U.S. Plans Human Rights Dialogue With Vietnam : Diplomacy: Meetings will be among last steps toward lifting trade embargo. Officials say Clinton will probably do that within a month.

The Clinton Administration announced plans Monday to open a formal dialogue on human rights with Vietnam in one of the last steps toward lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Hanoi.

Both State Department and National Security Council officials have recommended that President Clinton remove the 19-year-old embargo, according to Administration and private sources in Washington. They said Clinton probably will act in late January or early February after Congress returns.

Officially, Administration officials insist that the President has not given final approval to the move. While announcing the new human rights dialogue, State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly cautioned, “At this particular point in time, no decision has been made on further steps.”

The agreement to start the new human rights dialogue was arranged during a trip to Hanoi last month by Winston Lord, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. The State Department spokesman said Lord will meet “soon” with Le Bang, Vietnam’s ambassador to the United Nations.

By establishing formal human rights talks now, the Administration could counteract in part the argument that the United States should hold up normal relations with Vietnam until Hanoi--which has one of the world’s last Communist regimes--alters its repressive policies.

Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) said in an interview that the announcement on human rights is “welcome news.” But he added: “I don’t think this should be a fig leaf, and I don’t think a dialogue in the United States is enough. We should send a human rights delegation to Vietnam soon.

“Our price for normalization should be freedom for the people of Vietnam,” said Kerrey, a veteran who lost a leg during the Vietnam War. “We fought a war there for freedom. I want Vietnam to know Americans are prepared to come back there proud and with their heads up. I’m not talking about (Vietnam) having elections soon, but I believe Vietnam is in a position to change its human rights policies.”

A number of members of Congress and prominent Vietnam veterans such as former Navy Secretary James H. Webb have voiced similar views. The Senate is considering a provision sponsored by Kerrey that would require Hanoi to make progress on human rights before the Administration could establish normal relations with Vietnam.

The American position, dating back to the George Bush Administration, is that, since Vietnam helped contribute to a peace settlement of Cambodia’s civil war, the last condition holding up normal relations is Hanoi’s full cooperation in accounting for Americans missing in action during the war.

Shelly, the State Department spokeswoman, stressed that there is no direct “linkage” between the human rights issue and normal ties with Vietnam. But she added, “Certainly the human rights question is a part of the overall relationship and the considerations that we’re looking at.”

In recent years, Hanoi has imprisoned Buddhist monks and Roman Catholic priests, maintained press censorship, banned works by Vietnamese authors and sentenced political opponents to prison terms of as much as 12 years for “counterrevolutionary” crimes.

The human rights group Asia Watch, in its recent annual report, said Vietnam had “a mixed human rights performance” last year.

“The government released or reduced prison sentences for a number of well-known dissidents at the same time that it imprisoned others for peaceful expression of their views,” the organization said.

Other governments, including Australia and Germany, have sent human rights representatives or delegations to Vietnam over the last few months. But Mike Jendrzejczyk (, Washington representative for Asia Watch, said that over the past year, “human rights has taken a back seat to POW/MIA issues.”

There are more than 1,600 Americans still listed as missing in Vietnam from the war, as well as nearly 600 Americans listed as missing elsewhere in Indochina.

During its last months in office, the Bush Administration considered lifting the trade embargo against Vietnam. But it held off after deciding that there was not enough time for Hanoi to resolve the questions surrounding American POW/MIAs.

That left the issue up to Clinton. During the 1992 presidential primaries and general election, Clinton’s efforts to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War had been a prominent campaign issue.

Over the last year, the Clinton Administration has cleared the way for international financial institutions to resume lending to Vietnam, and the President has authorized American companies to compete for the contracts that Vietnam hands out after getting these new loans. But Clinton held back from lifting the embargo itself on grounds that he wanted to get “the fullest possible accounting of our POW/MIAs.”

Lord, during his visit to Vietnam in December, said he was satisfied with the cooperation Hanoi was giving to the United States in efforts to locate and account for missing Americans.

Ann Mills Griffiths, the head of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, said any lifting of the trade embargo now would amount to a violation of Clinton’s commitments because Vietnam is still deliberately holding back information on POW/MIAs.

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