Pressure to Alter Hanoi’s Political System Urged : Diplomacy: U.S. should take no major steps toward normal ties until Communists open way for democracy, critics say.

As the Bush Administration begins to move toward normal relations with Vietnam, some critics are raising a delicate, long-submerged issue: whether Hanoi’s Communist government must first be pressed to open the way for democracy before major steps are taken.

Even if Vietnam accounts for all the American servicemen missing in Indochina, these critics argue, the United States should not agree to establishing normal relations with Hanoi until the autocratic regime changes or abolishes its Leninist political system.

“Our price for normalization should be freedom for the people of Vietnam,” Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who lost a leg during the Vietnam War, said last week.

His sentiments are echoed by other prominent Vietnam veterans such as former Navy Secretary James H. Webb and by a number of Vietnamese-Americans such as Ky Ngo, co-chairman of the Bush-Quayle campaign in Orange County who threatened last week to resign if Bush proceeds with normalization.

If these views are translated into U.S. policy, they would have profound implications both for Vietnam and for America’s future role in Asia.

Any U.S. effort now to press for democratic freedoms in Vietnam probably would delay normal relations between Washington and Hanoi for many more years, since there is no sign that Vietnam’s Communist Party is either about to open itself to elections like Poland’s in 1989 or to collapse like former leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Soviet regime in 1991.

Although President Bush asserted last week that he would like to see Vietnam move toward democracy, neither he nor any other U.S. President has ever made that a precondition for normal relations. For more than a decade, the United States has said that it would establish normal ties with Hanoi and lift the 17-year-old American trade embargo against it if Vietnam pulled its troops out of Cambodia and cooperated fully in accounting for U.S. servicemen missing since the war.

Vietnam withdrew its forces from Cambodia three years ago, and the President declared last week that Hanoi’s recent help on MIAs has amounted to “a major breakthrough.”

“We’re not going to put on an additional codicil now,” a senior Bush Administration official said after Bush’s announcement. “Democracy is an issue that will come up in its own way, later on.”

The record shows that Vietnam’s regime remains as repressive as it was in the past--indeed, in some ways, it may be more repressive.

“The June 4, 1989, Tian An Men massacre and events in Eastern Europe have put a brake on Vietnam’s modest course of political reform,” wrote Indochina expert Nayan Chanda of the Far Eastern Economic Review last year. “. . . Since the summer of 1989, Hanoi has cracked down on free expression, silenced some of its domestic critics and has forcefully ruled out multi-party democracy.”

The State Department’s most recent human rights report, issued last winter, asserts that it is now easier for Vietnamese to travel inside and outside the country than it was a few years ago and that people talk more easily with foreigners. Nevertheless, it says, Vietnam maintains “severe restrictions on freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, movement, worker rights and the right of citizens to change their government.”

Some American specialists argue that establishing normal relations with Vietnam may help in the long run to bring more freedom to the country and its people.

“Hungry people make poor democrats,” said New York University Prof. Jerome Cohen, a lawyer who represents American firms seeking to do business in Vietnam.

Cohen contends that making democracy a new condition for normal relations with Vietnam would amount to “moving the goal posts”--since Hanoi was told for years that as soon as it met American requirements on Cambodia and the MIAs it would have normal relations with the United States.

Some Vietnamese-American groups disagree with the contention that normal ties with Hanoi will help bring democracy to the country. They argue that as soon as the American trade embargo is lifted, the United States will lose much of the leverage it now has over Vietnam.

“We know they are desperate for a lifting of the embargo, so we should push some more,” said Tran Dieu Chan, editor of the San Jose-based newsletter Vietnam Insight. “It is important for us to keep our principles, to uphold human rights.”

For some American veterans such as Webb, bringing freedom to Vietnam represents a way of returning to the original purpose of the war that cost 58,000 American lives.

“Vietnam is the great unfinished morality play of our time,” he wrote last year. “The main issue the renewal of relations poses is whether we can sort through past errors while not forgetting the sincere intentions of our failed effort to preserve South Vietnam from communism.”