history

Teenager Luke Littler created more history by becoming the first player to win five nights in a Premier League season with a 6-4 victory over Michael van Gerwen in Birmingham.

The 18-year-old, who is the youngest world darts champion after his success in January, has also secured his place in the season-ending play-offs at O2 Arena on 29 May.

He won four nights in the opening eight weeks but had failed to reach the final in the past four weeks.

No player has won more than four nights since the 16-week league phase was introduced in 2022 with Jonny Clayton (2022), Gerwyn Price and Michael Smith (2023) and Littler, Luke Humphries and Van Gerwen (2024) all achieving that mark.

Littler spoke at the start of the evening about wanting to finish top of the league in order to secure the first semi-final at the play-offs, so that he would have a break before the final, and is now on track to achieve that.

He needed last-leg shootout wins over Stephen Bunting and Nathan Aspinall to reach the final but improved as the evening went on.

The world number two missed two darts at tops in the opening leg and that allowed seven-time Premier League Van Gerwen to break, before he missed double 16 in leg two after two stunning darts at bullseye.

Littler kept pace with Van Gerwen, who was in his second final of the year, though and recovered the break in leg six, before breaking again in leg 10 to secure the win and avoid a final-leg decider.

He averaged 102.5 to Van Gerwen’s 94.31 and was six from 13 on the checkouts.

“I’m very happy. The fifth nightly win was going to come at some point but it’s been a few weeks since I actually won on a Thursday,” Littler told Sky Sports.

“I’m nine points clear, so I’m very happy and very confident I’ll stay at number one.”

On the importance of topping the league phase, Littler added: “It’s something I’ve always thought in my head, playing the first semi-final is so crucial because there is not that big of a turnaround.”

Relations between Algeria and its former coloniser, France, have rarely been straightforward.

After hitting a low point in July when France supported Algeria’s regional rival Morocco over its claim to the disputed territory of the Western Sahara, relations appeared to be recovering.

But then the April arrest in France of an Algerian consular official along with two other men for alleged involvement in the kidnapping near Paris of Algerian government critic Amir Boukhors has triggered a new wave of tensions.

So why are diplomats now being expelled, and what does this mean for relations between Algeria and its former coloniser?

Let’s break it down:

Who is Amir Boukhors?

Boukhors, or Amir DZ,  is an Algerian online influencer and critic of Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune with more than 1 million subscribers on TikTok.

The French government gave Boukhors political asylum in 2023.

But as far as the Algerian government is concerned, he’s a fraudster and a “terrorist”, who they’ve been seeking to extradite from France since 2016.

Algeria has tried to extradite Boukhors nine times. All attempts have been declined by France.

Why would an Algerian consular official allegedly want to kidnap him?

Speaking to the newspaper Le Parisien in an interview published on April 9, Boukhors said that on returning to his home in Val-de-Marne near Paris during the evening of April 29, 2024, he was stopped by an unmarked car with flashing lights.

Four men in civilian clothes handcuffed him and threw him into the vehicle.

“They first told me that an Algerian official wanted to talk to me, that that was why they were taking me. Then they told me the plan had changed and that I was going to Amsterdam,” Boukhors told the newspaper.

Boukhors said he was then forced to swallow sleeping pills and was held in a “container” for more than 27 hours before being released without explanation.

A subsequent investigation by France’s counterespionage agency uncovered information leading to the arrest on April 11 of three men with a fourth still reportedly at large.

No information has been released about two of the men. However, the third was an Algerian consular employee, French officials said.

Algeria issued a statement the following day strongly denying its official’s involvement and protesting the person’s arrest “in public … without notification through the diplomatic channels”.

The statement denounced what it charged was a “far-fetched argument” based “on the sole fact that the accused consular officer’s mobile phone was allegedly located around the home” of Boukhors.

All three suspects were later charged with “kidnapping or arbitrary detention … in connection with a terrorist undertaking”.

What was the diplomatic response?

On April 14, Algeria announced that 12 French consular officials had 48 hours to leave the country.

The statement, read on public television, confirmed the expulsions had been ordered in response to France’s arrest of the Algerian official.

According to the statement, the arrest had been intended to “humiliate Algeria, with no consideration for the consular status of this agent, disregarding all diplomatic customs and practices”.

France responded in kind the following day, expelling 12 Algerian consular officials from its territory and recalling its ambassador from Algiers.

A statement from the office of French President Emmanuel Macron described the Algerian decision as “incomprehensible and unjustified” and said Algiers should “resume dialogue” and “take responsibility for the degradation in bilateral relations”.

Why have relations between France and Algeria historically been poor?

France colonised Algeria for 132 years, killing Algerian civilians and creating a class structure in which European settlers and their descendants were on top.

The French refused to leave Algeria, considering it an integral part of France. It was only after a war of independence that France finally left in 1962. Algeria is still referred to as the “country of a million martyrs” because of the number of people killed by France during the fight for independence.

But the dispute has not ended there. The issue of the Western Sahara is also causing tension, not just between France and Algeria but also across North Africa.

