On November 21

On this day in ...

... 1967 (45 years ago today), the head of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, assured the U.S. news media:

'I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.'

His declaration came just 2 months before the massive Tet Offensive on Saigon and cities. The United States-Vietnam War would go on for another 8 years and end without U.S. victory.

(Prior November 21  posts are here, here, and here, here, and here.)

Look On! Cambodia's Khmer Rouge Killing Fields

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy productions)

The Killing Fields (1984) is set in Year Zero of Pol Pot's genocidal cleansing campaign in Cambodia.
The movie tells the story of an American reporter for The New York Times, Sydney Schanberg (played by Sam Waterson), who travels to Cambodia in the early 1970s to report on the effects of the Vietnam War and US military action in the country. In the capital city of Phnom Penh, Sydney is helped by his translator, the Cambodian journalist, Dith Pran (played by Haing S. Ngor). The journalists realise too late that Cambodia is on the brink of a 'bloodbath'. In the end, Pol Pot's regime would kill 1.5 to 2 million people; as detailed in IntLawGrrls' Khmer Rouge accountability series, efforts to bring surviving leaders of that regime continue to this day.

(credit)

The first half of the movie (at 141 minutes' running time, it is long) centres on the build-up to the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in the capital and the evacuation of civilians. During this time, Sydney ensures that Pran's family are flown to safety by the US military, but convinces Pran to stay. Pran, however, is not allowed to remain with the foreign journalists and is consequently captured by the Khmer Rouge.
The second half the movie revolves around Pran's resolve to escape from a Khmer Rouge labour camp. After Pran escapes, he literally stumbles upon the killing fields of Cambodia. Surrounded by the skeletons and dead bodies, Pran continues on his journey in an attempt to flee the atrocity and find his family. Through Pran's experience, we witness the 'reeducation' of the Cambodian people – much like that which had taken place a decade earlier in the Cultural Revolution in China. (IntLawGrrls posts on the latter here, here, here, and here.)
Notably, the film depicts child soldiers, used as lookouts and killers. We see the children's indoctrination in classes where they are taught that children are separate from their parents and that their only loyalty is to the party.
Directed by Roland Joffé, the British film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, and Cinematography. It won three – the last two, as well as Best Supporting Actor for Haing S. Ngor. The actor Ngor was, in fact, a doctor who had been held in labour camps for four years in parallel time to his character. This role was his first.
Killing Fields is an informative film on the run-up to the Cambodian genocide. The movie clearly highlights US involvement in the region; in particular, the role of then-President Richard M. Nixon in bombing Cambodia and so causing civilian casualties.

(Cross-posted at Human Rights Film Diary blog)

On May 8

On this day in ...
.... 1972 (40 years ago today), as a response "a massive invasion of South Vietnam" mounted by the North Vietnamese about 5 weeks earlier, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon announced that he'd ordered principal ports in North Vietnam to be mined, and that the mines would be activated in 3 days. (image credit) Other measures, such as U.S. Navy searches and bombing of railways, also were threatened. His goal, as stated in his televised speech on this day, was "to prevent the flow of arms and material to the communist forces." The measures did little to quell conflict in Indochina, but much to spark new antiwar protests in the United States.

(Prior May 8 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On November 1

On this day in ...
... 1966 (45 years ago today), during a National Day celebration, using artillery shells fired from a jungle base 3-1/2 miles away, the Viet Cong hit Saigon, capital of what was then called South Vietnam, killing at least 8 persons and wounding many others. The previous day, the BBC reported,

[F]ormer US President General Dwight D Eisenhower called for more troops to be sent to Vietnam to bring about a swift end to the conflict.
He told the US News and World Report that the war had been 'going on too long' and said America should be 'putting in the kind of military strength we need to win' as soon as possible.

U.S. involvement would end with the fall of Saigon 9 years later. By that time, according to the BBC, an estimated 900,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, 50,000 Americans, and 400,000 South Vietnamese had died.

