Bazin assassination

The assassination of Hervé Bazin, a French labor recruiter in Hanoi, on February 9, 1929, marked a turning point and the beginning of the demise of the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (VNQDD), the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, which perpetrated the killing. The resulting French retribution severely weakened the fledging Vietnamese revolutionary movement and hampered its ability to undermine French rule.

Biography

Hervé Bazin was a graduate of the École coloniale in Paris, and was a supervisor of labor recruitment in French Indochina. Since 1884, Vietnam had been a colony of France, and along with Laos and Cambodia, was part of French Indochina. Under the direction of Bazin, Vietnamese foremen were hired to recruit Vietnamese labourers to work on plantations. In some cases, the hired workforce would be utilised in southern Vietnam, which the French ruled as the colony of Cochinchina. Others were sent to distant French colonies such as the New Hebrides. The working conditions in which the Vietnamese were placed generated indignation. The methods of recruitment often included beating or coercion, as the foreman received a commission for each recruit. The living conditions were poor and the remuneration was low. Among the Vietnamese population, perception was that those recruited would never set eyes on their homeland again. The French colonial authorities refused to intervene, claiming on the one hand that recruitment “had no official character” and on the other hand that recruitment was beneficial to the Vietnamese, since it eased the population pressure on the crowded Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.

Death

In response, the hatred of Bazin among Vietnamese led to thoughts of an assassination. A group of workers approached the VNQDD, which had then been existence for two years, to suggest a revenge killing of Bazin. Nguyen Thai Hoc, the leader of the VNQDD felt that assassinations were pointless and that it would only prompt a crackdown by the French Surete Generale, thereby weakening the party. He felt that it was better to strengthen for an overthrow of the French, whereas he viewed Bazin merely as a twig. Having been turned down by the VNQDD leaders, one of the proposers of the assassination, whose membership or lack thereof is unclear, created his own plot. With the help of an accomplice, he shot and killed Bazin as he was leaving the home of his mistress on February 9, 1929. It was the first major attack by the VNQDD.

French reaction

The French authorities reacted by apprehending all known members of the VNQDD that they could track down, including a young naturalized Frenchman named Leon Sanh. Sanh confessed to the crime, but he later retracted it, claiming only to be a bystander. He later implicated an alleged accomplice, Nguyen Van Vien. Vien was then captured and died in prison. The sources disagree, but between three and four hundred men were rounded up. Of those seized, 36 were government clerks, 13 were officials in the French government, 36 were schoolteachers, 39 were merchants, 37 were landowners and 40 were military personnel. Eventually 78 men were convicted and sentenced to between five and twenty years in prison. Leon Sanh himself was acquitted. As a result of the arrests, the VNQDD leadership was severely depleted. Most of the Central Committee were captured, and Hoc and Nguyen Khac Nhu were among the few who managed to escape from the hideout at the Vietnam Hotel. The pressure under which the VNQDD was placed eventually led it to engage in overt violent struggle. This culminated in the Yen Bai mutiny of 1930, which resulted in a large section of the party being executed by the French authorities, decapacitating it as a major threat to the colonial order.

References

*cite book|title=The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, 1900–1941| authorlink= William Duiker |first= William |last=Duiker |year=1976 |publisher=Cornell University |location=Ithaca| isbn=0-8014-0951-9 |pages=pp. 160–161