Vietnamese face U.S.-Vietnam ties

Vietnamese face U.S.-Vietnam ties

By Karen Lowe

LOS ANGELES (AFP): Many Vietnamese refugees in the United
States seem sadly resigned to Washington normalizing ties with
Hanoi, though some hope it will be the wedge to pry open their
homeland to democracy.

President Bill Clinton was expected to announce full
diplomatic relations with Vietnam as early as next week after
determining Hanoi had complied in accounting for U.S. servicemen
missing since the Vietnam War.

Doi Dung, a former district chief in Binhdhuan Province in the
former South Vietnam and now executive director of the Vietnam
American Civic Association in Boston, Massachusetts expressed
dismay at the prospect.

"Obviously, we don't want to support this decision," Dung
said. "First, a lot of the American soldiers are still
missing ... They still have a lot of the political prisoners in
Vietnam.

"They have no human rights in Vietnam. Why do Americans have
to have formal diplomatic ties with Vietnam," asked Dung.

He was a political prisoner in Vietnam from 1975-88 and among
the first group of former political prisoners who were sent to
the United States in January.

He said former political prisoners will be "very, very upset"
about normalizing ties with Hanoi, but said those Vietnamese
refugees who arrived years earlier won't be so angry.

Cam Nguyen, the editor of the Vietnam Daily News in Orange
County, California, said much of the Vietnamese community in
California -- a community numbering several hundred thousand --
had anticipated normalization and reluctantly accepts it.

"We know that this is the decision that Clinton has to make"
for political and strategic reasons, said the 46-year-old editor
who left Vietnam in 1975 where he was an engineer for the
agriculture department before the fall of Saigon.

"But the human rights issue has been forgotten. There are many
Vietnamese who still have relatives there and are concerned about
them.

"I have mixed feelings about normalization. This may be
good ... a way to expand democracy in a country still under
communism. If that happens, that would be good," he added.

The decision would come after more than a year of debate
within the administration on whether Vietnam has cooperated fully
in determining the fate of 1,619 American personnel still listed
as missing in the war.

Full cooperation was one of the last remaining hurdles for
normalizing ties and Clinton in May said Hanoi had been more
cooperative "than ever before."

But Nguyen said normalization removes needed leverage for
improving human rights in Vietnam and is more likely the result
of economic and strategic expediency than cooperation over
missing U.S. servicemen.

Washington and Hanoi see their bond as a counterweight to an
ever strengthening China while U.S. businessmen have been eager
to tap economic opportunities -- petroleum in particular -- in
Vietnam, Nguyen said.

Eo Kimh, 53, of the Vietnam Daily News and a former major in
the South Vietnamese army, expressed deep mistrust of the
communist regime and little hope of improvements in human rights.

Arrests of priests and monks are routine, writers critical of
the government are imprisoned and prisons outnumber schools, said
Kimh, who spent seven and half years in a prison camp and arrived
in the United States in 1993.

"Absolutely, there are no human rights there. If relations are
normalized, " he said through a translator, "we would feel bad.
The only thing we could do is stand by to help those seeking
freedom."