Nguyen An Ninh

He is recognised by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as a Revolutionary Martyr.

• Name — Nguyễn An Ninh • Born — 6 September 1900 • Birthplace — Cần Giuộc district, Chợ Lớn Province, French Cochinchina • Died — 14 August 1943 • Place of death — Côn Đảo Prison, Poulo Condore, French Cochinchina • Occupation — writer, activist, revolutionary, anarchist

Nguyễn An Ninh was born on 6 September 1900, in Long Thượng commune, Cần Giuộc district, Chợ Lớn province (now part of Tây Ninh province), Cochinchina, a direct rule colony incorporated with four protectorates in the French Indochinese Union. His father Nguyễn An Khương, from Quán Tre, Hóc Môn district, Gia Định province (now part of Trung Mỹ Tây former District 12, Ho Chi Minh City), "a middling landowner, who preferred to think of himself as a country scholar", was a supporter of the Duy Tân hội or Đông Du (Association for Modernization, 19041912) reform movement. As a result, in 1908, he was excluded from Saigon and banned from journalism. Nguyen An Ninh received a French education. In 1918, this took him to Paris. He graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in Law age 20. While in Paris, Nguyễn An Ninh joined the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites (The Group of Vietnamese Patriots) that included Phan Châu Trinh, Phan Văn Trường, Nguyễn Thế Truyền and the future Ho Chi Minh (then under the name Nguyễn Tất Thành). Together the "Five Dragons" (Ngũ Long) indicted French colonial policy in the socialist press (an indictment that, on a return to France in 1923, Ninh developed and published as La France en Indochine). In 1919 the group tried to present delegates to the Versailles Peace conference with an eight-point programme for colonial self-determination. Within months of a final return from France, Nguyễn An Ninh was arrested in a suppression of La Cloche Fêlée. As the editor-in-chief, reporter, type-setter and even street seller, he had been producing the paper intermittently in Saigon since December 1923. Its appeals had drawn thousands of young workers and students to protest debt peonage and deportations, and to demand freedom of press, education and assembly. Ninh was summoned before the governor, Maurice Cognacq, who told him: This country has no need for intellectuals. This country is very simple. If you want to be intellectual, get the hell out of here, go to Moscow, you'll know that the seeds you want to sow in this country can never sprout. Ninh's arrest on 21 March 1926, coincided with the return from France of Bui Quang Chieu, the leader of the moderate-nationalist Constitutionalist Party. Crowds accompanying Chieu through the streets of Saigon chanted "Free Nguyễn An Ninh". It was also the day news was received of the death of Phan Châu Trinh. One of the Five Dragons, Phan Châu Trinh was a celebrated political convict. The result, on 4 April, was an unprecedented demonstration against the government. Seventy thousand paraded with Phan Châu Trinh's cortege. When Ninh's 18-month sentence was announced on 24 April 1926, students and school children in Saigon and the region deserted their classes en masse. More than a thousand of them were expelled.

Between 1930 and the end of 1932 the colonial authorities responded to widespread rural and labour unrest with dragnet arrests. More than 12,000 political prisoners were taken, of whom 7,000 were sent to the penal colonies. The French shattered the structure of every anti-colonial faction including (at a time when most their leading cadres were already in prison or, with Ho chi Minh, abroad) the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI). Gathering around the independent figure of Nguyễn An Ninh, several of surviving representatives decided to bury their differences and together oppose the government in the Saigon municipal elections of April–May 1933. The group, which included Nguyễn Văn Tạo of the PCI, the Trotskyist Tạ Thu Thâu, the anarchist Trinh Hung Ngau, and the independent nationalist Tran Van Thach, put forward a common "Workers's List" (So lao dong) and briefly published the paper La Lutte (The Struggle) to rally support for it. In spite of the restricted franchise, two of this Struggle group were elected (although denied their seats). Ngo Van identifies Nguyễn An Ninh as having been "the real linchpin." At the largest of the hustings he was elected to chair by acclaim. In 1934 Nguyễn An Ninh helped revive the La Lutte collaboration. Ninh and the Lutteurs "focused squarely on the plight of the urban poor, the workers and peasant labourers." However, from 1936 the lengthening shadow of the Moscow Trials (obliging the Party loyalists to denounce their Trotskyist colleagues as "twin brothers of fascism"), and the failure of the Communist Party-supported Popular Front government in France to deliver on promises of colonial reform, ensured a split. Tạ Thu Thâu and Nguyễn Văn Tạo came together for the last time in the April 1937 city council elections, both being elected. In the wake of renewed labour unrest, with Tạ Thu Thâu and Nguyen Van Tao, Nguyễn An Ninh's was soon back in prison. When released early in 1939, but still under house arrest, he was persuaded to let his name go forward with Nguyễn Văn Tạo, and other Party cadres, as a Democratic Front candidate in the April 1939 Cochinchina Colonial Council elections. Together with the Constitutionalist slate, his list was defeated by the now wholly Trotskyist lutteurs. The La Lutte Workers and Peasants platform was revolutionary (radical land redistribution and workers' control) but in a restricted income-tax payer election the key was the Trotskyists' opposition to the French Indochina defence levy that the Communist Party, in the spirit of Franco-Soviet accord, had felt obliged to support.

When on 23 August 1939, Franco-Soviet relations were finally sundered by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and war followed two weeks later, "sedition" of every stripe and faction was repressed. Nguyễn An Ninh was sentenced to 5 years in prison and 10 years exile. Nguyen An Ninh died in the Côn Đảo island prison, Poulo Condore, on 14 August 1943. It is possible that his jailers had decided his fate. They may have regarded him as a figure the Japanese occupiers would seek to use politically.

Thirty-seven years after his death, on 1 August 1980, the Vietnamese Socialist Republic posthumously conferred upon Nguyễn An Ninh the title “Revolutionary Martyr.” In what is now Ho Chi Minh City, Ninh is memorialised in the Nguyễn An Ninh High school and in Nguyễn An Ninh Street, a central thoroughfare familiar to the city's growing number of foreign visitors. A museum dedicated to Nguyễn An Ninh was opened on the site of his parental home northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, in District 12 In 2002.