(Prior November 1 posts are here, here, here, and here)

On February 4

On this day in ...
... 1973, teams of inspectors known as the International Commission of Control and Supervision began monitoring a truce in the U.S.-Vietnam War, pursuant to an agreement reached a few days earlier at peace talks in Paris. The commission included delegates from Hungary, Poland, Canada and Indonesia. Sporadic fighting would continue, ending "with the fall of Saigon in April 1975 and the reunification of the country under communist rule."

(Prior February 4 posts are here, here, and here.)

On December 1

On this day in ...
... 2009, the U.S. Senate voted 97-0 to confirm the 1st Vietnamese American federal judge appointed with life tenure pursuant to Article III of the U.S. Constitution. Serving since then as a U.S. District Judge for the Central District of California is Jacqueline Hong-Ngoc Nguyen (left). Nguyen was born in 1965 in Dalat, in what was then South Vietnam. When that country was defeated in 1975, she came with her family to the United States. Following undergraduate and law studies at Occidental College and UCLA, respectively, she held a number of posts, including Deputy Chief of the General Crimes Division for the U.S. Attorney's Office, Central District of California, and Judge of the Los Angeles County Superior Court.

(Prior December 1 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 22

On this day in ...
... 1957, 13 Americans were wounded when outposts of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (logo at right) and U.S. Information Service were bombed in Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam (today, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). The event marked the 1st U.S. military casualties in Vietnam -- the 1st in a war that would claim many more over the next decade and a half.

(Prior October 22 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 14

On this day in ...
... 1916, Rutgers University benched all-American athlete Paul Robeson (left), because the Washington and Lee football team it faced refused to take the field against a squad that included an African-American player. (photo credit) Robeson went on to Fame, and not only in the College Hall of that name. He would graduate from Columbia Law School and study languages at the University of London; become a "superbly talented" actor and singer; and engaged in political activism on issues such as the Spanish Civil War, workers' rights, the Vietnam War, and racial discrimination. He was called to testify before anti-Communist inquiries in state and federal legislatures, and for years during the 1950s was denied a passport to travel on account of his views. Robeson died in 1976 at age 77.

(Prior October 14 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 11

On this day in ...
... 1995 (15 years ago today), "the one-time student protester" against the Vietnam War, who'd become the United States' leader 2-1/2 years earlier had become the leader of the United States, established full diplomatic relations with Vietnam. President Bill Clinton hearkened to words once used by Abraham Lincoln, President during the Civil War a century earlier, when he said in remarks delivered at a ceremony in Washington:

This moment offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted time for too long. We can now move onto common ground.

The move came more than 2 decades after U.S. troops abandoned what was then the capital city of South Vietnam. Today it's known as Ho Chi Minh City, part of the single country of Vietnam depicted above right. In 2000, as depicted in these BBC photos (credit), the President and the 1st Lady -- today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- would make the 1st official visit to Vietnam in a quarter-century.

(Prior July 11 posts are here, here, and here.)

On May 15

On this day in ...
... 1970 (40 years ago today), 2 persons lay dead and another 12 were wounded at Jackson State in Mississippi by the early hours, following a nighttime demonstration in which officers had aimed "a heavy, constant barrage of gunfire" at a women's dormitory, (credit for photo of 2 women looking out of the bullet-ridden dormitory soon after the fusillade) The deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green occurred one of many protests related to civil rights and antiwar issues on college campuses across the United States that spring; indeed, the killings of 4 demonstrators at Ohio's Kent State had taken place fewer than 2 weeks earlier. No prosecutions ensued, though the report of a presidential inquiry commission stated (p. 450) that the gunfire was "an unreasonable, unjustified overreaction."

