Article du jour: War Claims and Compensation: Franco-Vietnamese Contention over Japanese War Reparations and the Vietnam War

On peut lire en ligne depuis lundi un article fascinant sur les relations après 1945 entre le Japon, la France et les nouveaux Etats nés de la décolonisation: Geoffrey Gunn, 'War Claims and Compensation: Franco-Vietnamese Contention over Japanese War Reparations and the Vietnam War', The Asia-Pacific Journal 9, 49,4 (5 décembre 2011).

Voici quelques extraits de la conclusion :

As this article has demonstrated, the big losers in the Franco-Japanese reparation contest were the Vietnamese people. Of course, nothing could compensate them for the human losses arising as a result of Japanese and French policies during the Great Famine that struck Vietnam in 1945 (The famine never entered into reparation discussions).
(…)
In any case, the [Diem's Da Nhim] dam project fell into the pattern of Japanese reparation payments favoring big projects of which the chief beneficiaries were Japanese consultants and Japanese construction companies, with local elites also sharing the benefits. As it transpired, the Paris government would not redeem a single centime from Special Yen credits extracted from Indochina.
(…)
Few who would observe the apparently unproblematic nature of post-war French-Japanese relations from nuclear cooperation to “cultural” tourism would have an inkling of the intense and justified angst felt by Paris in the 1945-1954 period over the compensation/reparations issue.

Depuis un précédent paragraphe :

France would press its reparations claims to the eve of the San Francisco Conference in early 1951, expressly demanding US$2 billion compensation from Japan for wartime damages incurred in Indochina. As explained below, however, not one centime would ever be paid to France.

Je note l’existence d’un autre article sur le site de Japan Focus: Geoffrey Gunn, The Great Vietnamese Famine of 1944-45 Revisited, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 5 No 4, January 31, 2011.