Pressed Vietnam on MIA Search, 2 Senators Say

Two U.S. senators said in a statement here Saturday that they asked Vietnamese leaders during high-level talks in Hanoi last week to increase efforts to trace Americans missing in action since the Vietnam War.

Republicans Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon and James A. McClure of Idaho also urged the resumption of an orderly departure program for emigrants and the release of Amerasian children and the inmates of re-education camps for resettlement in the United States.

They said normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations depends on a negotiated settlement of the conflict in Cambodia, the statement from Hatfield said.

The senators were received in Hanoi by former Premier Pham Van Dong, former Paris peace talks negotiator Le Duc Tho and Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach--the most senior Vietnamese leaders to talk to U.S. congressmen since the end of the war in 1975.

Vietnam’s Communist Party newspaper Nhan Dan gave unusual front-page treatment Saturday to their visit on Wednesday and Thursday, Vietnamese state radio said.

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Washington has been prodding Hanoi to resume the screening of Vietnamese applying for asylum in the United States and elsewhere. The program was interrupted a year ago.

The United States also wants to resettle tens of thousands of Vietnamese with ties to the United States and the former Saigon government, who are now in re-education camps, as well as Amerasian children fathered by Americans during the war.

Hatfield, an early and strenuous critic of U.S. involvement in the war, said the discussions “hopefully will assist both (sides) in the resolution of the issues which divide our two countries and in the development of a new relationship with Vietnam.”

U.S. leaders have said there are still several obstacles to diplomatic relations.