Western Sahara – a disputed territory in northwestern Africa – is at the centre of the poor relations between Algeria and Morocco. Rabat claims the territory as its own and occupies the majority of it while Algeria supports the pro-independence Polisario Front and has taken in tens of thousands of Sahrawi refugees.

What has France’s position on the Western Sahara been?

France has largely backed Morocco – despite the United Nations not recognising Rabat’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara. And last year, Macron said France’s position was that it supported Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

At the time, Algeria voiced its “deep disapproval” of France’s “unexpected, ill-timed and counterproductive” decision to endorse Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara and recalled its ambassador.

However, relations between the two were thought to be improving since then.

Speaking in early April after a series of talks intended to restore relations after the rift, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said: “We are reactivating as of today all the mechanisms of cooperation in all sectors. We are going back to normal and to repeat the words of President Tebboune: ‘The curtain is lifted.’”

But the Boukhors case and the diplomatic expulsions that have followed it have made it clear that the curtain has fallen right back down.

Enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings: The human rights abuses allegedly committed by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s regime have left scores of Bangladeshis scarred and traumatised.

After a student-led movement overthrew the government in 2024, the full extent of the suffering is finally coming to light as an interim government, led by 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, tries to rebuild a shattered nation.

From repairing the demoralised police force to seeking justice for victims and presiding over unstable relations with India, it’s a daunting task. How will Bangladesh rise from the rubble of a dictator’s rule? 101 East investigates.

WASHINGTON — California is already leading the way in lawsuits against the Trump administration since the president resumed office in January, taking the White House to court over its funding cuts, its rollback of diversity initiatives and its aggressive immigration policies. Yet the office at the forefront of those legal battles is set to expand even further in the coming months.

The state attorney general’s office was granted $25 million in supplemental funding in February to help bolster its litigation efforts. But even after filing 15 lawsuits against Trump’s team, challenging his administration an average of twice a week in court, that money is still untapped.

“It’s not spent,” Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, told The Times in an interview at its Washington bureau. “We’re completely committed to suing the president whenever we have standing and he’s violating the law, and we will.”

“If we don’t need all the $25 million, we won’t use it all,” he added. “If we need more, they’ll give us more.”

Gaining from D.C.’s brain drain

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, with Gov. Gavin Newsom, announces a lawsuit against the Trump administration on April 16.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Bonta’s office is first setting up hiring panels and job listings, a process that will help build out its team to take on new challenges against the administration over the next four years.

Several of California’s lawsuits against Trump target his gutting of federal agencies and intimidation of big law firms. And yet, in an ironic twist, the attorney general’s office may end up benefiting from the flood of legal talent entering the job market as a result of Trump’s tactics.

“The process has started, but the people haven’t been hired yet,” Bonta said. “We think the folks leaving federal jobs provide a great source of talent to join our office.”

Just this week, approximately 70% of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department accepted buyout offers, gutting an office that had employed nearly 350 people. Attorneys with decades of experience at other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, are also taking part in mass resignations.

The funding was allocated by Democratic supermajorities in the California Legislature.

“They understand the need to protect California’s funding, and future, and rights,” Bonta said.

California sees Trump complying with orders

Over 100 days into Trump’s presidency, Bonta sees the new administration taking an aggressive stance toward the judiciary — but ultimately complying with court orders, so far.

“I think there’s a delta between the American perception of court compliance and what we’re seeing,” Bonta said. “I think more people in America think there’s less compliance than there is. I don’t think there’s complete, good-faith compliance, but broadly, largely in our cases, they’re complying.”

Instead, Bonta sees the administration as taking advantage of a legal “gray area” often created by judges and justices issuing orders that are vaguely or poorly written — the sort of manipulation that all litigants engage in at the highest levels. If there were true, outright defiance — which may have occurred or may yet — then judges have the ability to hold individuals in contempt.

“There’s a progression of steps between a court order not being complied with preliminarily and being at a constitutional crisis,” he said. “There are a number of steps we take to enforce an order when we think it’s not being complied with.”

The administration has been accused of violating court orders several times since Trump took office.

It slow-walked enforcement of a case in which the Office of Management and Budget was ordered to release assistance to states after attempting to cut it. A judge questioned whether Trump administration officials were in contempt of court after he ordered them to turn around a deportation flight filled with Venezuelan nationals, only for the flight to continue.

And several courts, including the Supreme Court, directed the White House to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man accused of gang ties, back to the United States after the administration deported him despite a standing court order against his removal. The administration has said Abrego Garcia will never return, flouting a judge’s orders to document its efforts to get him back.

“I think that we’re not at a constitutional crisis yet. I’m not saying we might not be. I disagree with probably a majority of my colleagues in that position,” he said. “But I think there needs to be a very clear U.S. Supreme Court order that this administration acknowledges their understanding of, and then refuses to comply with. And I don’t think that’s happened yet.”

Early test coming on judicial power

Out of all of California’s cases making their way through the courts, Bonta said one particular case — challenging Trump’s attempts to undo birthright citizenship — could soon provide some clarity from the Supreme Court, not on the merits of the case itself, but on a critical underlying question of whether judges at the district level are allowed to issue injunctions that halt the administration’s policies nationwide.

