Vietnamese in U.S. Urge Hanoi Ties

Encouraged by a recent Senate committee’s trip to Vietnam and the easing of Cold War rivalries here and abroad, many Vietnamese-American leaders--once bitterly opposed to normalization--are saying that the time has come for Washington to re-establish diplomatic relations with Hanoi.

With the presidential change-of-guard just six weeks away, the issue has taken on almost an urgent tone among many Vietnamese. Even many who were staunch enemies of the Communist regime in Hanoi and advocated continued armed struggle against it now say that diplomatic ties with Vietnam will facilitate reform there and lead to the demise of the Leninist dictatorship.

“It would be the best gift President George Bush could give the 69 million Vietnamese people. It is time to heal--time to let bygones be bygones,” said Nguyen Cao Ky, former South Vietnamese premier and vice president, in an interview with The Times from Hong Kong. Ky fled Saigon when South Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975 and now lives in Fountain Valley.

Ky’s turnabout reflects the changing political outlook of the Vietnamese immigrant community--more than 700,000 in the United States, with 280,000 in California. Even as recently as two years ago, few Vietnamese-Americans dared to take such stands publicly. Those who did often became targets of death threats and shootings. On occasion, their homes and businesses were firebombed; others mysteriously disappeared. Since the early 1980s, there have been at least a dozen such disappearances, mostly in California. Vietnamese settlements in California are concentrated in Orange County, Los Angeles and San Jose.

But now, a more conciliatory approach is gaining ground. Many leaders believe that President Bush, who has always taken a hard line on communism, would suffer less political fallout from the move toward normalization than President-elect Bill Clinton, whose record as an anti-war activist dogged him during the presidential campaign.

“Mr. Bush may go down in history as the one who wrote the last chapter of the Vietnam War,” said Ta Van Tai, a research scholar at Harvard Law School who visited Vietnam last year as a member of a U.S. delegation.

Vu-Duc Vuong, executive director of the San Francisco-based Center for Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement, said: “Bush could do for Vietnam in 1992 what Nixon did for China in 1979.”

The prospects of an end to the trade sanctions and eventual diplomatic recognition improved two weeks ago when Vietnamese officials promised Sen. John F. Kerry that they would seek to answer questions about U.S. soldiers who are missing or unaccounted for.

The U.S. policy on normalization of relations with Vietnam is linked to Vietnamese cooperation on implementing the Cambodian peace settlement and Hanoi’s cooperation on the POW-MIA issue, according to a State Department official. “Our position is we are prepared to take steps as the Vietnamese cooperate with us.”

Kerry and other members of the committee, who spent 10 days in Vietnam and Laos, briefed Bush Wednesday, recommending different policy options to encourage Vietnamese cooperation.

“We suggested the need for a reciprocal measure,” Kerry said. “We communicated to him the belief that it’s our move.”

The Massachusetts Democrat said Bush “listened carefully . . . and asked a lot of questions,” but did not commit to any further diplomatic or economic moves to reward the Vietnamese for the recent decision to open their wartime archives to the congressional fact-finders.

Ky and other community leaders believe that the Hanoi government is doing all it can. “They really need America,” Ky said. “They are begging to try to re-establish relations with America.”

Voung, who also changed his position on normalization recently, said that although Hanoi’s dismal human rights record is a concern, it would be unrealistic to wait indefinitely. “We cannot just sit and demand that Vietnam become a perfect place before we normalize relations,” he said. “All human relations progress in increments. We can push more with diplomatic leverage.”

For Vietnam, the stakes are high. United States recognition would signal Hanoi’s re-entry into the community of nations, ending nearly 20 years in international diplomatic limbo. Bringing Vietnam into the international mainstream would be an important factor in stabilizing post-Cold War Asia.

Equally important are the ramifications for the Vietnamese economy. Since the U.S. government imposed a trade embargo against Vietnam shortly after the Communist takeover of Saigon 17 years ago, the ravaged country has remained one of the most backward nations in Asia, despite a skilled labor force. In addition to increased trade, the lifting of the embargo could result in a mini-tourist boom, cultural exchanges and cooperation in educational and technological projects.

