HO CHI MINH MAUSOLEUM
HO CHI MINH MAUSOLEUM (Ba Dinh Square, Ba Dinh District) is an enormous monolithic structure where the embalmed body of Uncle Ho lies in state inside a plexiglas case like Mao's body in Beijing and Lenin's body in Moscow. Designed by Soviet architects and modeled after Lenin's tomb in Moscow, the building is 70 feet tall and is constructed from grey granite and marble. It was built near the place where Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in 1945.
The body—which reportedly has an artificial nose, because the original one fell off—is refrigerated and rests on a platform, three feet above the floor. It is watched over by four guards and many Vietnamese are moved to tears when they lay eyes on it. Once a year the body is sent of to Moscow where it is taken care by the same technicians who maintain Lenin's body.
Like Mao, Ho Chi Minh did not want his body displayed in a mausoleum. In his will, which is available in an English translation at most Hanoi bookstores, he asked that his body be cremated, and the ashes be spread at three sites—in north, south and central Vietnam—and marked with simple wooden memorials surrounded by shade trees for visitors. After his death in 1969, the Communist party released a falsified version of the will and built the mausoleum.
The construction of the Mausoleum started in September 1973, on the foundations of the old rostrum in Ba Dinh Square where president Ho Chi Minh used to chair national meetings. Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum was completed nearly two years later on August 29, 1975. Engraved on the front of the Mausoleum is Chu Tich Ho Chi Minh, meaning "President Ho Chi Minh". Uncle Ho's dead body dressed in faded khaki clothes and plain rubber shoes.
Visiting Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum
Visitors wearing shorts, tank tops, and hats are not admitted to the mausoleum and a "respectful demeanor must be maintained at all times." Tickets are purchased at the entrance to Ho Chi Minh Park and bags are left at a small place outside the park. Foreigners don't have to wait in line like ordinary Vietnamese citizens, they are escorted to the front of the line by a Vietnamese soldier. Location: 8 Hung Vuong, Dien Bien, Ba Dinh; Hours Open: Tuesday-Thursday 7:30am- 10:30am, Saturday and Sunday 7:30am-11:00am; Admission if free.
When enough foreigners have assembled a guard escorts them through the entrance of mausoleum, where a sign has Ho's most famous slogan: "Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom." Visitors are not allowed to talk or take pictures or linger for long over the body. You can't even scrutinize the body carefully without a guard in brown uniform giving you a dirty look or nudging your elbow. The whole process takes about 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes there is a changing of the guard ceremony outside the mausoleum.
Describing his visit to the mausoleum, New York Times correspondent Philip Shenon wrote: "Up a separate staircase within the structure I found myself in a cavernous room bathed in a ghostly, pinkish light. At the center of the room beneath a Vietnamese flag, was the glass sarcophagus bearing Ho's frail body. Ho's wispy white beard had been carefully groomed and set on a stiff grey shirt. His hands had a waxy sheen and were crossed over his chest."
Ho Chi Minh Museum and Park
Ho Chi Minh Park (Ba Dinh Square, Ba Dinh District) is a huge park containing the Hi Chi Minh Mausoleum, Ho Chi Minh's house and the Ho Chi Minh Museum. The park is bisected by a large avenue. Not far from the mausoleum in the Ba Dihn neighborhood is the wreckage of U.S. war plane that crashed into a pool in the Vietnam War. It has largely been untouched.
Ho Chi Minh Museum (3 Ngoc Ha Street, Ba Dinh District, Hanoi; near Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum in Ho Chi Minh Park) is housed in a cavernous white marble building. Many of the displays are modern and symbolic. The failure of the American effort, for example, is illustrated in one room with a Ford Edsel bursting through a wall. The museum is a four-story building covering a total area of 100 hectares and designed in the shape of a lotus flower as a symbol of President Ho's noble character. This museum was completed on 9 May 1990 for the 100th anniversary of President Ho Chi Minh's birthday.
The main showroom displays 117,274 documents, articles, pictures and exhibits illustrating the historical events that took place during President Ho Chi Minh's life, as well as important events that occurred in the rest of the world since the end of the 19th century. The museum contains other rooms such as a library, a large hall, meeting rooms and research rooms. Hours Open: The museum is open from 8:00am to 11:00 am and 1.30pm to 4.30 pm daily except Monday and Friday. Admission: about US$1.50 Photography is forbidden. Cameras and bags must be left at the reception.
