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."