Trump is hardly the first president to express frustration over this practice, which is often used by the party out of power to challenge administrative actions. But the ability of district court judges to continue issuing them will finally be put to the test soon in the birthright citizenship case.

“The U.S. Constitution applies to every American, period, no matter what state you’re in,” Bonta said, explaining California’s defense of the practice.

“The substantive, underlying issue is really strong for us,” he continued. “And whether you should have a national injunction on a constitutional right — it seems obvious. Either everyone has the right, or no one has the right. It’s not that red states don’t enjoy a constitutional right, but the blue states brave enough to sue do.”

On Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans are attempting to limit the powers of district judges through legislation. A bill authored by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall), a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, and passed by House Republicans would do just that: the No Rogue Rulings Act of 2025, his office said, would stop “single district court judges from solely determining national policy — an authority the Constitution reserves for Congress, the President, and, in limited instances, the Supreme Court.”

Bonta dismissed Issa’s proposal, expressing doubt it would overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. But even if it did pass, Bonta said, he would expect his office to sue over its constitutionality.

“I’d have to look at it more closely, but if there’s a legal defect to it, yes,” Bonta said. “It could be a separation of powers violation. Let’s say Congress says, ‘the Trump administration keeps losing in court. We’re not happy with that.’ And then they say, ‘OK, the courts can’t issue any more court orders.’ They could pass it with a majority in both houses, they could pass the filibuster, Trump could sign it, and it’s completely unlawful.”

“The Constitution has the final word on that — Article III defines the judicial branch — and they have power. Congress can’t take it away,” he added. “I think it’s likely a candidate for being constitutionally defective.”

What else you should be reading

The must-read: California has sued Trump 15 times in his first 100 days. Where do those cases stand?
The deep dive: ‘Disrupt, break, defund’: Trump’s imperial first 100 days
The L.A. Times Special: Trump signs orders ramping up immigration showdown with sanctuary cities and states

More to come,
Michael Wilner

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Pakistan said on Wednesday that it had “credible intelligence” that India might launch a military strike against it within the next few days.

Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi led a series of security meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday, adding to speculation of an impending Indian military operation against its archrival, after the April 22 attack on tourists in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir in which 26 people were killed.

Since the attack, barely existent relations between the nuclear-armed South Asian neighbours have nosedived further, with the countries scaling back diplomatic engagement, suspending their participation in bilateral treaties and effectively expelling each other’s citizens.

The subcontinent is on edge. But how imminent is an Indian military response to the Pahalgam killings, and what might it look like? Here’s what history tells us:

What happened?

Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in a televised statement early on Wednesday that Islamabad had “credible intelligence” that India was planning to take military action against Pakistan in the “next 24 to 36 hours”.

Tarar added that this action would be India’s response on the “pretext of baseless and concocted allegations of involvement” in Pahalgam. While India has alleged Pakistan’s involvement in the Pahalgam attack, Islamabad has denied this claim.

India and Pakistan each administer parts of Kashmir, but both countries claim the territory in full.

Tarar’s statement came a day after Modi gave the Indian military “complete operational freedom” to respond to the Pahalgam attack in a closed-door meeting with the country’s security leaders, multiple news agencies reported, citing anonymous senior government sources.

On Wednesday, Modi chaired a Cabinet Committee on Security meeting, the second such meeting since the Pahalgam attack, state-run Doordarshan television reported.

Meanwhile, as the neighbours continued to exchange gunfire along the Line of Control (LoC) dividing Indian and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, other world leaders stepped up diplomacy to calm tensions.

“We are reaching out to both parties, and telling … them to not escalate the situation,” a United States state department spokesperson told reporters on Tuesday, quoting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is expected to speak to the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan.

Also on Tuesday, the spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he had spoken to Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, offering his help in “de-escalation”.

What military action could India take?

While it is unclear what course of action India could take, it has in the past used a range of military tactics. Here are some of them:

Covert military operations

By design, they aren’t announced – and aren’t confirmed. But over the decades, India and Pakistan have each launched multiple covert raids into territory controlled by the other, targeting military posts, killing soldiers – and on occasion beheading the enemy’s troops.

These strikes are often carried out as a retaliatory step by a military unit whose personnel were themselves previously attacked, as a form of retribution.

But such raids are never confirmed: The idea is to send the other country a message but not force it to respond, thereby containing the risk of escalation. Public announcements lead to domestic pressure on governments to hit back.

Publicised ‘surgical strikes’

Sometimes, though, the idea is not to send subtle messages – but to embarrass the other country by making an attack public. It also doesn’t hurt politically.

India has in the past carried out so-called surgical strikes against specific, chosen targets across the LoC – most recently in 2016.

Then, after armed fighters killed 17 Indian soldiers in Uri, Indian-administered Kashmir, special forces of the Indian Army crossed the de facto border to attack “launch pads” from where, New Delhi alleged, “terrorists” were planning to strike India again. “The operations were basically focused to ensure that these terrorists do not succeed in their design of infiltration and carrying out destruction and endangering the lives of citizens of our country,” Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh, then the director-general of military operations for the Indian Army, said in a public statement, revealing the raid.