Ho Chi Minh's Stilt House
Ho Chi Minh's House (in Ba Dinh District, 15 minute walk from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum) is a small, modest house where Uncle Ho lived. Reportedly made from the least expensive wood possible, it is near the opulent colonial President place where he refused to live. The room where Ho Chi Minh died, it is said, has been left exactly as it was when he died. The pond near the house is where he raised carp. Location: Address: S 1 Hoàng Hoa Thám, Ng c H , Ba Đình, Hà N i, Vietnam; Hours Open: 7:30am–11:00am, 1:30pm–4:00; Admission: about US2.00.
The stilt house is located in a large garden at the back of the Presidential Palace. A nice road covered with pebbles and bordered with mango trees lead to it. Uncle Ho used it as his residence and office from May 1958 until his death. The perfume of jasmine flowers and roses is omnipresent. At the back is a garden of fruit trees, where the luxuriant milk fruit tree donated to Uncle Ho by his southern compatriots in 1954 stands between two lines of Hai Hung orange trees. Other valuable trees belonging to more than 30 species supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Forestry, and several provinces represent the wide variety of trees growing in Vietnam. There are also trees imported from foreign countries, such as Ngan Hoa trees, miniature rose bushes, areca trees from the Caribbean, Buddhist bamboo trees, etc. Dozens of varieties of beautifully hang from the trees which blossom all year round.
The front garden is decorated with little bushes of fragrant jasmines and eglantines, while at the rear is a stand of star-fruit trees from the country’s south. Spring sends the garden into a colourful riot of mangoes, white blossoms, and orchids. Uncle Ho regularly practiced martial arts and taichi with the guards in the garden, also the place where he once conducted people singing the famous song Unity, like a real orchestra conductor. In front of the stilt-house is his fish-pond, teeming with fish that he fed with great care. He only had to clap his hands and they came in shoals for food. The house clearly reveals his humility, his erudition and his love of simplicity and nature.
As late Prime Minister Pham Van Dong once wrote: "It is not merely a landscape, but a way of life; it speaks of a priceless joy that the current civilization seems deprived of, with its polluted mega-cities and cluttered high-rise apartments. Today, visitors flock to the stilt-house to remember what kind of a man Uncle Ho was, and to celebrate his memory - a man of sophisticated intellect yet simple pleasures, of revolutionary ideas yet of peaceful disposition.
Story of Uncle Ho and His House
Many people know the story of how Uncle Ho came to live in a small stilt-house rather than a grand palace. But it is worth retelling. Ho Chi Minh was never one for large houses and comfortable living. He was just 21 when, in 1911, he set out to travel "the five continents and the four oceans" to seek ways of saving his country. For 30 years he lived a nomadic life, changing addresses constantly. When he came back to Vietnam in 1941, he led the revolution against colonial rule and read the country’s historic Declaration of Independence at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi on September 2, 1945. Not long afterwards, the French attempted to reassert control of their former dominion, and Ho Chi Minh and his generals were forced into the north-western mountains.
During the resistance war of 1946-54, Uncle Ho reverted to his nomadic ways, for the only means of avoiding detection and capture was to live life constantly on the run. He moved from one hide-out to another several times a month, and only lived in stilt-houses. When the war was won in 1954, the Party, Government and Ho Chi Minh came back to Hanoi. But Uncle Ho eschewed the trappings of authority. A true egalitarian, he chose to live a simple life: he wore brown cotton garments and rubber sandals made from car tyros, and lived in a worker’s cottage out the back of the Presidential Palace.
In 1958, Uncle Ho revisited the former resistance base in the north-west and saw some of the stilt-houses where he had spent the war years. When he got back to Hanoi, he said he wanted a similar stilt-house built on the grounds of the Presidential Palace itself. The Party commissioned an architect from the Department for Army Barracks to design the house, but told him to submit his plans to Uncle Ho for comment before work began. The initial design had three rooms, including a toilet. But Uncle Ho wanted the house to remain faithful to the real thing. "The stilt-house must have only one or two rooms, small rooms at that, and definitely no toilet," he said. The architect amended the designs, and the stilt-house that Ho Chi Minh moved into on May 17, 1958, had two rooms of just 10 square meter each. He lived and worked there for the remaining 11 years of his life.
