U.S., Vietnam to Establish Liaison Offices

Twenty years after the fall of Saigon ended America’s longest war, the United States and Vietnam are on the verge of exchanging diplomatic missions, a probable first step toward normal relations.

State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly said that the former enemies signed an agreement in Hanoi today settling property disputes left over from the war and establishing liaison offices in each other’s capitals.

Indicative of the raw emotions still generated by the conflict, there was no corresponding ceremony in Washington. The agreement was announced less than 12 hours before the official documents were exchanged.

The Clinton Administration set aside objections from Capitol Hill and some veterans groups to establishing even low-level diplomatic ties before there is a complete accounting of the more than 2,000 service personnel still listed as missing from the war. Shelly said that the new office should help determine the fate of the missing.

“We felt that by getting the liaison office open and also by directing one official who will be at that liaison office to work on this issue on a full-time basis, that that was a way that we could increase our ability to achieve the kind of accounting that we . . . desire,” Shelly said.

At the same time, U.S. officials said that the offices will not be upgraded to embassies until the MIA issue is resolved.

Liaison offices are the lowest level of representation that provides diplomatic immunity. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said this week that the United States would not consider stationing officials in Hanoi without that legal protection.

The United States and China exchanged liaison offices for about five years before establishing full diplomatic relations.

Officials said Vietnam has improved its cooperation with the United States on the MIA issue, turning over 61 sets of remains during the last year. Forty sets of remains were retrieved as a result of joint U.S.-Vietnamese efforts, while the rest were recovered by the Vietnamese.

*

The Vietnamese office will be established in the old South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, which was abandoned in May, 1975, when the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government collapsed in the face of advancing North Vietnamese troops. As a result of North Vietnam’s victory, the country was unified, with Hanoi as its capital.

The U.S. office will be established in a new nine-story office building in Hanoi. Officials said it is expected to open next Friday.

James Hall, the State Department official who has been Washington’s chief Vietnam watcher, will be in charge. He served as an Army captain in Vietnam during the war.

The South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington was boarded up for almost a decade after the fall of Saigon. In recent years, the building has been used by the State Department as an office annex.

For the large Vietnamese community in the United States, the agreement generated mixed emotions.

“There’s no great excitement,” said Nguyen Ngoc Bich, a consultant to the Vietnamese Cultural Assn. of America. “The majority of us are refugees who have no great love for the present regime. But it will make things simpler to deal with Vietnam.”

He said that the new liaison office will make it easier for Vietnamese Americans to obtain visas for travel to Vietnam for business or family visits.

There was also mixed reaction in Orange County, home to the largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam.

For some, the announcement represents a setback in the fight against alleged human rights abuses in Vietnam. For others, it signals a chance to rebuild the poverty-stricken country.

At the center of the debate is the emotionally charged issue of handing over to the Vietnamese government the property rights of the former South Vietnamese Embassy.

“It is, in a sense, our final bastion,” said Co Pham, an obstetrician who also serves as president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce in Orange County. Pham led a trade delegation to Vietnam that caused much criticism in Little Saigon late last year.

Several Vietnamese Americans saw the move as “an insensitive act” on the part of the United States government.

“It reopened wounds that hasn’t quite healed,” said Dat Hoang, news editor of Little Saigon Radio. “It is like telling us that since (the South Vietnamese) lost the war, we don’t have a right to have a say in anything regarding U.S.-Vietnam relations.”

Hoang and others said they felt like their efforts to fight for human rights issues have largely gone ignored. As evidence, they pointed to the recent arrest of two Buddhist leaders in Vietnam.

Dung Tran, president of the Southern California chapter of the Vietnamese Professional Society, a group of mostly young professionals with 27 international chapters, said he was disappointed in President Clinton.

“The President said himself, at the time that he lifted the embargo last year, that he would push for human rights, that he would push to resolve the MIA-POW issue,” Tran said. “Well, we haven’t seen hardly any progress at all since that day.”

While agreeing that the U.S. government should put more pressure on the Vietnamese regime to be more sensitive to human rights, Michael Le, president of EPG International in Anaheim Hills, said the agreement could be a positive move. Le’s company is providing water-filtering systems for two companies in Vietnam.

“This will help to remove a lot of red tape for business, and that’s good,” Le said. “But while we need to pursue the interest of business, we also must be careful. We must also do what’s best for the Vietnamese people.”

Pham argues that the agreement has the potential to ultimately benefit the Vietnamese people.

“Here’s our chance to talk to them, work with them and convince them that freedom is the way,” he said.