India claimed that the surgical strike had killed dozens of fighters, though independent analysts believe the toll was likely much lower.

Aerial strikes

In February 2019, a suicide bomber killed 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers in Pulwama in Indian-administered Kashmir, weeks before national elections in the country. This attack was claimed by the Jaish-e-Muhammad, an armed group based in Pakistan.

Amid an outpouring of rage, the Indian Air Force launched an aerial raid into Pakistan-administered Kashmir. India claimed it had struck hideouts of “terrorists” and killed several dozen fighters.

Pakistan insisted that Indian jets only hit a forested region, and did not kill any fighters. Islamabad claimed it scrambled jets that chased Indian planes back across the LoC.

But a day later, Indian and Pakistani fighter jets again engaged in a dogfight – this one ending with Pakistan downing an Indian plane inside territory it controls. An Indian fighter pilot was captured, and returned a few days later.

Attempts at taking over Pakistan-controlled land

Over the past few years, there have been growing calls in India that New Delhi should take back Pakistan-administered Kashmir. That chorus has only sharpened in recent days after the Pahalgam attack, with even leaders of the opposition Congress Party goading the Modi government to take back that territory.

While retaking Pakistan-administered Kashmir remains a policy objective of every Indian government, the closely matched military capabilities of both sides make such an endeavour unlikely.

Still, India has a track record of successfully taking disputed territory from Pakistan.

In 1984, the Indian Army and Indian Air Force launched Operation Meghdoot, in which they rapidly captured the Siachen glacier in the Himalayas, blocking the Pakistan Army from accessing key passes. One of the world’s largest non-polar glaciers, Siachin has since been the planet’s highest battleground, with Indian and Pakistani military outposts positioned against each other.

Naval missions

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, the Indian Navy announced that it had carried out test missile strikes.

“Indian Navy ships undertook successful multiple anti-ship firings to revalidate and demonstrate readiness of platforms, systems and crew for long range precision offensive strike,” the navy said in a statement on April 27.

“Indian Navy stands combat ready, credible and future ready in safeguarding the nation’s maritime interests anytime, anywhere, anyhow.”

Many analysts have suggested that the trials were a show of strength, pointing to the Indian Navy’s ability to strike Pakistani territory if ordered to do so.

A full-blown military conflict

India and Pakistan have gone to war four times in the 78 years of their independent existence. Three of these armed conflicts have been over Kashmir.

Two months after the British colonial government left the subcontinent in August 1947 after carving it up into India and Pakistan, the neighbours fought their first war over Kashmir, then ruled by a king.

Pakistani militias invaded Kashmir to try and take control. The king, Hari Singh, pleaded with India for help. New Delhi agreed, and joined the war against Pakistan, but on the condition that Singh sign an instrument of accession, merging Kashmir with India. The king agreed.

The war finally ended on January 1, 1949, with a ceasefire agreement. India and Pakistan have both held parts of Kashmir since then.

In 1965, a clash between their border forces escalated into a full-blown war. Pakistani forces crossed the ceasefire line into Indian-administered Kashmir, while Indian forces crossed the international border into Pakistan’s Lahore and launched attacks. After thousands of casualties on both sides, a United Nations Security Council resolution helped the neighbours end the war.

In 1971, Pakistan and India were embroiled in an armed conflict over East Pakistan, where Indian forces helped liberate the territory, leading to the establishment of Bangladesh. In 1972, the two countries signed the Simla Agreement, which established the LoC.

In 1999, the Pakistani military crossed the LoC, sparking the Kargil War. Indian troops pushed the Pakistani soldiers back after bloody battles in the snowy heights of the Ladakh region.

On May 12, the Southern Section will release its baseball playoff pairings. The 32 teams selected for Division 1 will get to say they were part of the toughest bracket ever.

This is the first season the Southern Section is using power rankings to place baseball teams in divisions based on current performance. Previously teams were put into divisions before the season based on their records of the past two years.

That means the best of the best will have to win five straight games to be the champion by beating top pitcher after top pitcher while playing no weak opponents.

Corona’s Anthony Murphy is fired up.

(Nick Koza)

Corona is the favorite with a 25-2 record and the best pitcher perhaps in the nation in Seth Hernandez, who never has been tagged with a loss in two years of high school baseball. The team has recorded 14 shutouts and hit 38 home runs. Just don’t bet the house on the Panthers winning it all when there’s no three-game, five-game or seven-game series to crown the champion. It’s a series of one-game matchups, and one great pitching performance against Corona could mean defeat.

That’s what happened two weeks ago when Cooper Berger of Corona Santiago helped his team defeat Corona 1-0.

So who are the likely contenders with two weeks left in the regular season?

The biggest surprise is St. John Bosco (20-4), which has clinched its first Trinity League title since 2017. The Braves have the most important impact transfers in twins James and Miles Clark, who came from Servite to start at shortstop and center field, respectively, and have changed everything as juniors. James, a Princeton commit, is batting .377 and keyed a three-game sweep of Orange Lutheran.