The embargo, combined with Hanoi’s deliberate policy of isolation, has put Vietnam decades behind other Asian nations, said Douglas Pike, a Vietnam specialist at the Institute for East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. Pike, a former foreign policy adviser to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, said the Hanoi government is trying to break out of the isolation.

He said during the Communist Party’s seventh congress last year, most of the old “jungle fighters” were purged from the top ranks. Furthermore, Vietnam has joined the Assn. of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an observer, a step toward becoming a full member.

Again, the liberalization may have been driven by economics.

“It’s just a new world situation they have to deal with,” said a foreign policy aide to Kerry, who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs and a decorated Vietnam veteran. “They no longer have the support of the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. They have a greater incentive to make peace.”

Pike said Vietnam received almost $1 billion a year from the former Soviet Union until 1989. “They really took a big punishment from the Soviet Union when the money stopped coming.”

Pike, a career foreign service officer who served several tours in Saigon, said he found considerable change in the political atmosphere on his most recent trip to Vietnam three months ago--even from just a year before.

“The word has gone out in Vietnam that unless you’re actively plotting to overthrow the government, you can do almost anything you want,” he said.

The observation is shared by numerous Vietnamese-Americans who have visited their homeland in the past year.

But despite a similar evolutionary shift at home, the subject of normalizing relations still generates heated and at times bitter debate in the Little Saigon district of Westminster.

Westminster Councilman Tony Lam, the first Vietnamese refugee to win elective office in the United States, sees the issue as more complicated. “There’s a lot of bitterness in the community,” he said. “It’s a war that destroyed so much.”

Nonetheless, a perestroika- like attitude seems to have taken hold of many once fiercely critical of normalization.

Yen Do, editor and publisher of Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese language newspaper in the United States, even likens the current thinking of the Vietnamese in the United States to that of the Russians when Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power.

Moderate factions in the community argue that lifting the embargo would benefit both countries. For Vietnam, it would mean reconstruction of the country with American know-how, and in the process, the erosion and possible demise of communism as in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern European nations. For the United States, the rebuilding of Vietnam could be a boon to U.S. businesses.

Vietnamese would much rather do business with Americans than Japanese, numerous advocates for normalization said, noting the historical animosities between Japan and Vietnam. But if U.S. businesses do not get there soon, they will lose out to Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French and South Korean firms, they added.

Dr. Co D. L. Pham, president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce of Orange County, said he once opposed lifting the trade embargo. But now he sees the move as a chance to help empower the more moderate factions of Vietnam’s Communist Party. That way, he said, the party will go the way of its counterpart in the former Soviet Union.

“How we win is very important,” Pham said. “We want to see if we can win back Vietnam by economics, not by a bloody revolution. I guarantee you if we can do that . . . the Communists will go away. We win the war without a drop of blood . . . just like in the Soviet Union.”

In the United States, the issue does not end with the Vietnamese.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vietnam Veterans of America and other veteran groups say it would be a mistake to rush into establishing diplomatic ties with the Hanoi government based on the evidence Hanoi recently provided to Kerry’s committee.

Bill Smith of the VFW said the group is opposed to granting diplomatic recognition to Vietnam without obtaining the “fullest cooperation” in the recovery and return of the more than 2,265 POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia.

But those who favor normalization say quick action is essential.

For people of Vietnamese ancestry living in the United States, it would mean being able to freely visit relatives and friends and a renewal of contact with their ancestral land, which generations of Vietnamese have fought hard to defend. It would also give them a sense of being whole again--a people with a country. Those Vietnamese who want to help rebuild their homeland would be able to return to work and perhaps influence the changes that are certain to come with the opening of the country to the West.

But Harvard’s Ta believes that Vietnamese-Americans would not be the only ones to benefit emotionally and spiritually from closing the chapter on Vietnam.

“The American people could come back to Vietnam now as moral victors and do the healing work with the Vietnamese in hospitals, for example,” Ta said. “By doing healing work in Vietnam, they heal themselves. They can now say: ‘We went to Vietnam for a good cause. Now we return to do a good job again.’ ”