North Vietnamese Lt. Col. Bui Tin, center, waves as he bids farewell to the last U.S. troops to leave Saigon, South Vietnam, with the final withdrawal of American forces, March 29, 1973. Bui Tin and Viet Cong officers observed the departure of the last 2,500 men, who flew home or to other southwest Asia bases.Charles Harrity/AP
Bui Tin, a North Vietnamese colonel who had a prominent role in the Vietnam War’s final moments but later fled the country and became an unlikely critic of its ruling Communist Party, died on Aug. 11 in France. He was 90.
His death, in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil, was confirmed by his long-time friend Nguyen Van Huy, a fellow Vietnamese dissident who lives in France.
Mr. Huy said in a telephone interview that Mr. Tin had been in a coma and had received kidney dialysis.
Mr. Tin personally accepted the surrender of South Vietnam in 1975. He was also present at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated French troops to secure their country’s independence.
Although Mr. Tin was a high-ranking army officer and a onetime disciple of Ho Chi Minh, the founding president, he went into exile in France in 1990. For years afterward, he urged his former party comrades to embrace democracy and abandon what he saw as their moribund economic and political ideology.
“His exile embodies the tragedy of Vietnam, and Vietnamese intellectuals in particular, as they found themselves in the stranglehold of a corrupt and violent regime that at one point appeared to represent their aspirations,” said Tuong Vu, author of Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology.
When Mr. Tin awoke on April 30, 1975, he probably did not expect to play a direct role in a pivotal moment in Vietnamese history.
Later that morning, he rode aboard a North Vietnamese tank to the presidential palace in Saigon. There, he walked inside to find General Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, sitting in a conference room.
Mr. Tin was not a commander, but the deputy editor of an army newspaper. As the highest-ranking North Vietnamese officer in the room, however, it made sense for him to formally represent the winning side.
“I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you,” Gen. Minh told Mr. Tin, according to a description of the scene in the 2002 book Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975 by A.J. Langguth.
“There is no question of your transferring power,” was the colonel’s tart reply. “Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.”
Mr. Tin then reassured Gen. Minh that he had nothing to fear; it was only the Americans who had been beaten, he said.
April 30 is now celebrated as Reunification Day in Vietnam and commemorates the end of the war. The day also commemorates the change of Saigon’s name to Ho Chi Minh City.
Many South Vietnamese officials would be imprisoned for years after the war in what the Communist Party called “re-education camps.” Nevertheless, debates within the party would rage for decades over the role that Marxist-Leninist dogma should play in the country’s postwar development.
During a trip to France in 1990 – just as Vietnam’s main patron, the Soviet Union, was crumbling – Mr. Tin declared himself a political dissident and complained that his country was troubled by “bureaucracy, irresponsibility, egoism, corruption and fraud.”
But Mr. Vu, the historian, said that if Mr. Tin had hoped that his defection would bring broad political change in Vietnam, he miscalculated.
“He underestimated the resilience of Vietnamese Communism and the regime’s tight control over its officials through a combination of fear and rewards for compliance,” Mr. Vu said.
Bui Tin was born Dec. 29, 1927, in Nam Dinh, a northern Vietnamese city about 80 kilometres south of Hanoi.
Mr. Tin, whose father had been a mandarin in Vietnam’s last royal court, became one of a small number of educated Vietnamese who rallied to Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary cause, Mr. Vu said.
Many of those intellectuals later turned against the Communist Party, which dragged a unified Vietnam through disastrous postwar experiments in collectivized agriculture.
Mr. Tin saw the Soviet bloc’s disintegration as the right moment for his own political about-face. The Communist Party’s leadership “failed to bring liberty and prosperity to Vietnam,” he wrote in The Washington Post in October, 1991. “Rather than improve the abysmal condition of the population, they have blindly pursued sectarian policies designed to maintain their power,” he added.
Mr. Huy, the colonel’s friend, said that Mr. Tin leaves his wife, Le Thi Kim Chung; a daughter, Bui Bach Lien; a son, Bui Xuan Vinh; four siblings; and five grandchildren.
Today, Vietnam is a haven for foreign investors seeking a place with cheap labour and a relatively stable political environment. And despite steady waves of online dissent from the Vietnamese public, the party has maintained its grip on power.
It apparently never forgave Mr. Tin, who forged a friendly relationship with the United States soon after going into exile.
In 1991, Mr. Tin travelled to Washington and testified before a Senate committee that dealt with American prisoners of war. He also met with Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., a former prisoner of war in Hanoi, to discuss what the senator later described as their “mutual interest in promoting democracy in Vietnam.”
After Mr. Tin spoke to the committee, Mr. McCain approached him and stretched out his palm for a handshake. He got a hug instead.