U.S. to Offer Incentives for Vietnam Ties

The Bush Administration has decided to launch a major diplomatic initiative toward Vietnam, offering America’s former wartime adversary a series of trade and economic benefits and new steps toward normalization of relations if Vietnam helps to bring about a quick peace settlement in Cambodia, U.S. sources say.

As one sign of the Administration’s seriousness about possible diplomatic recognition of Hanoi, a senior Administration official confirmed Monday that in August, a small group of State Department Foreign Service officers will begin yearlong training in the Vietnamese and Khmer (Cambodian) languages.

This language study could prepare them to become the first American diplomats to serve in Vietnam or Cambodia since the end of the war in 1975. Over the last 16 years, only a handful of U.S. officials have learned Vietnamese as preparation for diplomatic posts in Bangkok, and no U.S. officials have been trained in Khmer, a State Department official said.

“The Administration would like to lay that (Vietnam) era to rest. . . ,” one senior Administration official told The Times on Monday. “What the Administration is trying to do is to give Hanoi and Phnom Penh every incentive to cooperate.”

Assistant Secretary of State Richard H. Solomon is expected to present the U.S. proposals to Trinh Xuan Lang, Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations, in New York today and to outline them on Capitol Hill in testimony Wednesday.

One Administration official said that the new U.S. initiative will amount to “a road map” detailing exactly what benefits Vietnam and the Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia will obtain from a Cambodian peace settlement. The exact details of the proposal were not available Monday.

Vietnam, confronted with a drastic cutback in economic support from the Soviet Union, has been seeking a lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam and an end to the ban on World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other international loans to Vietnam. U.S. support is considered crucial for Vietnam to obtain loans from international financial institutions.

“The Vietnamese dearly want international aid,” one Asian diplomat said Monday. “They are short of foreign exchange.” However, this official said, even in Vietnam’s current economic plight, it is still not clear whether its leaders will go along with the new U.S. initiative. “The Vietnamese are quite tough,” he said. “They can hang on the ropes.”

Administration officials emphasized that Vietnam will not get any of the new “incentives” the United States will offer unless it cooperates in bringing about peace in Cambodia.

Last summer, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council approved a detailed plan for peace in Cambodia. But over the last few months, Vietnam and Cambodia have resisted going along with the U.N. plan on grounds that it would require the Phnom Penh government of Premier Hun Sen to yield too much of its sovereignty to U.N.-sponsored overseers.

One congressional staff member, a critic of American policy toward Indochina, said Monday that he believes the new Bush Administration overture represents “an effort to show that they (U.S. officials) are amenable (to a peace settlement) and that the Vietnamese are being intransigent.”

However, a senior U.S. official characterized the new initiative toward Vietnam as the first step in what could be “the end-game” in diplomatic negotiations toward a Cambodian settlement.

Not only the United States but also the Soviet Union and China are trying to bring about a Cambodian settlement, this Administration official said. “Basically, this (U.N. plan) has everyone’s support but two parties, Hanoi and Phnom Penh,” he asserted. “. . . We’re sitting here ready to turn on the lights and pour the wine.”

The current government in Phnom Penh was installed when Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia at the end of 1978 and ousted the Khmer Rouge. Over the previous three years under the Khmer Rouge regime, more than a million Cambodians had died as a result of political repression, hunger and disease.

Since 1979, Khmer Rouge guerrillas, armed by the Chinese, have been fighting a civil war against the Vietnam-backed government. Two non-Communist resistance groups have also been battling the Phnom Penh regime with support from both China and the West. For nearly a decade, the Khmer Rouge and the non-Communist groups were joined together in a political coalition, and there has also been at least some battlefield cooperation among the resistance groups.

Under the U.N. peace plan, the four Cambodian political factions--the Phnom Penh government, the Khmer Rouge and the two non-Communist resistance groups--were all to share power in what was known as a Supreme National Council. U.N. personnel were to control the government, arrange a cease-fire and conduct free elections.

But last fall, an Administration official said, “things began to unravel.” The Phnom Penh government, with Vietnam’s support, resisted giving up control to the Supreme National Council and sought new assurances that the Khmer Rouge would not resume their murderous campaigns against other Cambodians.

Many analysts believe that there are internal disagreements, both within Vietnam’s Communist leadership and within the Phnom Penh regime, about how far to go in cooperating with the U.N. plan. The new U.S. diplomatic initiative is apparently aimed at breaking the deadlock and giving what one Administration official called “new momentum” to the efforts at a peace settlement.

State Department officials said that five new officers will start studying Vietnamese at the department’s Foreign Service Institute this summer. An additional, unspecified number will begin training in Khmer.

A senior Administration official insisted that the language training is “strictly a matter of prudent planning, in hopes that conditions develop such that we need to have Vietnamese- and Khmer-language officers.” He pointed out that in the 1960s, the State Department sent a small group of diplomats for training in Mongolian, although the United States did not establish formal diplomatic relations with Mongolia for another two decades.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher announced at Monday’s news briefing that Assistant Secretary Solomon will meet with the Vietnamese ambassador in New York, but he did not mention the incentives the Administration will offer at the meeting.

“This meeting will be aimed at encouraging an early political solution to the conflict in Cambodia and a rapid acceleration of progress on resolving the POW-MIA (prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action) issue,” Boucher said.

Gen. John W. Vessey, a special presidential envoy, has conducted a series of meetings with Vietnamese officials aimed at settling questions over Americans still listed as missing in action during the war. And last week, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), himself a former POW, traveled to Vietnam to discuss the missing servicemen with the leadership in Hanoi.