“We just couldn’t get him out,” Orange Lutheran coach RJ Farrell said.

Their athleticism, talent and ability to perform well in pressure situations have helped the Braves win close game after close game. St. John Bosco relies on strong pitching, good defense and clutch hitting.

Pitcher Jackson Eisenhauer shows emotion after getting out of jam against Loyola.

(Craig Weston)

Crespi (18-2) is playing Harvard-Westlake this week to decide the Mission League championship. Jackson Eisenhauer has allowed no earned runs in 52 innings. His development after pitching just 11 innings last season is extraordinary.

Second basmean Nate Lopez and shortstop Diego Velazquez, a USC commit, both are hitting better than .400. Catcher Landon Hodge is terrific defensively and first baseman Josh Stonehouse has supplied surprising power. Harvard-Westlake, last year’s Division 1 runner-up, is still dangerous with sophomore pitcher Justin Kirchner (7-0) and junior center fielder James Tronstein.

Huntington Beach is loaded with talent and experience, having lost to Corona in last year’s semifinals. The Grindlinger brothers, Trent and Jared, combined with Trevor Goldenetz, Ethan Porter and CJ Weinstein make the Oilers a formidable opponent. The key will be coach Benji Medure figuring out which of his many pitchers can deliver victory.

Jared Grindlinger gets emotional after tying the game 2-2 for Huntington Beach in the sixth with a single.

(Nick Koza)

The Crestview League has been so evenly matched that no one knows who’s really the best team, which means that if you draw Cypress, El Dorado, Villa Park or Foothill in the early rounds, beware. Each has a top pitcher to deliver defeat.

The Inland Empire has strong teams besides Corona. Summit entered this week with an 18-game winning streak. Aquinas quietly is beating everyone with a 21-2 record and ready to earn respect. Norco has won 11 of its last 12 games and has top freshman pitcher Jordan Ayala.

La Mirada and Mira Costa are talented teams capable of making playoff runs. Orange Lutheran is in second place in the Trinity League and ready to unleash its one-two pitching duo of Colt Peterson and Gary Morse. Arcadia, at 23-2, is looking forward to the opportunity to take on the big boys.

There’s no place in the nation that will put together a better 32-team playoff bracket than the Southern Section. The seedings won’t really matter. Every game will be difficult. Calling a game an upset really won’t be accurate unless you can topple Corona.

So let the excitement build toward May 12 and the unveiling of the 32-team bracket, the best and toughest ever.

A military parade held in Ho Chi Minh City concludes celebration of 50th anniversary since the fall of Saigon.

Thousands of Vietnamese have waved red flags and sang patriotic songs as a grand military parade held in Ho Chi Minh City concluded Vietnam’s 50th anniversary celebrations of the end of war with the United States.

Wednesday’s event commemorated the first act of the country’s reunification on April 30, 1975, when communist-run North Vietnam seized Saigon, the capital of the US-backed South, renamed Ho Chi Minh City shortly after the war in honour of the North’s founding leader.

A lotus-shaped float carrying a portrait of Ho Chi Minh was near the front of the parade as fighter jets and helicopters carrying red flags flew overhead.

Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng, reporting from the city, said thousands of people stayed in the streets overnight to get the best vantage point for the parade, which was “a day of sombre reflection but also a day of celebration”.

“I am proud of having contributed to liberating the south,” said 75-year-old veteran Tran Van Truong who had travelled – dressed in full military uniform – from the capital, Hanoi, to see the parade.

“But what’s gone is gone, I have no hatred for those from the other side of the battle,” Truong told the AFP news agency. “We should join hands to celebrate the end of the war.”

For the first time, more than 300 soldiers from China, Laos and Cambodia also took part in the spectacle.

More than 300,000 Chinese soldiers were involved in the bloody conflict, according to state media, providing crucial anti-aircraft defence support and helping with logistics and supplies.

“I think Hanoi is signalling to China that they recognise China’s historical contribution,” said Zach Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington who focuses on Southeast Asian politics. “It’s also another way for them to signal: ‘Don’t think our foreign policy is lurching towards the Americans.’”

Strain in US ties

This year marks the 30-year anniversary of diplomatic ties between Vietnam and the US.

In 2023, Vietnam upgraded its relations with the US to that of a comprehensive strategic partner, the highest diplomatic status it gives to any country and the same level of relations as China and Russia.

There are new signs of strain in the relationship with Washington, however, with President Donald Trump’s imposition of heavy tariffs and the cancellation of much foreign aid, which has affected war remediation efforts in Vietnam.

Agent Orange contamination and unexploded ordnance in the countryside still threaten lives. The future of those projects is now at risk because of the Trump administration’s broad cuts to USAID.

Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Although a child of war refugees, Victoria Ngo got to learn more about her Vietnamese identity only during her college years in the United States in the 1990s.

The eldest daughter in a refugee family with a Vietnamese father of Chinese descent, Ngo grew up in a Chinese-speaking community in the US and for a while thought of herself essentially as just Chinese.

As an inquisitive schoolgirl, Ngo had noticed the differences, though, between her experience as Vietnamese and those of the Chinese people she grew up with.

