Vietnam diplomatic revolution since war

Vietnam diplomatic revolution since war

By John Rogers

HANOI (Reuter): Vietnam is entering the international mainstream.

"It's taken a long time, but Vietnam is taking its place on the world stage at long last," a Western ambassador says. "It's become a normal country, with great potential."

Vietnam, viewed as pariah by much of the West and non- communist Asia for its 10-year occupation of neighboring Cambodia, is now courted as a partner owing to its economic and business potential.

Although it is one of the world's poorest countries, Vietnam is the second largest in population in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, with 72 million people, and is rich in oil, minerals, coffee and rice.

After five decades of war or diplomatic isolation, Hanoi has watered down its old communist friendships and established vigorous new ties with Asian neighbors and the West.

In July, Vietnam will become the seventh member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), formed in the late 1960s as a buffer against a perceived communist threat from China, and Vietnam.

ASEAN members Thailand and the Philippines played an active role in support of U.S.-backed South Vietnam during the war. Now they jostle for business opportunities in Vietnam with other former enemies of Hanoi like South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, which sent troops to support the Saigon regime. Vietnam is also on better terms with its former arch-enemy, the United States.

In February, 1994, Washington ended an economic embargo on Hanoi imposed in 1964 after it entered the war.

They established formal links and opened diplomatic missions this year and full relations look likely in the next year or two. Vietnam says it's time to bury the past and for the United States to realize that "Vietnam is a country, not a war".

U.S. President Bill Clinton says he wants more progress towards a "full accounting" for more than 2,000 U.S. airmen and soldiers still listed as missing in action (MIA), presumed dead, in Indochina.

Vietnam could not have achieved its new-found international respectability without U.S. approval. Washington took steps to bring Vietnam into the world financial community by lifting its de facto ban on International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank assistance in July 1993.

It allowed other governments, led by France and Japan, to repay Hanoi's IMF arrears, clearing the way for new loans. The IMF, World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have since approved over $1 billion in aid for roads, ports and other projects vital to Vietnam's drive for growth.

"The U.S. go-ahead amounted to a seal of international approval," said a European banker in Vietnam. "Vietnam became respectable, which it had not been for decades." Rich nations have pledged $3.8 billion in aid to Hanoi the past two years. Business executives from the West and Asia's "tiger" economies are falling over each other to explore investment, manufacturing and sales prospects in Vietnam.

It's a far cry from Vietnam's position in the late 1980s. Although the Communist Party had approved a shift to market economics in 1986, ahead of its Soviet bloc allies, Vietnam still depended on them for aid and trade.

Hanoi faced a crisis when the Soviet and East European communist regimes collapsed in 1989-91 and had no choice but to seek new partners in the West and capitalist Asia, partners experienced in the economic system with which it was flirting.

In the earlier Cold War atmosphere, North Vietnam had been viewed by the West as a hardline anti-capitalist regime and was feared by smaller Southeast Asian countries.

Vietnamese communist forces had booted out the French colonial regime with a shock victory in the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu.

They went on to stun the world again in the "American War", which started in the early 1960s after the country had become divided between north and south.

North Vietnamese and southern communist guerrilla armies defeated the U.S.-backed Saigon regime on April 30, 1975, two years after U.S. combat troops withdrew under a peace pact agreed in Paris. At least two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were killed in the fighting.

Despite post-war exhaustion, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in December, 1978, following a series of Cambodian attacks on border villages and occupied Cambodia for a decade.

The occupation of Cambodia earned Vietnam the international cold shoulder and not the praise it felt it deserved for ending the hated Khmer Rouge regime that had ruled in Phnom Penh since 1975.

Communist, neutral and left-leaning European countries like Sweden and Finland gave Vietnam economic aid in the 1980s, but developed countries and ASEAN joined a U.S.-led boycott of Hanoi.

It was only after Vietnam's army left Cambodia in 1989 that Western aid resumed in earnest, with governments eying business opportunities in an economy on the way to liberalization.