Hanoi Suspends Accord to Join U.S. in MIA Search

Vietnam on Wednesday abruptly suspended plans to participate with U.S. technicians in a joint search for the remains of missing American servicemen. The Reagan Administration then accused Hanoi of breaking a year-old promise to cooperate on the issue.

The dispute, touched off by an angry statement issued in Hanoi by Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, appears to reverse a recent warming trend in the relationship between the United States and Vietnam.

State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley confirmed that Thach has informed the U.S. government that Vietnam is not prepared to go ahead with an agreement--reached just last month--to allow U.S. experts to take part in three months of searches and excavations intended to resolve the fate of some 2,400 Americans still listed as missing in action in Indochina.

At the same time, Thach suspended a program to resettle released political prisoners in the United States. Hanoi said the action was taken because of a statement to Congress last month by the State Department’s top Asia expert, Assistant Secretary of State Gaston Sigur. He reiterated the Administration’s longstanding opposition to normalization of diplomatic relations with Hanoi until Vietnamese troops are withdrawn from Cambodia.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) immediately withdrew legislation--opposed by the Administration--calling for the exchange of “interest sections,” or low-level diplomatic missions, with Vietnam as a first step toward more normal relations.

“I think we have to suspend our efforts since the Vietnamese have suspended their commitment to resolving the humanitarian issues,” McCain said in an interview.

The Voice of Vietnam, in a broadcast monitored by news agencies in Bangkok, Thailand, said that Vietnam “is compelled to temporarily (prevent) the United States from joining Vietnam in the search and exhumation of the remains of (Americans) missing in action, as well as the resettlement of released (re-education) camp inmates in the United States.”

The broadcast said Sigur’s congressional testimony “showed the State Department is continuing to pursue a hostile policy against Vietnam.”

Oakley said the Vietnamese action is unacceptable because the two governments agreed in 1987 that humanitarian issues would be addressed without linkage “to broader political questions such as normalization or economic aid.”

“We therefore do not accept this attempt to establish such a linkage and call on Vietnam to continue cooperation with us on these important humanitarian issues, as they agreed to do a year ago,” Oakley said.

The National League of POW-MIA Families issued a statement deploring Hanoi’s action as an “obvious attempt to manipulate the POW-MIA issue and other humanitarian issues for political gain.”

“This is not going to play well, and it’s not in their interest,” said Ann Griffiths, executive director of the league. “We would hope they would reconsider what we think is a serious misjudgment on their part.”

Thach’s message was addressed to retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who serves as President Reagan’s personal envoy in charge of the search for servicemen unaccounted for after the Vietnam War.

Joint U.S.-Vietnamese efforts to resolve the fate of missing servicemen had been expected to begin this month. Among the missing are 70 high-priority cases of Americans who reportedly have been seen alive in Vietnam more than a decade after the war. Most of those accounts came from Vietnamese refugees.

In addition, the United States was prepared to admit tens of thousands of political prisoners, most of them officials or soldiers of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government that was toppled in April, 1975.

More than 1,700 servicemen are listed as missing in Vietnam. The remaining 700 MIAs are cases from Laos, Cambodia and southern China.