“He’s controversial. Some people in the party don’t like his legacy. But none of that will be made public,” he said.
He said the official delay in releasing the news of his death may have had more to do with internal bureaucracy than a dilemma over how to treat the revered general’s death.
Any official announcement has to come from the country’s top leaders, who were busy with a crucial Central Committee party plenum.
While some smaller state newspapers such as VNExpress did run reports on Giap, the official Vietnam News Agency remained mute, causing consternation online.
“They do not dare to spread information on a story that the whole society has already read,” one Facebook commentator, Nguyen Dang Phat, wrote scathingly on Friday.
State television only reported Giap’s death Saturday lunchtime, describing the self taught soldier as a “legend of Vietnam’s modern history.”
“Why didn’t VTV run this news yesterday?” another Vietnamese Facebook user said.
One former correspondent at the Vietnam News Agency told AFP that it was “such a shame” that local journalists were unable to break such a major story despite being fully aware of it.
“The journalists don’t like it at all. But they’ve got used to itAll newspapers belong to the government so we have to wait for the green light to publish,” she said.
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