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.