Vietnamese Premier Planning a Trip to U.S.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai announced today that he planned to go to the United States in June, marking the first visit by a Vietnamese leader to the U.S. since the end of the Vietnam War three decades ago.

Khai, who was visiting Australia, told reporters in Canberra that the U.S. government was making arrangements for him to visit Washington. Vietnamese officials say Khai also will visit New York and possibly Southern California, home to the United States’ largest community of Vietnamese immigrants.

There was no immediate response from the U.S. government.

But a Vietnamese official in the United States, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the visit would “mark the full normalization between the two countries.”

He said that Khai would meet with President Bush and that Vietnam expected agreements to be signed involving maritime, transportation and adoption issues.

The Vietnamese official said the idea for the visit began last year when Deputy Foreign Minister Le Bang spent a week in Washington, where he talked with congressional and White House officials.

“Thirty years has passed since the end of the war,” Khai said in Canberra, according to Associated Press. “This is the first ever visit by a leader of a unified Vietnam to the United States.”

“The relationship has seen a lot of improvement that people could not have foreseen 10 years ago,” said Chien Ngoc Bach, a spokesman for the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.

In recent years, Vietnam’s communist government has opened the door to private enterprise, and the country’s economy has experienced the highest growth rate in Southeast Asia.

Half the country’s population of 83 million was born after the war. The U.S. has become a major trading partner and many refugees and their children have returned to Vietnam seeking business opportunities. The Vietnamese seem to have put the past behind them, and Americans are welcomed.

On Saturday, Vietnam commemorated the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, since renamed Ho Chi Minh City, with a parade of colorful floats, including some bearing the logos of American companies.

In an attempt to build relations with the United States, the government has made a concerted effort to search for the bodies of American soldiers missing in action in a joint program with the U.S. military.

More than 550 bodies of American troops have been recovered through years of painstaking searches, although a million Vietnamese soldiers from both sides remain unaccounted for.

President Clinton went to Vietnam in 2000, the first such visit by a U.S. president since the war, and received an effusive welcome.

“The bilateral relationship is mature enough for a reciprocal visit to the United States by a Vietnamese prime minister,” the Vietnamese official in Washington said.

The visit will not be universally popular.

“I prefer that he doesn’t come to the U.S., especially Garden Grove, because the people will not be welcoming him,” said Janet Nguyen, a Garden Grove council member.

Westminster and Garden Grove, home to the largest Vietnamese community in the United States, both have laws requiring a 14-day notice from Vietnamese delegations planning to visit.

“He has the freedom to go and say what he wants to in the U.S., unlike ... his own country, where he won’t allow his own people to taste the same freedom,” Nguyen said.

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Paddock reported from Jakarta and Tran from Orange County.