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The 1988 battle against Chinese forces on Gac Ma Island, part of Vietnam’s Truong Sa archipelago in the East Sea, in which 64 Vietnamese naval soldiers were killed, should be included in textbooks, two historians have suggested.

Dr. Do Bang, vice president of the Vietnam Association of Historical Sciences, and Dr. Do Thanh Binh, a senior lecturer at the Hanoi National University of Education and a writer of history textbooks, put forward their suggestions during recent interviews with Tuoi Trenewspaper.

Besides the “Nghia Tinh Hoang Sa -Truong Sa” (“Sentimental Attachment to Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly)”) program, which has been launched to honor 64 Vietnamese soldiers who fell in the 1988 battle against Chinese forces to safeguard Vietnam’s sovereignty over the archipelago, there should be other actions to ensure the event is remembered forever, the historians said.   

The battle on Gac Ma Island, which occurred on March 14, 1988 and claimed the lives of the 64 naval soldiers, is one of the great historic events of our nation and thus it should be included in school textbooks, said Dr. Do Bang.

It is satisfactory to build a memorial temple in south-central Khanh Hoa Province to commemorate the Gac Ma heroes, as planned in the above program, but it is also necessary to build a stele with an epitaph that describes the battle and is inscribed with the names and other basic personal information of all the Gac Ma heroes, the vice president said.

In other countries, 30 years after an historical event, all details of the event are publicized sufficiently and transparently.

Similarly, the Gac Ma incident, which occurred nearly 30 years ago, should also be reviewed and publicized in detail so all related parties can realize the nature of the event as well as its aftermath correctly and multilaterally.

It is the responsibility of political leaders, not historians, to conduct this review and publication, Dr. Bang said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Binh said that education on the country’s sovereignty over seas and islands has yet to become a specific subject in local K-12 schools, although teachers may sometimes mention it in lessons.  

“The Gac Ma event is not included in school curricula now,” Dr. Binh said.

However, as part of a national program for textbook reform that will be implemented in the near future, the subject of Vietnam's sovereignty over seas and islands will certainly be included in the K-12 education program, the lecturer said.

“Such an inclusion is an aspiration of historians and the society in general, and is under the direction of the Prime Minister,” he added.

“In order to make education on sovereignty more attractive to students, we writers of textbooks suggest that it should be integrated into two subjects: history and geography,” the teacher said.

“Lessons on history will educate students on national sovereignty while those on geography will teach them about the natural resources related to the country’s seas and islands,” he explained.