Vietnam Will Return 26 MIA Bodies to U.S.

Vietnam has informed the United States that it will return the remains of, or provide information on, 32 Americans missing in action in that country, the largest number of MIAs involved in such a gesture, the State Department announced here Sunday.

The move, involving the remains of 26 people and data on six others, appears to make good on Hanoi’s earlier offer to accelerate the process of accounting for an estimated 2,464 Americans still missing in Indochina, according to senior officials traveling with Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

U.S. Visits Increased

Vietnam this year agreed to increase from four to six the number of visits by U.S. teams that search for and identify remains, and in recent days Hanoi has proposed a meeting of high-level officials of the two countries aimed at resolving the MIA issue in two years.

The flurry of activity on the MIAs, about whom Hanoi had once been dragging its feet in hopes of gaining political concessions from the United States, coincided with a recent call by former Cambodian leader Prince Sihanouk for a broad peace conference on Cambodia that would include representatives of Hanoi’s puppet regime in Cambodia as well as the various Communist and non-Communist guerrillas there.

It may have also been intended to influence growing U.S. willingness to help the non-Communist forces fighting in Cambodia.

The U.S. Congress, for example, will soon vote on whether to provide $5 million in military aid, for the first time, to the non-Communist forces. Shultz is tentatively scheduled to meet with leaders of the non-Communist rebels in Thailand during a visit there this week.

The United States has said it will not normalize relations with Vietnam unless Hanoi makes “the fullest possible accounting” of MIAs, and until Hanoi’s troops leave Cambodia.

Eliminating the MIA issue would “remove a major obstacle” to normalization, and would also be a step towards permitting the United States to take some role in the search for peace in Cambodia, a senior U.S. official traveling with Shultz said Sunday.

With the MIA issue resolved, Hanoi would be in a position to ask what benefits it might expect from the United States, such as an end to the trade embargo and possibly even economic aid in the future, if it were to withdraw its invading forces from Cambodia and if normal relations were restored eventually with the United States.

Shultz recently objected to any Cambodian peace talks that “implicitly recognize the puppet regime” that the Vietnamese have imposed on Cambodia.

But U.S. officials suggested that U.S. opposition to such talks might be muted in the future if the six-member Assn. of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) supports such a peace conference and if the MIA issue is moving towards resolution. Resolving that issue satisfactorily will not be easy, however. Of the 2,464 Americans still missing, at least several hundred will probably never be accounted for in any way, senior officials said.

On the other hand, they quickly add, the Vietnamese can do much more than they and their allies have done so far. The remains of only 99 Americans have been returned from Vietnam, compared to about 1,200 servicemen listed as missing there. Only 17 have been returned from Laos where about 600 are still listed as missing.

“Substantially more” than those 116 American remains must be returned or otherwise accounted for before the MIA issue will be over, officials said.

A significant speed-up of the process could be made if U.S. technicians were permanently stationed in Hanoi. But the Vietnamese must radically step up the tempo of their work identifying and excavating sites of downed U.S. aircraft and graves to justify such a permanent U.S. presence there.

Senior State Department officials said that the job might be completed in two years if the Vietnamese cooperated seriously. But before another senior U.S. official goes to Hanoi for talks, in what would be the fifth such visit in three years, the United States wants to thoroughly reexamine the situation and prepare new proposals.