Brazil's Lula visits Vietnam's General Giap
HANOI (AFP) — Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on a Vietnam visit Thursday paid his respects to General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of military victories over France and the United States.
Lula, a former leftist trade union activist, posed for a photograph with the 97-year-old general dressed in a white army uniform and said he would send the picture to Cuba's ailing veteran revolutionary Fidel Castro.
"The Vietnamese can be proud of being the people that defeated the French and the Americans in the same century," said Lula. "That says a lot about who the Vietnamese people are and how resilient they are."
The general said that whenever he used to go to Cuba he would visit Castro.
Giap, who was a close confidante of Vietnam's late revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, is regarded as one of history's great military strategists, having defeated the French colonial regime at the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Over the next two decades the founding father of Vietnam's People's Army, whose guerrilla tactics inspired anti-colonial fighters worldwide, led his forces toward victory over the United States with the 1975 fall of Saigon.
"I could not leave Vietnam without visiting the general," Lula told him at his French colonial mansion in Hanoi, where Giap presented him with a copy of "Unforgettable Years and Months," one of his many historical memoires.
Lula asked Giap how old he was and the general replied 98, using the Vietnamese method of calculating a person's age.
The Brazilian president then told Giap that Brazil's oldest living communist was the architect Oscar Niemeyer, aged 100, who designed his country's capital Brasilia and the UN Headquarters in New York City.
