Hanoi to Repatriate 40,000 Vietnamese, Bonn Reports

German officials said Thursday that they have reached a basic agreement with Hanoi on the mandatory repatriation of about 40,000 Vietnamese nationals living in Germany, after weeks of disagreement over the financial underpinnings of the deal.

German sources said the arrangement calls for the Vietnamese to return to their homeland, in shifts, by the year 2000. In exchange, Vietnam is to receive more than $65 million in aid to promote trade and development. Final details must be worked out before the repatriations begin.

The departure of the Vietnamese will remove a small but highly visible vestige of Cold War life from this formerly divided nation.

The arrangement is being hailed by German businesses, which are eager to get a toehold in the expanding Vietnamese market and have been unable to get export credits while repatriation was still an open question.

But humanitarian groups argue that it is wrong to link repatriation, a human rights issue, with the interests of German business.

German Economics Minister Guenter Rexrodt broke the impasse on a recent trip to Vietnam, reaching an arrangement in which part of the money will be used to help resettle the returning Vietnamese and part will finance other development.

The 40,000 to be sent home represent less than half of the Vietnamese immigrants now living in Germany. Many of the immigrants came to West Germany as asylum-seekers during the Vietnam War, and their legal status in united Germany is unchallenged.

But many thousands more were invited to East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s as contract laborers and university students in exchange programs sponsored by the sister socialist states. Their legal status was thrown into confusion when the East German state collapsed in 1989.

About 60,000 of these immigrants went home when Bonn offered them free plane tickets and $2,000 departure bonuses.

But others stayed on, and the German government now says that they are in Germany illegally.

The government has not been able to deport them without an agreement with Vietnam, but has wanted to, in part because the Vietnamese stand out in this predominantly white country and irritate some Germans--particularly those from the east whose fortunes have plummeted as the economy has soured after the reunification boom.