“There is no inevitability to oppression and misfortune”: André Menras looks back on his eventful history with Vietnam in a powerful book

André Menras, a retired schoolteacher, has forged unbreakable ties with Vietnam. Diane Petitmangin

A retired schoolteacher, André Menras has forged unbreakable ties with Vietnam, which he discovered in 1970 while the war was raging. He published a book on his "50 years of loyalty" to the Vietnamese people.

The breath of resistance. When he is told, impressed by his biography and his commitments, that he has shown incredible courage, André Menras dismisses the argument with a wave of the hand. If he is not “the type to back down”, as he himself says, he just admits to fighting, since his greenest years, injustice.

The opportunity, while he has just released his latest book “Vietnam, between the best and the worst – 50 years of loyalty to the battles of my youth” (Les Indes savantes ed.), to look back on the journey of this “son of hard-working peasants, forged by this harsh life” from southern Aveyron, now a retired school teacher.

“In the apocalypse and humiliation”

He was 23 years old when, as a young teacher fresh out of the École Normale de Montpellier, he left in 1968, as a cooperant, to practice his profession in Saigon, in Vietnam while the war was raging there. Very quickly, he rejected these "French circles that stank of the end of colonialism" and took an aversion "to these American soldiers who "liberated" the people in the apocalypse and humiliation".

In his spare time and during school holidays, he travels around South Vietnam by motorbike, car and even fishing boat, all the while writing down memories of his travels in a small black notebook. Slowly but surely, anger at the war is growing because in South Vietnam too, it is wreaking havoc.

The ransacking of a country

“I have seen, with my own eyes, throughout the South of Vietnam, the systematic ransacking of a country, the organized massacre of the rural people”, he writes in his book, delivering “his unbearable shame of being a powerless witness” of the fires, rapes and killings that were going on.

“People were taken from their villages and put in camps without any means of subsistence. From a proud people, who were self-sufficient even in poverty, they were made people deprived of their dignity, of their culture, who had to beg or prostitute themselves…"

The flag of revolt

So one fine day in July 1970, with a fellow Frenchman, cooperating like him, he brandished the flag "of exasperation and revolt", the standard of the National Liberation Front, in climbing the statue of the two marines, in the heart of Saigon, and throwing leaflets in Vietnamese to demand the withdrawal of foreign troops.

“It was not a political act, in the sense of being affiliated with a party, communist in this case. It was just to give a voice to those who no longer had one and to bear witness to what we had seen to demand peace”.

Two and a half years in prison

Arrested, tried and convicted, André Menras spent two and a half years in prison, in difficult conditions – almost non-existent hygiene or sanitation, beatings… But by forming unwavering friendships. When he was finally released in December 1972, he returned to France and resumed his teaching career, but without denying the ties he had forged there.

Mastering the language, “I already spoke a little Vietnamese and I learned to write it to communicate clandestinely in prison”, he was received with honors in 2002 by the ruling Communist Party and was the first foreigner to receive Vietnamese nationality from the President of the Republic in 2009.

From hope to disillusionment

But hope quickly gave way to disillusionment when he saw the influence of “big brother” Chinese, an ogre with limitless appetites, on the Vietnamese state. “I had, as early as 2005, significant differences of opinion with the regime because journalists were imprisoned for having denounced corruption or because the government had granted China a monopoly on the exploitation of bauxite”.

His documentary on the widows of fishermen from the Paracel archipelago, attacked by the Chinese, was censored on site, just as his writings ended up being censored. However, André Menras does not want to give in. He is the author of the film, “A Cry from Within”, on the repression of democrats in Vietnam.

A Police Regime

“It is a police regime, riddled with corruption and under the influence of Beijing. Once again, people are gagged”,he gets excited. But the country is no longer in the news here. Barely a small item to mention the torrential rains, floods and deadly landslides two weeks ago. Or to be surprised by this influx of Vietnamese refugees in Calais. ~60/p~62

Open letter~60/h2~62

André Menras has just signed an open letter with 90 Vietnamese academics, journalists, diplomats and researchers abroad to demand the release of a Vietnamese journalist (Huy Duc), arrested in June 2024 and of whom we have no news. The petition appeared at the time when the new Secretary General of the Party and President of the Republic arrived in New York, to participate in the United Nations General Assembly from September 22 to 27.

So, at the beginning of November, he will leave there again for another documentary. Because despite everything, “as when I was 20, I persist in believing that there is no inevitability to poverty, oppression and misfortune”.

Thursday, October 10, at 6 p.m., Cimade (14 rue de la Rotonde) is organizing, with the association Adep France-Vietnam, an evening with André Menras around the book “Vietnam, between the best and the worst”, with a screening of the film “A cry from within.