Sanchez: Lobby for Rights in Vietnam

Offering Vietnamese emigres a primer on influencing foreign policy, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) Sunday advocated lobbying Congress to win human rights concessions from Vietnam. The campaign has a new opportunity because Congress must approve the trade pact the Clinton administration is negotiating with the Southeast Asian nation.

“The place where you can have an impact on human rights is in Congress. The fight is to change Congress people’s minds on trade,” the two-term representative said. “I do not believe we can stop the trade agreement, but we must be in the process and ask for [human rights] concessions.”

Sanchez, who represents the largest Vietnamese community in the nation, suggested Vietnamese Americans mount a nationwide lobbying campaign by using their political and economic clout to pressure representatives.

“If you have 5% of the population in a [congressional] district, you can make a difference, and Vietnamese are living all over the United States now,” she said.

Sanchez also suggested talking to members of Congress who are open to appeals on human rights issues but have yet to link those concerns to trade issues with Vietnam.

“About the last thing on the mind of most Congress people is Vietnam,” she said, noting that about 100 members of Congress last year voted to block an initial expansion of trade with Vietnam.

She repeated her earlier suggestions to the Vietnamese community that it try to persuade individual Congress members “to adopt a political prisoner” as means of personalizing the human rights discussion. “Do that and they begin to have a connection,” she said.

Sanchez this month returned from a weeklong trip to Vietnam, and her session Sunday was billed as a “community briefing” on her visit.

Mong Lan, with Little Saigon Radio, station KVNR, applauded Sanchez’s suggestions but said she remains concerned that any agreement could be meaningless. “What guarantees would we have . . . that they won’t violate the human rights part of it?” she said.

The turnout at the Garden Grove Community Center was surprisingly small. Thirty people, about one-third of them Vietnamese emigre and mainstream media, attended the session. Lan said it “was not publicized well enough and an advertisement included the wrong address.”

Sanchez aides attributed the low turnout to competition from other Sunday pursuits.

Sanchez spoke briefly about the POW/MIA issue. She said the Vietnamese government had promised to return the remains of two missing Americans on May 5 and to provide information on six to a dozen missing servicemen, whose names appear on a list of 569 the U.S. presented to the Vietnamese government a year ago. There are some 1,500 cases involving missing servicemen that remain unsettled, she said.

Describing her six days in Vietnam, she said the bustling economy in what she referred to as Saigon is in marked contrast to Hanoi. She likened the street scene in what is now called Ho Chi Minh City to the frenetic activity of New York City.

“Everybody is going somewhere,” she said. “Everybody is doing something.”

She said the vibrancy suggested that individuality and entrepreneurship would be impossible to contain, even by a totalitarian government. She quoted a number of Vietnamese dissidents and experts who said they expected that within five years there would be more freedom of speech, religion and the press.

Despite those predictions, she said, that repression continues. All publications must be sanctioned by the government, she said, and there are restrictions on Buddhist and Roman Catholic religious leaders and repression of dissidents.

She gave details on a meeting with dissident leaders, including Dr. Nguyen Dan Que, whom she brought medicine from his brother, a doctor in Orange County.

“He looked healthy, was in high spirits and is doing well,” she said, though she noted that the secret police watch his home and he is followed where ever he goes. “He has not been able to [reestablish] his practice, but he is working on his writings.”