Vietnam Officials Should Stay Away, Westminster Council Says

Acting with the enthusiastic support of more than 400 demonstrators chanting slogans outside City Hall, Westminster on Wednesday became the second Orange County city in eight days to declare itself opposed to official visitors from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

The vote seemed almost anticlimactic, given that it came against the backdrop of angry shouts aimed at the presence of the man at the center of weeks of Little Saigon near-riots in 1999.

“This is freedom country,” Truong Van Tran told the City Council shortly after it unanimously adopted the resolution putting Westminster on record as opposing “stops, drive-bys or visits” by representatives of the Communist country from which many residents fled as refugees more than three decades ago. Tran was the only outspoken critic of the resolution at the meeting.

It was Tran’s placement of Communist icons in his Little Saigon video shop five years ago that sparked 53 days of angry protests drawing as many as 15,000 demonstrators into the streets.

“I come here,” Tran said Wednesday, “to tell you how to educate Vietnamese to understand how freedom works in this country. You have the right to make that law, and I have the right to sue.”

The resolution also advises city employees against encouraging visits by representatives of Communist Vietnam and requests that the State Department give at least 10 days’ notice before they occur. A similar resolution was unanimously adopted in Garden Grove last week after Westminster delayed its vote the week before.

“We took this action tonight because we treasure freedom,” Mayor Margie L. Rice told the cheering throng of Vietnamese Americans outside the council chamber after the vote. “When you came to this country you were welcomed, and we will welcome any people who long for democracy to come and be free.”

Said Councilman Andy Quach, who co-authored the resolution with Councilman Kermit Marsh: “I think this is a step in the right direction. It’s best that we listen to the will of our voters. I’m ecstatic.”

Much attention, however, was drawn by Tran, who had to be escorted to and from the building by about a dozen helmeted police officers as angry protesters shouted insults.

“I was a little bit nervous” about coming, he said during a 15-minute break called by the mayor to “celebrate” the vote. “If they attack me, that’s against the law and they must go to jail.”

Asked whether he appreciated the suffering of fellow Vietnamese under the Communist regime, he said, “I was a victim too, but that was in the past.”

It was the 1999 protests that set the stage for Wednesday’s council action and the May 11 vote by the City Council in Garden Grove, which also has many Vietnamese American residents.

The drive for both resolutions was launched last month after the State Department gave Garden Grove two days’ notice that a delegation of Vietnamese officials on a goodwill trip would be touring Little Saigon, part of which is in Westminster.

The tour was canceled when police, citing the earlier protest, said they couldn’t ensure the delegates’ safety.

In a further indication of community sentiment, both cities adopted laws last year declaring that the flag of the former South Vietnam, which the Communist republic replaced after the Vietnam War, would be flown during city-sponsored events.

Some legal and political experts have seen potential legal and ethical issues in the two resolutions. And a spokesman for the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington has said that the resolutions do not serve the best interests of local Vietnamese.

“Those who favor and advocate such a resolution,” Chien Ngoc Bach said last week, “are making a desperate attempt to hinder an irreversible trend of contacts and exchanges between the government of Vietnam and Vietnamese people living in the U.S.”

In reaching out to Vietnamese Americans, he said, the government of Vietnam “advocates putting the past behind us and looking forward to the future.”