Possessions of Ho Chi Minh in His House
Today, the stilt-house and its furnishings have been preserved must as they were in the 1960s. In the area under the house, Ho Chi Minh would receive visitors and meet members of the Political Bureau. In the center of the floor is a long table, with wooden and bamboo chairs around it. Uncle Ho used a rattan armchair in the left-hand corner to sit and read, or rest. In another corner are three telephones that he used to talk to the Political Bureau, the Operations Department and others, and a steel helmet that he wore during the years of the American War.
In the right-hand corner, he kept an aquarium with goldfish to amuse visiting children. The two rooms of the stilt-house are sparsely furnished. One, the bedroom, contains only a bed and wardrobe. The other, the study, houses a table, chair and bookshelf. His appliances were just the bare necessities: a palm-leaf fan, a brown paper fan, a bamboo mosquito catcher, a little thermos-flask, a bottle of water, a radio-set given by Vietnamese nationals in Thailand, and a small electric fan — a gift from the Communist Party of Japan. A little brass bell used to hang on the door. In the stilt-house, Uncle Ho received top cadres, children and his close friends. He spent most of his time writing letters, revolutionary articles encouraging "good people, good deeds," and documents of great historical value on important political tasks such as his 1966 Call against US Imperialism, for National Salvation. Plants and trees were grown in the area around the stilt-house, as Uncle Ho was a poet with a great love for nature and pet animals. The garden is bordered with hibiscus, and the gate of climbing plants is typical of rural Vietnam.
VIETNAM WAR SIGHTS IN HANOI
Cat Barton of AFP wrote: “A small plaque next to Hanoi's Truc Bach Lake marks the spot where US Senator John McCain was shot down as a navy pilot and dragged ashore to become a prisoner of war — one of 10 American planes to be downed by anti-aircraft gunners on just one day in 1967. Tourists can also visit the so-called "Hanoi Hilton", where American POWs like McCain were held. While much of the Hoa Lo Prison was demolished, sections of it, including the gatehouse, remain open as a museum. [Source: Cat Barton, AFP, October 9, 2012]
"Not all of Hanoi's war relics are memorials. On the shore of the city's West Lake one family has transformed a former French armaments store into a popular café. "This cafe has a special style because of historic values. When people come here, they are more curious about history," cafe owner Vu Thi Huong told AFP. In other parts of the city, the wartime history has been absorbed into the scenery. A small shrine on Yen Ninh-Hang Bun street marks the spot where French soldiers opened fire on a market killing dozens of civilians in an incident that is believed to have triggered the first Indochina War in 1946. The name of the shrine means 'deep hatred' in Vietnamese and was a popular word used during the war. But today this shrine is famous for another reason — delicious noodles."People here call it 'Hatred shrine' noodle stall," owner Do Thi Yen told AFP. "Sometime we need to be grateful to the dead. They brought customers to me so I'm grateful to them," Yen added.
"Other business owners are hoping to cash in on wartime nostalgia — a new themed restaurant in Hanoi, called the "State-run Food Shop number 37", takes customers back to the days of food rationing. For around 25 dollars, you can get an authentic 1970s-style meal for six, served to you by staff wearing uniforms from the actual state-run shops of the period, in a restaurant packed with war-era memorabilia. "A good place for the old to remember the difficult era and (for) the youth to understand a historic period — though the dishes are not all delicious," a September review in the official Vietnam News Agency said.
Lenin Park (near the History of Military Museum) is the largest but by no means the nicest park in Hanoi. It contains a monumental statue of Lenin, well-maintained gardens and quite a bit of military hardware, including a MIG-21, SA-2 surface-to-air missiles, an armored truck, an early-warning radar unit and the tail of B-52 with nine aircraft guns pointed at it. Sometimes there is a photographer who charges 50 cents for photographs with a human-size stuffed Mickey Mouse. Mile-long Long Ben Bridge was repaired several times after it was bombed during the war. .
