By the end of Second World War VietMinh controlled the northern half of Vietnam.Viet Minh formed a government led by Ho ChiMinh in Hanoi. This Viet Minh governmentquickly occupied the southern half of Vietnam.However, the Allied Powers decided at Potsdamthat the British in the south and the Chinese inthe north should defend Indo-China from theJapanese. But Ho Chi Minh had established hiscontrol very firmly and so, early in 1946, theBritish and Chinese troops had to withdraw,leaving the French and Viet Minh to confronteach other. In March the two governments(French and Viet Minh) reached an agreementby which North Vietnam was to be a free state,within an Indo-Chinese Federation.In 1949 the French attempted to secure thesupport of the population by declaring Vietnam,Laos and Cambodia independent within theFrench Union, retaining only foreign affairs anddefence under French control.
American Bombing of North VietnamEarly in 1975, the war took a decisive turn.
The armies of North Vietnam and of the NationalLiberation Front of South Vietnam swept acrossthe country routing the American supportedtroops of South Vietnam. By 30 April 1975, allthe American troops had withdrawn and thecapital of South Vietnam, Saigon, was liberated.North and South Vietnam were formally unitedas one countryin 1976. The cityof Saigon wasrenamed as Ho Chi-Minh City after thegreat leader of theVietnamese people.While the French were receivingconsiderable financial aid from America, theViet Minh were helped by the new Chinesecommunist government. The French troopswere eventually defeated. The GenevaConference (1954) that met on Korea andIndo China decided that Vietnam was to be anindependent state but temporarily divided; theViet Minh tocontrol the north and Bao Dai tohead the government the south. Cambodia and Laos were to be independent.
One of the momentous decisions taken inthe post-War II era was to integrate the statesof Western Europe. In doing so the Europeanswanted (1) to prevent further European wars byending the rivalry between France and Germany.(2) to create a united Europe to resist any threatfrom Soviet Russia. (3) to form a third force in theworld to counter-balance the strength of the USand USSR. (4) to make full use of the economicand military resources of Europe by organizingthem on a continental scale. In May 1949 tencountries met in London and signed to form a
Council of Europe. The Council of Europe withheadquarters at Strasbourg was established witha committee of foreign ministers of membercountries and a Consultative Assembly, drawn from the parliaments of foreign countries
The year 1988 saw the first mass protests–first in Armenia, and then in the Baltic States.Earlier Soviet regimes had used severe repressionto quell such uprisings. Gorbachev could not takerecourse to such brutal measures. The ChernobylDisaster, a major accident in a nuclear plant inUkraine, in 1986, was another blow. Gorbachevmade moves to stabilise his position by relianceon conservative forces in 1989 and 1991. But oneach occasion he was interrupted by massive miners’ strike which came close to cripple thecountry’s energy supplies.
The East European communist states,under the Soviet umbrella, were also in a deepeconomic and social crisis. Gorbachev’s decisionto loosen the Soviet control on the countriesof Eastern Europe created an independent,democratic momentum. A series of workers’strikes undermined the communist regimesfirst in Poland and then in Hungary. A waveof demonstrations that swept East Germanyled to demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In the meantime, three Baltic States hadformally left the Soviet Union. They wereadmitted to the U.N. as independent countries:Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In November1991 eleven republics (Ukraine, Georgia,Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistanand Uzbekistan) announced secession from theSoviet Union. Instead, they declared they wouldestablish a Commonwealth of IndependentStates. On 25 December Gorbachev announcedhis resignation. For six days the Soviet Unioncontinued to exist only in name and at midnighton 31 December 1991, it was formally dissolved.The USSR was no more.
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