The agreements, which were signed by France and the Vietnamese resistance army, the Viet Minh, followed more than two months of negotiations over the fate of the defeated US-funded French colonial empire in Indochina.

No major ceremonies have been scheduled for Tuesday but last week veteran diplomats and officials met for a seminar to highlight the significance of the accords "to the revolutionary cause in Vietnam and the world as a whole".

"The signature of the Geneva Accords constituted a glowing victory for Vietnamese diplomacy and strengthened the role and prestige of Vietnam in the international arena," the state-run Le Courrier du Vietnam newspaper said Monday.

The talks began in the Swiss city on May 8, 1954, a day after the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in northwestern Vietnam was overrun by the Viet Minh following 56 days of fierce fighting.

Besides the Viet Minh and the French, representatives from Cambodia, China, Laos, Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the "State of Vietnam" or the South Vietnamese took part in the negotiations.

The Accords stated that Vietnam was to become an independent nation and that elections were to be held in July 1956 under international supervision to choose a national government.

However, during the two-year interval until the elections, the country would be split into two parts, with the dividing line chosen at the 17th parallel.

"For the Viet Minh the Geneva Accords were a gamble," says Edwin Moise, military historian and Vietnam War expert at the University of Clemson in South Carolina.

The Viet Minh controlled much more than half of Vietnam in 1954, he argues, but they decided to give up a great deal of territory south of the 17th parallel "in the short run in order to win control of all of Vietnam in 1956".

The agreements required all Viet Minh soldiers to go to the North, which was under the control of Vietnamese Communist Party founding father Ho Chi Minh, while all soldiers who had fought for the French were to go to the South.

Civilians were also permitted to move, and hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese, mostly Catholics, headed to the South in 1954 and 1955.

In June while the negotiations were ongoing, Washington pressured former emperor Bao Dai to appoint Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch anti-communist, as prime minister of South Vietnam.

From the outset, the United States made it clear that Diem did not feel obliged to obey the accords, which would almost certainly hand the Viet Minh an election victory.

Washington feared that if the entire country fell under a communist government, communism would spread throughout Southeast Asia in a "domino" effect.

Consequently, with US backing, Diem refused to allow national elections, and in October 1955 rigged a referendum in the South in which he won a commanding victory over Bao Dai, the only other candidate.

Diem declared South Vietnam to be an independent nation, with himself as president and Saigon as its capital. The United States provided military and financial assistance to keep him in power.

However, growing popular discontent with his corrupt, authoritarian regime led to Washington orchestrating a military coup in 1963 in which he was killed, further deepening US involvement in the country.

The first American combat troops arrived in Vietnam in March 1965, and by the time the Saigon regime finally fell to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975, more than 58,000 Americans had died.

WAR.WIRE