West Lake (Thanh Nien Road, Tay Ho District) is surrounded by million-dollar homes owned by entrepreneurs rich from joint ventures with foreigners. Here there is a small monument honoring Hanoi resident who helped seek out and find shot-down American pilots. The concrete monument stands beside the lake, depicting an American pilot, hands raised in surrender. A plaque misspells U.S. Senator John McCain's name and lists his branch of service as the Air Force (he was in the navy)
Vietnam War Bunkers
Ho Chi Minh's Bunker and D67 Underground Command Center (within the area of Kinh Thien Palace in Hanoi’s Citadel) was used by North Vietnam’s top leaders in the Vietnam War. Margie Mason of Associated Press wrote: "Behind thick concrete walls and iron doors, Ho Chi Minh and other top North Vietnamese leaders took cover in secret underground tunnels during U.S. bombing raids and plotted key military strategies that led to America's defeat in the Vietnam War... The bunker used by Ho, his military leader, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others is in the same building where the 1968 Tet offensive and the fall of Saigon in 1975 were planned from about 30 feet below the surface. [Source: By Margie Mason, Associated Press, October 28, 2004 \\]
"The communist military, with help from the Soviets, built its headquarters there in 1967. It housed an elaborate tunnel system, including the underground bunker, which has narrow submarine-style corridors and vaulted metal doors leading into two larger rooms. During U.S. bombing raids, Politburo members and top military brass took cover there and held meetings. Vietnam's Defense Ministry occupied the property until recently, relocating to another site and turning part of the area over to the city of Hanoi. Only a small underground section of the bunker was opened to the public, with most of the tunnels remaining closed and classified. \\
"No one knows how long (the tunnels are)," said professor Le Van Lan, a historian with in-depth knowledge of the site. "It's a secret. There's many legends that they go to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum." An army blanket and a simple wooden bed where Giap, now 93, sometimes napped is also on display in his old office along with antique phones used to communicate with his staff and other officials. "It's a very simple room, but from that room, the Vietnamese military strategists issued big decisions for the liberation and unification of the country,'' said Truong Khanh Hao, 71, a veteran who fought the French and the Americans. "It's a pride for all Vietnamese that we have these relics.'' \\
Metropole Hotel
Metropole Hotel (in the French Quarter, near the Hanoi Opera House) was restored in 1992. Millions of dollars were spent on the effort. Formerly a hangout for communist revolutionaries, it could be mistaken for one of Paris's best hotels. Many of the guests are foreigners. On the reopening of the Metropole cafe in 2006, Reuters reported: “After a 95-year absence, a sidewalk cafe that was part of "little Paris of the tropics" has reopened at the famous luxury Metropole Hotel in the heart of the Vietnamese capital Hanoi. La Terrasse du Metropole duplicates the look of a Parisian street cafe on one corner of the white facaded hotel that has a room named for late English author Graham Greene, who wrote about the last days of French colonial rule in 1950s Vietnam. [Source: Reuters - May 11, 2006]
"Our customers cannot always experience the real life of Hanoi and with this terrace they will be able to enjoy our service and meet Vietnamese people," said Gilles Cretallaz, 41, general manager of Sofitel Metropole Hotel as it is now named. The old Metropole Cafe closed after just 10 years in 1911. The hotel, which opened in 1901, was a gathering point for high society a century ago and it was referred to as "little Paris of the tropics" according to travel guides.
