Former President Lê Đức Anh dies, aged 99
Update: April, 22/2019 - 23:27

Former President and Politburo member Lê Đức Anh

HÀ NỘI Former President and Politburo member Lê Đức Anh passed away Monday evening at his home in Hoàng Diệu Street, Hà Nội due to illness and old age, according to the board of healthcare services for senior officials.

Lê Đức Anh was born in 1920 in Phú Lộc District, Thừa Thiên-Huế Province.

At the time of the General Offensive and Uprising in the spring of 1968 (Tết Offensive), Anh was the Chief of Staff of the Command of the South Vietnamese Liberation Army. He served as the second-in-command of the Hồ Chí Minh Campaign, the military campaign that put an end to the three-decade conflict in Việt Nam and unified the country on April 30, 1975.

Anh served as Minister of Defence from 1987 to 1991, then served as President until September 1997, playing an important role in normalising diplomatic relations between Việt Nam and China and the US.

Information about his funeral will be announced later. VNS

Former Vietnamese president, who led invasion of Cambodia that ousted Khmer Rouge, dies at 99
Apr 23, 2019
HANOI - Gen. Le Duc Anh, a Communist Party hard-liner and former Vietnamese president who led the invasion of Cambodia, which led to the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, has died at 99.

Duc Anh, who was born in 1920, spent much of his life in southern Vietnam, where he joined the communist war effort against the French and then the United States.

Duc Anh died late Monday “following a long illness,” the government and state media announced.

He served as president between 1992-1997, championing the continued primacy of the Communist party as Vietnam embarked on sweeping market reforms that spurred remarkable economic growth.

In 1995 he became the first Vietnamese head of state to set foot on U.S. soil after the Vietnam War when he attended the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in New York.

Educated in the former Soviet Union and blind in one eye, he held various military posts during the Vietnam War.

He was one of the “liberators of Saigon” as deputy commander of the offensive that toppled the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government.

He is best remembered for playing a commanding role in the invasion of Cambodia that drove Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh in 1978, earning him the nickname “Tiger of Cambodia.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/ ... L8mKaJS_IU