(Prior May 15 posts are here, here, and here)

The Vietnam War: Take II

The United States pulled out of an intractable, expensive and highly destructive war in Vietnam in 1975. For decades thereafter, relations between the two countries was nonexistent. But then ever so slowly came the thawing. Trade was a big part of The Great Thaw. Since time immemorial, whether the war involved companies or countries, real peace came only after the warring parties had established strong and deep trade ties between them. Trade has a way of creating new relationships and new memories.

Such has been the experience of Vietnam and the United States. Despite the bitter memories of mass bombings and torture cells deep in the jungle, the two countries forged a path to peace. In 2007, Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization with the aid and support of the United States. Vietnam's accession signaled the renewal of its ties with the international community. But just as important, it signaled a new relationship with the United States. The bonds of that new relationship are now being tested. Just a few weeks ago, Vietnam filed its first ever dispute in the WTO. Against whom? The United States.

In United States — Anti-dumping Measures on Certain Shrimp from Viet Nam (DS404), the two countries once again face off on some heated issues. The U.S. believes Vietnam is "dumping" large quantities of shrimp into the U.S. market. In trade law, dumping occurs when the exporting country sells its products into the domestic market either for less than the cost of production or less than the price sold at home. It is an unfair trade practice, and most countries have laws against such a practice. Vietnam, however, takes issue with the way the United States has calculated the so-called "dumping margin" -- an additional charge the U.S. imposes on Vietnamese shrimp to raise the price to more accurately reflect its normal value (i.e., it's "fair price"). The U.S. dumping methodology has long been under attack, indeed the WTO previously ruled the complicated "zeroing" method in dispute violated U.S. WTO obligations.

In this war, as in the last, Vietnam is likely to win an unexpected victory. What will this mean for relations between the two countries? Thankfully, in a sign of how far we have come since 1975, it is likely to have no effect. Trade = Peace

On April 3

On this day in ...
... 1969, Melvin Laird (left), the Secretary of Defense, described the United States' plan to "'Vietnamize'" the war that it had waged in Indochina for years. Laird thus confirmed that the government was moving "to lessen the burden on the United States in terms both of lives and dollars," but he declined to give any "'unilateral withdrawal-of-troop figures.'" Laird further announced "that secret talks aimed at settling the Vietnam war were under way" between South and North Vietnamese factions, and that they "had shown 'some sign of progress.'" (credit for (c) photo, published in Laird's memoir, With Honor (2008))


(Prior April 3 posts are here, here, and here)

On August 23

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), Madeleine Riffaud (left) was born in Paris, France. When the Nazis occupied her city, the teenager adopted a codename and "joined the 20,000 strong Résistance in the French capital and became one of the 100,000 or so members nationwide." Decades later she told a Deutsche Welle reporter:

'I took the name of a German, out of respect for the author Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poems I loved. We were at war with the Nazis, not at war against the German people. So I became "Rainer" and remained so to the end of the occupation.'

In retaliation for an SS massacre of 600 in central France, Riffaud shot a German soldier to death -- an exploit she recalled in her poem Femmes avec fusils (p. 5) -- and was arrested. She would be released when Allies liberated the city. After World War II she became a journalist, poet, and war correspondent, covering wars in Algeria and Vietnam. (image credit)
... 1990, Armenia declared itself sovereign. It would become independent from the Soviet Union a year later. Today the country (flag at left), which is slightly larger than the state of Maryland, has a population estimated in the neighborhood of 3 million.

(Prior August 23 posts are here and here.)

On August 7

On this day in ...
... 1964 (45 years ago today), Congress voted in favor of a resolution that President Lyndon B. Johnson had requested as a means "to strengthen his hand in dealing with Communist aggression in Southeast Asia." This Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave "prior Congressional approval of 'all necessary measures' that the President may take 'to repel any armed attack' against United States forces and 'to prevent further aggression,'" passed the House of Representatives 416-0 and the Senate 88-2. Decades later serious questions would be revealed about the incident that had supposedly triggered the need for the resolution, an attack on U.S. ships in the gulf off Vietnam. (credit for photo of Johnson signing resolution 3 days after Congress' vote)
... 1942, amid World War II, 11,000 U.S. Marines landed at Guadalcanal, one of the Solomon Islands (right), then under Japanese control, and took over the airfield. A bloody jungle battle would ensue, leaving thousands dead before Japan retreated in February 1943.

