Hanoi OKs Exodus to U.S. of Freed Political Prisoners
The United States and Vietnam on Sunday announced an agreement for former political prisoners and their relatives to be resettled in the United States, with the first group of 3,000 expected to leave this year.
A joint statement, released in Bangkok, said the two sides hope to begin by October “a program for the resettlement in the United States of released re-education center detainees and their close family members who wish to emigrate to the United States.”
The Communists toppled the U.S.-backed South Vietnam government in April, 1975, and hundreds of thousands of people were put into the camps of manual labor and political re-education because of their ties to the old regime.
The U.S. government has sought a formal program for their resettlement since 1982, but political bickering barred progress.
The agreement was reached in Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, in talks last week between teams led by Vu Khoan, Vietnamese assistant foreign minister, and Robert L. Funseth, U.S. senior deputy assistant secretary of state.
Funseth said the pact “starts healing the last big wound remaining from the war, which is that these people who were clearly associated with the United States have not been allowed to leave Vietnam and be united with their relatives. . . . “
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