina and had the majority of the communist leadership arrested by means of extensive raids, which can be regarded as the ultimate failure of the movement in Cochinchina. The communists initiated the Nam-Kỳ uprising at the end of 1940 , but it collapsed within a few weeks. Even if some of the former action committees lasted until 1945 and then were of great use to the communists during the August Revolution , the Communist Party in the south had largely lost its base. Instead, the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo sects developed in Cochinchina as the new dominant mass organizations .
literature
- Sud Chonchirdsin (Chulalongkorn University): The Indochinese Congress (May 1936 – March 1937): False Hope of Vietnamese Nationalists , In: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Vol. 30, No. 2, Singapore 1999, pp. 338–346 ( restricted preview )
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Martin Thomas: The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society , Manchester University Press, 2005, pp. 290/291
- ↑ a b Peter Zinoman : The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 , University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001, p 290
- ↑ a b c d Geoffrey C. Gunn: Rice Wars in Colonial Vietnam: The Great Famine and the Viet Minh Road to Power , Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham 2014, pp. 114–116
- ↑ a b c Christopher Goscha : The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam: A History , Penguin UK, 2016
- ↑ a b R. B. Smith: Communist Indochina , Routledge, London 2012, p. 75
- ↑ KW Taylor: A History of the Vietnamese , Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 516