Jakarta trip continues Vietnam's ASEAN flirtation

Jakarta trip continues Vietnam's ASEAN flirtation

HANOI (Reuter): Vietnamese President Le Duc Anh's talks in Indonesia next week continue an increasingly steamy affair between communist Hanoi and its non-communist neighbours, diplomats said yesterday.

Anh's Jakarta visit, due to start on Tuesday, rounds off a series of top-level contacts which appear to have advanced Vietnam's bid to join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), they said.

Communist Party General Secretary Do Muoi visited Malaysia last month. Philippines President Fidel Ramos, Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai held talks in Hanoi.

Following these contacts, Anh's visit to Indonesia will leave Brunei as the only one of the six ASEAN members with which Vietnam's top leaders have not had recent talks.

Asian diplomats said the swift pace set by Vietnam was a sign of its keeness to join ASEAN -- at whose meetings it is already an observer -- as a cornerstone of its policy of diversifying diplomatic links.

Once locked into the communist network centred on Moscow and mired by its occupation of Cambodia until 1989, Vietnam has built up links with Western and other non-communist states in the 1990s while trying to mend fences with China and other old foes.

"Everyone's talking about a much shorter time frame (for ASEAN membership)," one diplomat said. "Initially the talk was of the year 2000 but now they're talking about the next few years."

Vietnam has only said it wants to join the hitherto non- communist grouping "at an appropriate time", and its ASEAN interlocutors have given few hints of when that might be.

Singapore's Goh was the most specific, saying he did not expect Hanoi formally to apply for membership within 18 months.

The Philippines' Ramos said Vietnamese membership was "now a matter no longer of policy or principle but merely of time and procedure".

In Indonesia, Anh, a 73-year-old former military commander, will be returning a historic visit to Hanoi in 1990 by President Souharto, who became the first non-communist Southeast Asian leader to visit Vietnam since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

During the war, some ASEAN members such as Thailand and the Philippines supported the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government which was defeated by communist armies led from Hanoi.

There are few problems to settle during Anh's visit. Indonesian officials said this year they saw Vietnam as more flexible on a boundary dispute in the South China Sea.

Indonesia is not directly involved in disputes more important to Hanoi such as Vietnam's rivalry with China, Taiwan and three other claimants over the Spratly Islands.

Indonesia -- not a party to the dispute -- is trying to defuse tension over the potentially oil-rich archipelago.

A key issue in Anh's talks, due to end on April 29, is likely to be Indonesia's wish to speed up repatriation of about 10,000 Vietnamese boat people from its Galang Island refugee camp near Singapore, which it wants to develop as an industrial zone.