Vietnam is officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. It's the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. With an estimated 90.3 million inhabitants as of 2012, it is the world's 13th-most-populous country, and the eighth-most-populous Asian country.
The capital city has been Hanoi since the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976.
The president is
Trương Tấn Sang .
The official language is Vietnamese.
Vietnam's profile:
Vietnam, a one-party Communist state, has one of south-east Asia's fastest-growing economies and has set its sights on becoming a developed nation by 2020.
Vietnam's independence was gradually eroded by France – aided by large Catholic militias – in a series of military conquests between 1859 and 1885. In 1862, the southern third of the country became the French colony of Cochinchina. By 1887, the entire country formally became part of French Indochina. The French administration imposed significant political and cultural changes on Vietnamese society. A Western-style system of modern education was developed, and Roman Catholicism was propagated widely. Most French settlers in Indochina were concentrated in Cochinchina, basing themselves around Saigon.
War dominated 30 years of Vietnam's history last century. The struggle that began with communists fighting French colonial power in the 1940s did not end until they seized Saigon and control of the whole country. In
1975, communist forces seized control of Saigon, ending the Vietnam War , and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.
The period that Americans refer to as the
"Vietnam War" – and the Vietnamese call the "American War" – was the US military intervention from 1965 to 1973.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
opposed the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
He argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes. Dr. King also didn't like the fact that the war was shifting resources to the conflict and taking them away from the War on Poverty. He said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Also, he lashed out against what he called the "cruel irony" of American blacks fighting and dying for a country which treated them as second class citizens: “We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. ... We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them in the same schools.”
On January 13, 1968, the day after President Johnson's State of the Union Address, King called for a large march on Washington against "one of history's most cruel and senseless wars."
“We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia.”
Dr. King's "
Beyond Vietnam" speech.
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