Liberation Day

Our latest trip to Vietnam happens to co-incide with Liberation Day - an annual public holiday celebrating the the surrender of Saigon in 1975 to the North Vietnamese army.

Vietnam's a colourful place at any time of the year but today everyone's painting the town red. On the road into Hoi-An from Danang, every single house, shop or tin-roofed shack has a red flag sporting a yellow star outside its door.



Earlier in the month. many cities and provinces will have had their own special commemoration of the day they were individually 'Liberated' but the 30th is a countrywide rememberance.

As liberation day falls on a Saturday this year, and International Labour day is directly after it on the Sunday, both Monday and Tuesday are taken as holidays in lieu - but only for people in government posts.

With this in mind, it's difficult to say how much the public celebrations are a true display of national pride and how much they are simply a reflection of the Party's desire to remind everyone 'who won the war'. Thirty years on there are some that would argue that the country is still divided North to South. For many, the end of the war was not as liberating as it might have been. There are plenty of cyclo drivers in Saigon scraping a living in spite of having a tertiary level education and more than a handful of former landowners now making ends meet selling lottery tickets; all because they were on the wrong side in the war. In a country supposedly governed by communist ideals of egalitarianism it would appear that some are more equal than others.

For a new generation the war has achieved almost mythical status and holds no real day-to-day relevance to their lives. However the scenes are replayed by the party propaganda machine at regular intervals lest anyone forget, particularly the one in which the North Vietnamese tank crashes through the gates of the American Embassy. It also lives on in a more bizarre form as one of the most popular games on the internet here - 'HeliAttack' - in which the player has to shoot as many helicopters out of the sky as possible.