(Prior August 7 posts are here and here.)

On July 23

On this day in ...
... 1920, May Wright Sewall died in Indianapolis, Indiana, 76 years after her birth in Wisconsin, and just a month before women's suffrage -- an issue to which she'd devoted her lifework -- would come into effect in the United States via ratification of the 19th Amendment. She had earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern Female College in Evanston, Illinois, now part of Northwestern University. She taught throughout the Midwest, founding a girls' school in Indianapolis. Elected president of the National Congress of Women in 1891 and of the International Congress of Women (ICW) in 1899, Sewall, like many feminists of the day, combined her work for women's rights with work for peace. Thus she chaired the ICW standing committee on peace and arbitration and a 1915 Organized Conference of Women Workers to Promote Peace, and sailed in 1915 on Henry Ford's Peace Expedition. As we've posted, Sewall, along with IntLawGrrls transnational foremother Susan B. Anthony and others, led a women's rights meeting at which abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave the last speech of his life. (credit for portrait of Sewall on display in Indiana's capital)
... 1962, in Geneva, Switzerland, Laos and more than a dozen other countries signed the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, the result of a 2-month conference. They "pledged to respect Laotian neutrality" and "to refrain from interference 'direct or indirect' in the internal affairs" of that country. The agreement would be breached in the course of the Vietnam War.

(Prior July 23 posts are here and here.)

On July 2

On this day in ...
... 1839 (170 years ago today), more than 4 dozen persons held in slavery revolted 4 days after the ship transporting them, La Amistad, had set sail from Havana, Cuba. Leading the revolt was Sengbe Pieh, or Cinque, as he was called in the United States. A member of Africa's Mende people, he'd been seized and sold into slavery in West Africa in January of the same year. The ship would drift about the Atlantic until August, when, on arrival in New London, Connecticut, the ship, its remaining crew, and the rebellious slaves became the source of an epic legal dispute. As depicted in the film Amistad (1997), former U.S. President John Quincy Adams would argue on behalf of Cinque and comrades (above right) (image credit), resulting in the Supreme Court's favorable 1841 decision.
... 1976, 3 years after the departure of U.S. troops and 1 year after the fall of Saigon, the National Assembly of Vietnam met for the 1st time and officially reunified the country, naming it the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, establishing the capital at Hanoi, and adopting the flag at left. The aftermath, as described at this Belgian website:

Many people who supported the Saigon regime are sent to 're-education camps'. Over the next years more than one million of Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese ('boat people') flee the country.

(Prior July 2 posts are here and here.)

On April 19

On this day in ...

... 1988, Kwon Ki-ok died at age 86. Born in Pyongyang in the north of Korea in 1901, the 17-year-old Kwon saw a stunt aviation demonstration that inspired her, following imprisonment for political activities at home, to move to China. There she became the 1st Korean woman pilot and, eventually, an officer in the Chinese Air Force. After World War II she helped found the Air Force of South Korea (logo above right) and served in that country's Ministry of Defense.

... 1971, in Washington, D.C., Vietnam Veterans Against the War began a 5-day demonstration against U.S. involvement in the conflict in Indochina. This website states:

The generally peaceful protest, called Dewey Canyon III in honor of the operation of the same name conducted in Laos, ended on April 23 with about 1,000 veterans throwing their combat ribbons, helmets, and uniforms on the Capitol steps, along with toy weapons. Earlier, they had lobbied with their congressmen, laid wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery, and staged mock 'search and destroy' missions.

The event took on new significance in 2004, on account of a speech that veteran John Kerry gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at that time (left). Audio available here. Indeed, 2004 attacks on Kerry, by then a U.S. Senator and the Democratic Presidential candidate, led to a new term for the smearing of a political opponent: "swiftboating."