"We hope this time we will be able to keep this terrace open," Cretallaz said as motorcycles whizzed by on the road outside. On opening night, the cafe received its first guests including ambassadors to the communist-run Southeast Asian country. Before the opening, Hanoi authorities asked the hotel to make security changes because it is close to some embassies and a government building used for official events. The establishment will face competition from several other sidewalk cafes that are increasingly popular among Vietnamese. Vietnam-Era Bunker Below the Metropole Hotel has been preserved in its original state and is open for tours for guests. Go down an unassuming stairway between the pool and outdoor bar and you’ll find yourself in an old air-raid shelter. In October 2012,
Jane Fonda and the Bunker at Metropole Hotel
Cat Barton of AFP wrote: “From Hollywood starlets to scruffy trade union delegations, an unassuming reinforced concrete bunker under a central Hanoi hotel has sheltered communist Vietnam's most important wartime guests. Sealed off and forgotten after hostilities ended in 1975, the dank subterranean passages were unearthed during recent renovation work at the hotel, now favoured by foreign tourists and wealthy Vietnamese. "I felt a little bit like Indiana Jones discovering the Temple of Doom or something," said Kai Speth, general manager of the Metropole Hotel, describing when he first entered the seven-room bunker, which was knee-deep in water.[Source: Cat Barton, AFP, October 9, 2012]
There were always rumours that the bunker — no more than 20 square meters (215 square feet) in size — was under the swimming pool bar, he said. "So I told the team when we were rebuilding the foundations of the bar: 'let's dig a little deeper'." The bunker was built in 1968 when the hotel, then known as the Thong Nhat, was a drab, government-run establishment used by the communist authorities to house visiting delegations, including a string of prominent American anti-war activists.
Actress Jane Fonda and folk singer Joan Baez both used the shelter, with Baez recording a song in it during the Christmas bombings in December 1972, when the US dropped some 20,000 tones of ordnance in 11 days. More than 1,600 civilians died in the attack, and Baez's 21-minute recording "Where Are You Now My Son", made in the concrete passages, captures some of the sounds of wartime Hanoi. "You can hear the bombs falling. You can hear the anti-air(craft) machine guns going off that were mounted on the Opera House" near the hotel, Speth said.
Fonda arrived after the Christmas Bombings, her then interpreter Tran Minh Quoc told AFP, but was caught in several raids during her controversial tour of the country which earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane" back in the States. "We could hear the bombing from afar and we together went down to the bunker... The American air force never hit the hotel. (Fonda) was very calm... She didn't show any fear," he said.
The bunker at the Metropole is one of thousands of similar bomb shelters dug across Hanoi during the decades-long conflict. Most have since been filled in, but one other famous site remains — behind the walls of Thang Long Citadel lies a bunker where former key leaders General Vo Nguyen Giap and president Ho Chi Minh once sheltered from bomb attacks.
Vietnam History Museum
Vietnam History Museum (No. 1 Trang Tien Street, behind the Hanoi Opera House, near the Metropole hotel) is located in a French villa built in 1930. Established by French archaeologists, it features numerous artifacts from the Dong Son civilization, also known as Lac Viet, the purported ancestors of modern Vietnamese. Interesting pieces include a set of huge bronze drums inscribed with images of deer hunts, fishing boats with images of copulating frogs and humans, and glazed ceramics decorated with colorful flowers, fish, dragons and fireflies from the Ly and Tran dynasties, which ruled Vietnam shortly after it became a kingdom in the 10th century.
The museum has an area of 2,000 square meters for exhibition. On the ground floor are theme rooms, including Prehistory, Vietnam from the Time of National Building to the Tran Dynasty. The second floor features Vietnam from the Ho Dynasty to the Nguyen Dynasty and contains a section on Cham Culture.
Nearly 7,000 objects and documents depict vividly the long process of development of the Vietnamese community, its undaunted and heroic struggle for thousand years, from its early history up to the August Revolution in 1945. The system of computers installed on the second floor is intended for visitors to search for information effectively. Hours Open: From 8:00am to 11:30am and from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, closed Mondays. Admission" about US$1.50
History of the Military Museum
History of the Military Museum (No. 28A Dien Bien Phu Street, Hoan Kiem District) is located in group of refurbished French military barracks. Honoring 1,000 years of Vietnamese military history, the museum houses huge dioramas of the capture of Saigon in 1975, the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the Vietnamese victory over the Mongols in 1287. There is also a collection of rare Viet Minh posters, an exhibition on the "American War," including a container filled the flight helmets taken from American flyers shot down over North Vietnam, and a display commemorating Vietnam's victory of China in the 1979 border war.
Underneath a tree on the museum grounds are a surface-to-air missile launcher and a Soviet-built MIG-21 placed over the remains of B-52 bomber shot down over Hanoi. A sign on the MIG claims it shot down 12 American planes. In 1992, the museum archives turned over numerous documents to the U.S. government to help account for over 2,000 missing in action troops. There is also an interesting display of booby traps.
