Hanoi Hosts Summit With a French Twist

Suddenly everyone seems to be speaking French and eating croissants again. Old men are wearing berets. Colonial French villas have been repainted. Banners draped over cafes and restaurants proclaim, “Bienvenue!”

The French are back, and Hanoi is all smiles. The occasion is the 7th Francophone Summit, which runs from today through Sunday and has brought 2,000 delegates, including about 20 heads of state, and 600 journalists to this gracious old city that from 1903 to 1954 was the capital of French Indochina.

For Vietnam, this is a historic event. It is the first international summit this Communist country has hosted since reunification in 1975, and it confirms to the long-isolated Vietnamese that they are back as legitimate members of the global mainstream. It also is the first Francophone summit ever held in Asia.

Normally a subdued city, Hanoi has taken on a festive atmosphere as pedestrians line the streets, peering into speeding sedans to catch a glimpse of President Jacques Chirac of France or Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada or former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a candidate for the new post of secretary-general of La Francophonie, a club of nations based on loose cultural and linguistic foundations.

On the surface, Hanoi seems an unlikely place to host a gathering whose membership is composed of 49 French-speaking countries, representing 500 million people.

Less than 1% of Vietnam’s population has a “satisfactory command” of French, and in the past five years English has replaced Russian (which replaced French in the 1970s) as the second language taught in schools. Additionally, for seven decades, ending in 1954 with the Communist victory at Dien Bien Phu, France ruled Vietnam as an unpopular colonial master.

But France left behind touches of grace that the Vietnamese, their proud independence now well established, recently have come to appreciate: well-preserved colonial architecture, wide boulevards lined with tamarind and banyan trees, stately villas with green shutters, replicas in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) of the Paris Opera House.

If France was an unwelcome colonial ruler, it has been a good ex-colonial partner in the development of a war-battered country whose official foreign policy is “to be friends with all countries.” France, for instance, helped bring Vietnam back into the world community after its 1978 invasion of Cambodia led to widespread condemnation and political isolation.

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France is Vietnam’s biggest Western trading partner; about 100 French companies are located here. As the leader of the Francophone movement, France contributed $12 million to help Vietnam stage the summit and gussy up Hanoi.

For weeks, laborers in conical hats have worked feverishly to tile crumbled sidewalks. The fronts of shops and homes have been tidied up, a new conference center was completed in the nick of time, and just this week finishing touches were put on the magnificent downtown Opera House, whose two-year renovation cost $17 million.

With police and soldiers out in force--an unusual sight in Hanoi--the ubiquitous shoe-shine urchins have disappeared, as have street vendors who sell everything from parrots to cigarettes and wrenches. Once again, sidewalks are for walking, not parking motor scooters and bicycles.

Hanoi has had to scramble desperately to find French-speakers to ensure the summit runs smoothly. The government press center has only three employees fluent in French among its 60 workers and had to fly in additional staff from Ho Chi Minh City.

The Korean-owned Daewoo Hotel sent its key front-desk staff to Paris for training and conducted a spirited campaign to lure Chirac and his delegation away from the refurbished Sofitel Metropole Hotel, once the center of French colonial social life.

But in the end the ultramodern Daewoo had to settle for the Canadian delegation, and Chirac opted to stay at the stately, French-owned Metropole.

For the Vietnamese, it is a matter of national pride that the summit come off without a hitch. “After all, this is a practice run,” a Vietnamese official said, to the chagrin of the French, for the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations summit that Vietnam will host late next year.