Curiosity about her identity increased over the years, partly because questions she asked about Vietnam went unanswered by her parents and other relatives.

“I lived with people who only spoke Chinese. My siblings and I went to Chinese school on the weekends,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I also speak Vietnamese, and my name is a Vietnamese name. My experience is very much a Vietnamese experience in the sense that I came as a refugee and came during the wave of the Vietnamese refugee,” she said.

But Vietnam was just not spoken about. And certainly not the war that ended 50 years ago when South Vietnam’s then-capital, Saigon, fell to North Vietnamese forces and their leaders in Hanoi.

Trying to fill in the missing pieces of her family’s past, Ngo recounted how she signed up to attend a conference about the war in Vietnam at her college, “thinking that my father would be proud of me”.

His response was stark and unexpected.

“He said, ‘If you go to that conference, you are not my daughter!’” Ngo recounted.

“And I was like, ‘Wow, I thought I was just learning about our history,’ to which he responds: ‘That is not our history.’”

Ngo’s experience is not uncommon among Vietnamese families who fled their country as refugees after Saigon fell on April 30, 1975.

The fall of Saigon ended the war and marked the reunification of North and South with Hanoi as the new capital of post-war Vietnam.

But many of those who worked under the US-aligned government of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam as it was then known – its civil servants, soldiers, businesspeople – chose exile over unification and living in a communist Vietnam.

Too many lives had been lost. Too much blood had been spilled – North and South – that many, like Ngo’s father, could never forgive nor live with their wartime foes in peacetime.

For others, exile as refugees would be a choice taken to stay with relatives who feared persecution – or so they believed – if they stayed in Vietnam after the war.

‘There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about’

The US-backed wars in the three countries of Indochina left huge losses in their wake. Laos and Cambodia suffered an estimated 1.45 million deaths under US bombings.

In Vietnam, there were an estimated 1.1 million military deaths on the communist North’s side alone and more than 254,000 on the side of the South Vietnamese republic. Compounded with civilian deaths, the estimated death toll from the war in Vietnam stands conservatively at 3.1 million people.

For the victorious communist forces, they were left with a country in ruin. The northern part of the country was subjected to heavy US bombings. The railroads were inoperable. Most of the major roads were bombed into cratered tracks. Its economy was shattered. The northern population had also witnessed decades of conflict after the onset of French colonial rule in the late 19th century.

Southern Vietnam’s urban infrastructure was less damaged by the war. The countryside was in ruins as rural areas had become the front lines in the guerrilla warfare that marked most of the fighting in the South.

Croplands and forests had been poisoned by the US use of defoliant, better known as Agent Orange, the highly toxic chemical compound that was sprayed from the air to deny communist fighters on the ground the cover of trees and other concealing foliage.

Millions of Vietnamese people were affected by the use of Agent Orange, including at least 150,000 children who would be born with severe physical, mental and developmental defects, and others are still being affected to this day because the soil remains poisoned.

Unexploded bombs – in the many hundreds of thousands of tonnes – still “contaminate” up to 20 percent of Vietnam’s territory due to the millions of tonnes of ordnance used in the war, according to the Vietnam National Mine Action Center.

While their April 30, 1975, victory marked an end to the war for the North Vietnamese, for the defeated US-backed government and people of the South, the war’s end was for many the start of lengthy separation from family in “reeducation camps” or permanent exile to Western countries, such as the US, Australia, Germany and Canada.

Before the fall of Saigon, Ngo’s father was a high school principal in South Vietnam. After April 30, 1975, he was placed in reeducation camps twice before he made a desperate decision to take his family out of the country on a rickety, overcrowded boat in 1978.

The family would spend half a year in a refugee camp in the Philippines before being accepted by the US as refugees.

By the time of their arrival in the US in the early 1980s, Ngo’s extended family had lost everything. Her immediate family, two aunts and uncles, and a grandmother and her relatives shared a two-storey, 30sq-metre (323sq-ft) subsidised housing unit in Los Angeles.

Her father could not teach in the US and ended up becoming a deep ocean fisherman as well as doing odd jobs to put food on the table.

The Vietnam they fled became a bad memory to be forgotten, Ngo said.

“There is this void in our history that doesn’t get talked about. You don’t know about what’s happened in the past,” she told Al Jazeera.

A profound sense of loss is a narrative shared by many Vietnamese refugee families – deep pain from the past that is felt across generations.

Within some families, any mention of the war risks evoking strong emotions and triggering past griefs. The sensitivity is such that silence about the past is sometimes preferred.

‘Deep pain from her past’

Cat Nguyen, a young American Vietnamese poet, experienced similar evasiveness when it came to family experiences of the war.

Now based in Ho Chi Minh City – the name given to Saigon after the war in honour of the founding father of the Vietnamese Communist Party – Cat Nguyen said little was shared about their family’s past before coming to the US.

“My family, in particular my grandma, harboured deep pain from her past,” Cat Nguyen told Al Jazeera.

Cat Nguyen’s family also has a complicated political history.