The Military History Museum is housed in former French expeditionary barracks. Founded in 1958, it covers 10,000 square meters and is divided into 30 showrooms. The content of the museum covers 6 periods: 1) The history of the Vietnamese nation and the birth of the Vietnam People’s Army. 2) The Vietnamese struggle against French colonialism. 3) The Vietnamese struggle against American imperialists. 4) The Vietnam People’s Army on the path to a regular modern army. 5) The People and the Army are oneness - they will be invincible. 6) Piece of weaponry displayed in the museum courtyard (airplanes, tanks, heavy artilleries, rockets, mortars, bombs, etc. Hours Open: From 8:00am to 11:30 and from 13:30 to 16:00 all days. Admission: about US$1.50
Remnants of the Hanoi Hilton
Hanoi Hilton (at the Hanoi Towers hotel and shopping complex in the French Quarter) was the nickname of Hoa Lo Prison, where shot-down American pilots and other American prisoners of war languished for up to eight years during the Vietnam War. Built in 1912 by the French, it was surrounded by a electric barbed fence and yellow walls topped with pieces of broken glass. Vietnamese revolutionaries captured by the French were imprisoned in Hoa La during the war with France in the 1940s and 50s. They called it Hoa Lo, or the furnace, because the cell blocks were unbearable hot.
The prison was used through the 1990s, and finally torn down in December 1994 to make way for a $60 million, 22-story hotel and office complex called Hanoi Towers. Around it are upscale shops and condominiums. Some former Vietnamese inmates and American POWs wanted the prison preserved as a memorial. A few original walls were left standing and Hanoi Towers has a museum with objects from the old prison. There is now a real Hilton hotel called the Hanoi Hilton.
Several cell blocks were saved at a museum called Prison Museum. Each of the cells is fitted with shackles. In the courtyard is a guillotine. In a glass display case you can see the helmet, oxygen mask and a flight suit of Sen. John McCain ( he denies they're his, the placard states he “now a Senator in the US House of Representatives”) and Douglas Peterson, the first U.S. Ambassador to post-war Vietnam.
Anthony Faiola wrote in Washington Post, “A place of torture and suffering for almost a century — first for Vietnamese political prisoners and thieves during French colonial times, then for American troops during the Vietnam War — Hoa Lo has become a hot tourist attraction in a profoundly changed Vietnam. It draws not only overseas tourists but curious locals as well. Giang Phu and Nhung Thi Tian, 23-year-old college students in Hanoi, did not have to travel very far to see Hoa Lo. At 2 p.m., they are in front of its in-house guillotine, which was used to dispatch death row inmates during French rule. "The French, like the Americans, invaded Vietnam," Giang says, in a room filled with the smell of wood and cold, rusting metal. She rubs the goose bumps forming on her slender arms as she speaks. [Source: Anthony Faiola, Washington Post, October 25, 2006]
Most of the prison was knocked down in 1993, when investors from Singapore wanted to make way for luxury apartments, shops and office space. The rest was polished, buffed and opened to the public. The quarters where American prisoners were housed, officials here say, were part of the sold-off parcels. Today, most of the museum is dedicated to the memory of Vietnamese freedom fighters who resisted the French in the early 20th century. Oil paintings depict Vietnamese national heroes being tortured to death for their alleged crimes.
The legacy of the several hundred American POWs housed here from 1964 to 1973 is contained in two small rooms toward the outer edge of the prison museum. Propaganda photos underscore Vietnamese claims that U.S. prisoners were treated with utmost dignity. American soldiers are depicted receiving gifts from guards and attending Christian religious services. Encased in glass is the flight suit of Hoa Lo's most famous former resident — Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has written of his horrific years of daily interrogations and torture here. Captured after being shot down in his A-4 Skyhawk while on a bombing run of Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967, McCain spent two years in solitary confinement. Like other former POWs who have revisited this place in search of closure or catharsis, he came back here in 2000, the 25th anniversary of the war's end.
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Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, Vietnamtourism. com, Vietnam National Administration of Tourism, CIA World Factbook, Compton’s Encyclopedia, The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Global Viewpoint (Christian Science Monitor), Foreign Policy, Wikipedia, BBC, CNN, Fox News and various websites, books and other publications identified in the text.
Last updated August 2020