Although 50 years after the crucial battle the two countries enjoy excellent relations based on economic cooperation and cultural exchanges, efforts to pay joint homage to those who died in the conflict proved fruitless.

At Friday morning's symbolic re-enactment in a stadium in Dien Bien Phu town of that battle of 1954 -- now a key date in Communist Vietnam's history -- no French or any other Western diplomat was present.

And later in the day no Vietnamese official turned up at a memorial to the French dead, where the deputy head of France's embassy in Vietnam, Eric Berti, laid a wreath.

Berti, however, offered incense sticks at a Vietnamese cemetery.

Only a year ago, the French had been hoping for much more.

In March, 2003, the French under secretary for veterans, Hamlaoui Mekachera, visited Hanoi and proposed to build a "shared memory" with a "joint homage which would be something to pass on to coming generations."

Two conferences were organised in Paris and Hanoi in the last six months and were deemed positive.

And Hanoi approved the renovation of the memorial to the French dead at Dien Bien Phu, a private initiative by a now deceased veteran. But the Vietnamese authorities would go no further.

"There was a desire on the Hanoi side to celebrate the victory as a Vietnamese affair, which is understandable, without jeopardising the relations with France," a French diplomatic analyst said.

If the French had been invited to attend the ceremonies, he said, "there would certainly have been the risk (for Vietnam) of putting out confused signals."

Another Western diplomat said: "It seems that there is still a need to celebrate this heroic event in a way to support the national feeling. The time has not come apparently to share this memory.

"Maybe it is too difficult for a colonised people to share things like this with the former colonial power."

Vietnamese officials were unavailable to discuss the matter.

Fifty years after the battle, one point remains sore between the two armies: the treatment of 10,000 French prisoners at Dien Bien Phu.

Historians and military officials cannot agree on what precisely happened to those who did not return but only a third of the prisoners got back home.

"There is no animosity between the French and Vietnamese soldiers, that's clear," said a French former soldier. "But the question of the treatment of French prisoners will always be there."

That remains perhaps the only taboo subject.

On Friday, smiling Vietnamese veterans thronging the streets of Dien Bien Phu were quick to greet visitors from France and to dust off what little French they learned decades ago.

The few French military officers who were visiting privately encountered no hostility. Some of them even went to pay homage to the Vietnamese dead.

But the two governments have not been able to go that far.

Some analysts say Vietnamese Communist party hardliners, especially the older generation, were to blame for not agreeing to a joint commemoration. But others say France was not exactly amenable to a compromise.

"In Paris, there's not a shadow of interest in the Vietnamese version of the battle. The television stations show four seconds of Vietnamese images and three minutes of interviews with French 'heroes', the same ones for the last 50 years," said a French analyst, who asked not to be named.

"Even today, nobody has any time for the Vietnamese. And we are paying, especially in terms of economic opportunities. Because when you don't really get to know the people with whom you work, or fight, you always lose."

WAR.WIRE