While a maternal grandfather was an active revolutionary who supported anticolonial efforts against the French in pre-independence Vietnam, a paternal grandfather served in the government of South Vietnam and a maternal grandmother was the principal of an American-English school in Saigon.

But in 1975, Cat Nguyen’s family on both sides, and its political divide, left Vietnam.

Cat Nguyen’s father was just 10 years old and mother was 13 when they left Vietnam. They were “uprooted from their native land in the blink of an eye” for a new life in the US, Cat Nguyen said.

“The first few years in the US were filled with sadness for them: difficulties adjusting to a strange land, a language they were not fluent in, a people who did not understand the world they [the Vietnamese refugees] were coming from,” Cat Nguyen said.

The trauma of fleeing Vietnam was also compounded by official accounts that cast the refugees and Vietnamese diaspora as abandoning their country in its hour of much-needed national reconstruction.

This year’s 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon will be celebrated by the Communist Party of Vietnam as a day of unification and also “liberation of the south”.

That message speaks to the aspirations of millions of Vietnamese in the north and south who made great sacrifices during the war, but the party’s official history is inevitably limited.

To this day, the experiences of many in southern Vietnam and their perspectives on the war – what motivated them to resist North Vietnam’s political leadership, including Ho Chi Minh – remain absent from the celebratory narratives.

In this fateful historical showdown, southerners who fled overseas as refugees are cast in the role of puppets or traitors, lured and manipulated by the enemy’s luxuries and propaganda into abandoning their own people.

Seeing their experiences erased and delegitimised after the war added to the pain of displacement for Vietnam’s diaspora communities. It also explains the anger still harboured towards Vietnam’s leadership by an older generation of refugees, such as Ngo’s father.

This is a multigenerational resentment that still rears its head when refugee parents believe their children are being exposed to positive narratives about bustling, economically thriving Vietnam five decades after the war – which they brand as “the North’s propaganda”.

‘You crossed an ocean for me to cross another’

It is not only contemporary Vietnam’s official version of history that is problematic.

Cat Nguyen realised there were also gaps when turning to American high school textbooks to learn about the war in Vietnam.

In those schoolbooks, Washington’s decades-long military involvement in Vietnam, which left millions of people dead and millions scattered across the world as refugees, only “a small paragraph” was devoted to “how the US fought against communism in Vietnam”, Cat Nguyen said.

Although supposedly sympathetic to their former South Vietnamese “allies”, Cat Nguyen told of a US-centric perspective that still subjects Vietnamese refugees to an “Americanised gaze”.

“An Americanised gaze of refugees, meaning that Americans viewed all Vietnamese as either dangerous, threatening communists or as helpless, infantilised refugees,” Cat Nguyen said.

Such narratives had helped to justify US intervention and military occupation of Vietnam to “save” the Vietnamese from themselves and communism.

“While it is true that Vietnamese refugees suffered greatly, this gaze strips human beings of their own agency and humanhood, displacing them into a framework that upholds the system of white supremacy,” said Cat Nguyen, who has called Vietnam home for more than two years.

Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen noted in his book Nothing Ever Dies that Vietnamese refugees were able to find in the US – in whatever limited space that was available to them – opportunities to tell their immigrant stories, to “insert themselves into the American dream”.

But it was precisely that “dream” that Cat Nguyen would eventually grow disenchanted with along with its “capitalist propaganda”.

The “American dream” has erased “the history of the US’s genocide of Indigenous populations, enslavement of Black and racialised peoples, and violent colonial and imperial projects”, they said.

It is not that Cat Nguyen never had tried to fit into US society. Rather, from a young age, Cat Nguyen told of constantly being made to feel different in a society that “never sees them as American enough”.

“Throughout my life, I watched as the Vietnamese parts of me slowly eroded. It wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother – the person who taught me the most about where I come from – that I began desperately searching for a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual return to my ancestral homeland and my humanity,” Cat Nguyen said.

Seeking to reconnect, Cat Nguyen has become involved in art projects in the form of poetry, performance and filmmaking that experiment with a range of elements in Vietnamese folklore and traditional musical instruments to “unapologetically” recommit to “the fight against colonisation, imperialism and capitalism”.

Drawn to identify with Vietnamese revolutionary fighters from “the other side”, Cat Nguyen spoke of finding a source of personal strength in their wisdom and dying for their cause.

That conviction has not led to a dismissal of Cat Nguyen’s own family’s suffering as refugees in the US, but the acknowledgement of the coexistence of intergenerational trauma that Vietnam’s official history fails to include.

One of Cat Nguyen’s poems pays homage to their late grandmother: “You crossed / an ocean / for me / to cross / another and then you crossed / a world / before I / could follow.”

Ngo never did attend the university conference on the war in Vietnam that her father had threatened to disown her over all those years ago.

That was out of respect for her father’s wishes. Since then, she has gradually come to see events in Vietnam during the war years and after from the North’s perspective – albeit with critical eyes.

“I definitely see that when anything is too centralised and too authoritarian, you have corruption. But if the leadership is very strong and competent, things can move very efficiently,” said Ngo, who relocated to Vietnam more than 20 years ago.

Like Cat Nguyen, Ngo understands the trauma her family members from the South suffered.

