Nguyễn Hữu Thọ

Nguyễn Hữu Thọ (born July 10, 1910 in Cholon Province , French Indochina , † December 24, 1996 ) was a Vietnamese politician .

Life

Thọ was born the son of a local manager of a rubber plantation in Cholon . From 1921 he studied law in Aix-en-Provence . In April 1932 he applied for French citizenship, which he was denied. He returned to Indochina in 1933 and worked as a lawyer in Saigon .

Nguyễn Hữu Thọ began his political career in 1949 when he took part in leading positions in the protests against the French occupation of Indochina and against the patrols of American warships off the coast of South Vietnam . Because of these activities he was arrested and was serving 1,950 to 1,952, a prison sentence . During this time he gained a great reputation among the population for his extensive hunger strike against the Indochina War .

After the division of Vietnam into communist North Vietnam and pro-American South Vietnam in 1954, he stayed in his South Vietnamese homeland and subsequently cooperated with the government of President Ngô Đình Diệm until he was arrested again for standing up for national elections to achieve reunification . With the exception of a short break, he was mainly in prisons in South Vietnam between 1954 and his escape in 1961 . After his escape he became first interim president and then in 1962 chairman of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, which he co-founded on December 20, 1960 (Mặt Trận Giải Phóng Miền Nam Việt Nam, NLF) . With this liberation movement he carried out successful protests against the government of South Vietnam.

During the Vietnam War , the NLF founded the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam in June 1969, in which Huỳnh Tấn Phát became President and he himself became Chairman of the Consultative Council. After the conquest of Saigon by the unit of the Army of North Vietnam and the NLF in April 1975, he became Prime Minister of South Vietnam.

After reunification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on July 2, 1976, he became one of two vice-presidents and thus deputy of Tôn Đức Thắng . He was also the first mayor of Ho Chi Minh City . After Tôn Đức Thắng's death on March 30, 1980, he became the incumbent President of Vietnam and held this office until he was replaced by Trường Chinh on July 4, 1981.

He then served as Vice President of the State Council between 1981 and 1992 and was Deputy President Trường Chinh and Võ Chí Công . At the same time he was from 1981 to 1987 chairman of the national assembly (Quốc hội Việt Nam) and thus parliamentary president .

Most recently, between 1988 and 1994, he was chairman of the Fatherland Front (Mặt trận Tổ quốc Việt Nam), the umbrella organization of the country's mass organizations .

Web links

• rulers.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jacques Dalloz: Dictionnaire de la Guerre d'Indochine , Paris, 2006, p. 171
   Christopher E. Goscha : Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954) , Copenhagen, 2011, p. 323

Note: The surname of this Vietnamese name is Nguyễn , in Western texts the spelling is often simplified Nguyen . According to Vietnamese custom, the person should be referred to by their first name Th - even in formal situations .