Vietnamese Group’s Chief Reelected

An Irvine businessman who for two years has led the Vietnamese Community of Southern California has been reelected to head the organization, one of the most prominent Vietnamese American groups in the Southland.

Preliminary results from Sunday’s regionwide election showed Ban Binh Bui won by a wide margin, collecting 5,264 votes to challenger Ngoc Van Tran’s 3,565. Polling places were located in five cities, from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley, and were open to people of Vietnamese descent age 18 and older.

Bui will lead an organization many in the community hope will serve as a political voice for the 300,000 emigres living in Southern California, the largest Vietnamese community outside of Asia.

From San Diego to Santa Barbara, there are more than 300 Vietnamese social service agencies and business organizations, most of which are based in Orange County. The Vietnamese Community of Southern California, a social service group formed in the late 1980s and run by a 15-member board, is the only one that holds a regionwide election.

Organizers said the turnout indicated the strength of the organization as a political voice for the community.

“This means the Vietnamese people want to have a voice, to have some entity that represents them,” said Ly Khac Le, who was in charge of the election oversight committee.

Vietnamese American communities across the country closely watched the election, which was only the second held by the group. It was notable for its increasing sophistication--candidates held debates and aired advertisements on Vietnamese-language radio and TV stations--and sniping. The incumbent had accused the challenger of supporting the Communist government in Vietnam.

But after Le read the results at 2 a.m. Monday on a local radio station, Bui appealed to Tran to put the campaign behind them and work together for the betterment of the expatriate community.

On Tuesday, in an interview in the headquarters of his Unity group, Tran said he could not work with Bui unless Bui publicly retracts his campaign accusation. Candidates had to sign a statement attesting to their opposition to the Vietnamese government.

“He would have my full support if he would only admit that what he did was but a campaign tactic, a technique to get the votes and to win at any cost,” said Tran, a 49-year-old electronics technician.

Bui said Tuesday he will do no such thing and asserted his victory meant voters resoundingly supported his view and rejected Tran’s.

“If he is for the continuing struggle against Communism, then why does he not join forces with me?” Bui said.

The Vietnamese American community includes a large number of former South Vietnamese military officers and soldiers who are passionately anti-Communist. For many of these people, some of whom spent more than a decade in political prisons after the war, to be accused of supporting the current regime, however baseless, is to be isolated from many of their fellow emigres.

Tran ran on a platform that called for the Vietnamese Community of Southern California to act as a liaison between local government and Vietnamese American groups and businesses and to encourage cooperation among Vietnamese American organizations.

Bui ran on the Free Vietnam platform, which supported a centralized organization that works independent of any other groups.

“They had nothing to gain,” one voter, who heads a Vietnamese American business-interest group, said of the candidates. “Yet, they gave the race everything they had because they believe that there needs to be an organization that would act as a collective voice for the refugees.”