(Prior April 19 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: L. Song Richardson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome L. Song Richardson (right) as today's guest blogger.

A specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and prosecutorial ethics, Song is an Assistant Professor at DePaul University College of Law, and this semester she's a visiting professor at Boston College Law School. Song earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal of International Law, and her B.A. in psychology from Harvard College. While at Harvard she earned distinction for her classical piano performances, which included performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before entering academia, Song was a Skadden Arps Public Interest Fellow with the National Immigration Law Center, assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. As a state and federal public defender and private practitioner of criminal defense, she represented defendants in numerous white collar, serious felony, and capital cases. That expertise is evident in Song's guest post below, which exposes a defect in foreign evidence-gathering mechanisms and proposes a solution to the problem.

Song dedicates her post to Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (1924-2005) who, as Song writes,

in 1968, became the first African American woman elected to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She became an international figure as a vocal critic of the war in Vietnam and, throughout her career, tirelessly championed numerous issues including civil rights, women’s rights and the rights of the urban poor.

In addition, as prior IntLawGrrls posts have noted, Chisholm ran for the highest office in the United States. In her most concerted campaign she entered several Presidential primaries (below left), and received 151.95 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. In 1984 Chisholm was trounced in a bid for the Democratic nomination for Vice President by another woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro. Chisholm was not the 1st African American person nominated for President at a major-party convention. As we've posted, that milestone was reached in 1888 by Frederick Douglass, who'd also run for Vice President in 1872 on a minor-party ticket headed by a woman, Presidential candidate Victoria Claflin Woodhull. Nor was Chisholm the 1st woman nominated for President at a major-party convention; as we've also posted, 8 years earlier Margaret Chase Smith had made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Presidential nod. Nonetheless, the placement in IntLawGrrls' foremothers list at right of this 1st African American woman to have her name placed in nomination is especially apt on this day of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Heartfelt welcome!

On October 31

On this day in ...

... 1883 (125 years ago today), Marie Laurencin was born in Paris. Her mother sent the teenaged Marie to Sèvres, home of a famed porcelain-painting factory. When she returned to Paris she entered an art academy and became acquainted with artists who would form the Cubist School, among them Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Her own paintings featured "mainly lyrical motifs like graceful, dreamy young girls in pastel coloring and soft shading," a "color-sensitive inventiveness" that "leads to a variation of repetitions of form and motifs." "During World War I Laurencin took refuge in Spain where, feeling painfully exiled, she produced few works. " In addition to her paintings, Laurencin is known for designing sets for Serge Diaghilev's ballets and for illustrating a 1930 edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. She died in Paris in 1956. (credit for photo of Laurencin; credit for her 1923 painting, "Portrait of Mademoiselle Chanel")

... 1968 (40 years ago today), in a televised speech dubbed an "October Surprise," U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he was halting "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam" effective the next day. Five days later, Johnson's preferred successor, his Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost the Presidential election to Richard M. Nixon (right), the Republican who had served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Vice President in the previous decade. The Vietnam War continued for another 7 years.

On October 20

On this day in ...
... 1988 (20 years ago today), aviator Sheila Scott (left) died 61 years after she'd been born in Worcestershire, England. Scott made history when, in the course of a 34,000-mile flight in 1971, she became the 1st pilot -- woman or man -- "to fly directly over true North Pole in a light aircraft." During this flight the U. S. Navy, which tracked her via satellite, "had orders: 'Don't lose Sheila!'"
... 2003 (5 years ago today), the U.N. General Assembly (below left) passed a resolution condemning what the resolution called "Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory." The action to which the resolution referred was the building of a wall dividing territory. The resolution asked for an advisory opinion on the legality vel non of this act; consequently, the International Court of Justice ruled in mid-2004 that the building of the wall was contrary to international law. (photo credit)