It inspired her to pursue a career in psychology and public health focused on underserved communities. She became an associate professor of community health and social sciences at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“One of the reasons why I work with marginalised populations and vulnerable populations is because I also understand that experience having grown up as a refugee and in the early years not having very much,” Ngo said.

After more than two decades in Vietnam, Ngo has focused on equipping primary care clinics with the capacity to take care of poor people who suffer from mental health problems but lack access to care.

“I feel like my experience as a refugee has really made me think a lot about the human condition and what kinds of social resources and economic resources we need to put in place to help people in transition and who are marginalised, to help people who are displaced in one way or another,” she said.

For both Ngo and Cat Nguyen, being part of the Vietnamese diaspora and its painful past has given them a nuanced perspective on Vietnam’s history that is not readily found in the competing narratives of North and South.

Divided by the flag

Kevin D Pham said there was a recurring story he was told while growing up in a Vietnamese refugee family in San Jose, California.

“I was told by my high school teachers and especially my family that communists were bad, essentially,” said Pham, an assistant professor of political theory at the University of Amsterdam.

Pham’s paternal grandfather was imprisoned by communist Viet Minh forces in the 1950s, and his maternal grandfather was imprisoned in a reeducation camp after 1975 and died there from malnutrition.

From a young age, Pham was taught to be proud of his Republic of Vietnam family heritage. Although he appreciates this perspective, he did not uncritically accept what he was taught. After graduating from university, he lived in Vietnam for eight months and, there, came to learn about and sympathise with perspectives from the “other side”.

But growing up in the US, he told of listening to his uncle, who was a pilot, as he recounted the glory of his younger days when he fought “the communists” during the war.

Pham’s father, on the other hand, was only 16 years old when he was forced to leave Vietnam and did not have much direct experience of warfare. Still, his patriotism for the vanquished US-backed Southern government was still unwavering.

Pham recounts how, during his youth, older Vietnamese men would stop and salute as he and his father cruised down the streets of San Jose in his father’s bright yellow Ford Mustang, which had three horizontal red stripes painted on the bonnet to represent the flag of South Vietnam.

In Vietnam to this day, the South Vietnamese flag is still taboo.

Among staunch Vietnamese nationalists, the south’s “three-stripes”, or “ba que”, flag has become a popular slur, symbolising betrayal of the nation, defeat and humiliation. Any association with the former government’s flag, however remote, has also been used to denounce and alienate.

In early 2023, Hanni Pham, an Australian-Vietnamese singer with the Korean band New Jeans, got caught up in the flag controversy and was subjected to an online campaign, which started when online activists spotted a South Vietnamese flag in a video recording made when she visited her grandparents’ home.

The only public place where you can still find an actual three-stripe flag in Vietnam is in Hanoi at the newly built Vietnam Military History Museum, where one is displayed as a historical artefact.

Yet attempts to reconcile Vietnam’s fractious past date back decades.

In 1993, under Vietnam’s then-prime minister, Vo Van Kiet, the Communist Party’s Politburo issued a resolution that marked the first official attempt at reconciliation by encouraging the country to “respect differences, join hands in dismantling prejudices, shame, hatred, and look forward to the future”.

Kiet was sensitive to the plight of Vietnamese refugees, something that he witnessed within his own family. In a well known interview in 2005 that drew both praise and criticism, he described April 30, 1975, as a “great victory” but one that left “millions happy, millions in sorrow”.

“It is a scar that needs healing rather than left to bleed,” he said.

In November, then-president and incumbent general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, To Lam, made a historic appearance at Columbia University in the US with Lien-Hang Nguyen, the daughter of a refugee family who became the first director of Vietnamese studies at the university and who has worked on building bridges between the diaspora and Vietnam.

Their meeting reflected a broader spirit of unity and healing emerging among Vietnamese people long divided by the scars of war and political differences.

Kevin D Pham said he noticed how those who have strong views on the historical North-South divide in Vietnam commonly use the word “puppets” as a slur, whether referring to supporters of the South Vietnamese government as “puppets” of the Americans or the North’s supporters as “puppets” of the Soviet Union and China.

“There is this tendency on both sides of seeing the other side as puppets who cannot think for themselves,” Pham said, adding that it indicates a “lack of curiosity” about the other side’s perspective and has become “an obstacle to true reconciliation”.

“What I encourage instead is the ability to understand multiple perspectives,” he said.

For Cat Nguyen, what is fascinating is that the current national flag of Vietnam – a yellow, five-pointed star on a red background – which once brought painful memories to family members still in the US, is now a source of comradery throughout Vietnam.

This was experienced firsthand when the Vietnamese national football team won the 2024 ASEAN championship in January. Cat Nguyen described flag-waving crowds storming onto streets across the country in celebration of a sporting, not a political, event.

“I am empathetic to the suffering from both sides despite which flags they identify with, either the three-stripe or the red flag with yellow star,” Cat Nguyen said.

“Everyone experienced so much violence, and ultimately I assign the most blame to US imperialism.”

Additional reporting by Duy-Minh Nguyen in Ho Chi Minh City