Vietnamese Leaders Go Looking for Aid in Flurry of Diplomatic Activity

Vietnamese Deputy Premier Vo Van Kiet came here this week to talk up investment opportunities in Vietnam, mentioning tourist hotels and shrimp farms.

The same day, Deputy Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien was in Bali, meeting with Indonesian officials on the prospects for initial steps toward a possible political settlement in Cambodia.

Not since Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia nearly nine years ago have its officials mounted such a flurry of diplomacy as seen in the past few months, according to Bangkok-based diplomats.

Out of the Freeze

A new leadership in Hanoi, perhaps spurred by the can-do image of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is trying to break out of the diplomatic and economic deep freeze into which the invasion plunged their country.

“It’s the rational, logical thing to do, given their desperate economic situation,” a Western diplomat observed. “The question is, what price are they willing to pay? Will they compromise their objectives in Cambodia?”

In a nutshell, according to analysts, Vietnam cannot revive its economy without major aid and trade from non-Communist countries, and none will come until its occupation army is withdrawn from Cambodia.

New Business Law Due

Kiet, who rose to political power with a reputation as an economic reformer, told Thai businessmen on his visit here that a new investment law, which he said would be published before the end of the year, “will boost bilateral trade relations.” Vietnam, he added, has a lot of raw materials.

But a Hanoi-based diplomat, visiting recently in Bangkok, said more would be needed. “It won’t help Vietnam to have a beautiful investment law when there is no electricity and any transaction is smothered in red tape,” the diplomat said.

The country’s revolutionary leadership, replaced just a year ago, was schooled on a wartime economy supported by outside Communist powers. “Things came in, were used, and were replaced,” the diplomat noted.

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the supply train stopped, but it took more than 10 years and a change in leadership before Hanoi began to come to grips with reality, he said. “It will be a developing country for a long time,” the diplomat explained. “They know that now. No more the glory of the victors.”

The economic straits have led to changes in political approach. Vietnamese refugees living abroad, once branded by Hanoi as criminals and Western lackeys, have more recently been extolled as “the great patriotic Vietnamese overseas community,” at least those who send money to family members remaining in Vietnam.

The key question is whether the shift in political tone will result in a change in Cambodian policy. Next week, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of an armed resistance coalition, is scheduled to meet with Hun Sen, premier of the government installed in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, by Vietnamese troops in January, 1979. It will be the first meeting between Sihanouk, who ruled Cambodia intermittently as prince and politician in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, and a leader of the Vietnamese-installed regime.

The talks, scheduled to begin Wednesday, will take place at a hotel outside Paris, according to Sihanouk’s spokesmen here. Hun Sen will be in Paris for a congress of the French Communist Party. A more important possibility is that Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach may be in Paris for the same event, and could also meet with the 65-year-old prince. The Vietnamese ambassador in Bangkok has said that Thach will not be there, but the rumor has not died.

The Sihanouk-Hun Sen talks promise no more than a tentative first contact. The Phnom Penh regime says the talks will be unconditional, but in a five-point peace plan it proposed in October, Sihanouk was offered only “a leading role” in government. The prince, in his public statements, appears to have in mind “the leading role.”

The resistance front, the coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia), in its own peace plan has called for a phased Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia and free elections. Both of the prince’s coalition partners, the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front and the Khmer Rouge, oppose any contact with the Phnom Penh regime. The guerrilla war between the two sides is stalemated.

Last May, Sihanouk declared that he was taking leave as head of the coalition, a move that gives him the freedom of movement that many diplomats here say set in motion this year’s heightened diplomatic activity on the Cambodian issue.

October Vote Due

Some suspected it would diminish once the annual U.N. General Assembly vote was taken in October on who represents Cambodia. The measure, and its companion call for the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, overwhelmingly favored the resistance.

In those political terms, little has changed for Hanoi since the invasion. But the pressure of the ensuing economic isolation, engineered by the United States and the non-Communist countries of Southeast Asia, has squeezed the vitality out of Vietnam.

A number of countries are interested in the trade potential. Indonesia, for instance, exported nearly $30 million in goods to Hanoi last year, and Singapore and Thailand sent many times more. Japanese businessmen are regular visitors to Vietnam.

But the occupation of Cambodia, with its population of about 7 million, has deterred the large-scale trade and investment that Vietnam needs to help feed and employ its 62 million people.

Hanoi has declared that it will pull out its estimated 140,000 troops by 1990, but would not permit a situation where its security was threatened. Specifically, while insisting that the Cambodian factions must resolve the problem of Cambodian rule, Vietnam has made clear it would not accept the return to power of the ruthless Khmer Rouge faction, which fought a running border war with the Vietnamese in the late 1970s.

Nor, say most Western diplomats, would Hanoi give way to any regime that did not rank Vietnam’s interests as the highest priority. Only in the past two months has the word neutral appeared in peace feelers issued by the Phnom Penh government.

None of the recent diplomatic moves on Cambodia have been openly initiated by Hanoi, even though its officials have kept the issue on the front burner for months now. Most Asian and Western diplomats interviewed here in Bangkok insist, however, that the Vietnamese are pulling the strings.

Said a Western official this week, before the Paris meeting was confirmed: “In my bones, I think the Sihanouk meeting with Hun Sen will go through. It’s really Hanoi’s call.”