From: Nhan Tran <tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com>
Subject: NEWS/VN: Rural Vietnamese bitter over US MIA hunt
Originator: daemon@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Reply-To: tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com
Organization: N/A
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 14:23:33 GMT


08/13

RURAL VIETNAMESE BITTER OVER U.S. MIA HUNT

    By Kathleen Callo
    MY LAI, Vietnam, Aug 14, Reuter - The Hanoi government says it wants to
forget the Vietnam War and forgive its old enemy. It wants Washington to resume
relations and lift its punishing trade embargo.
    But a sign over the My Lai memorial museum in Vietnam's remote Quang Ngai
province delivers a different message.
    "Forever deeply hate the U.S. enemy," it says.
    The museum houses photographs and written testimony of a massacre of 504
Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers on March 16, 1968.
    In Quang Ngai and other parts of the isolated central coast -- including
areas decimated by U.S. bombs and virtually untouched by the recent economic
growth in the cities -- many villagers remain quietly bitter.
    "Half this village was killed during the war. Why are you coming back?" one
woman, squatting in front of her house in rural Quang Binh province, recently
called out to two journalists she presumed were American.
    The expulsion of two Americans from Vietnam on July 10 for taking a
photograph in Quang Binh province is an indication of the lingering mistrust
between the two former foes.
    Villagers in An Thuy were gathering on July 7 for a meeting with a group of
U.S. experts about the missing remains of an American pilot whose plane crashed
there 25 years ago.
    A Vietnamese-born American in the group, thinking the locals could not see
him, raised a threatening fist towards a portrait of the late nationalist leader
Ho Chi Minh while another U.S. expert took his photo.
    Local officials were so angry they demanded the two, among some 50 U.S.
experts digging up graves and interviewing villagers in Vietnam this summer,
leave the country.
    Both governments played down the incident and promised to continue the joint
searches for signs of missing U.S. servicemen, but there is a lasting suspicion
towards Americans in this region.
    An Thuy, a village accessible only by bicycle path or canoe near the 17th
Parallel and the old demilitarised zone, was destroyed by U.S. bombs in the war,
said Nguyen Xuan Thi, an official at the village's farmers' cooperative.
    Chau Dinh Trung, a former militiaman, said local people believed Americans
were now returning with a secret agenda.
    "When the U.S. MIA (missing-in-action) teams come to Vietnam to investigate,
some team members have another goal -- like to spy. We know that, so we take
care from the very beginning," he told Reuters.
    The U.S. government, which has no diplomatic relations and maintains an
embargo against Hanoi, lists 2,266 Americans as missing or killed in action with
no body recovered as a result of the war in Indochina.
    The Department of Defence says about half of those 2,266 were known to have
been killed in action but their bodies not recovered, and about half were
otherwise unaccounted for.
    In 1987 the United States asked Vietnam to account for 82 of those men who
might have survived. But as U.S.-Vietnamese teams worked through the list and
determined the men were dead, Washington twice added more names, said Ngo Hoang,
deputy head of Vietnam's office in charge of seeking missing servicemen.
    "This is not only a technical question, but a political one. Some circles in
the U.S. do not want to normalise relations with us. They want to use this as a
pretext," Hoang said in a recent interview in Dong Hoi, Quang Binh province.
    The MIA issue has special irony in Vinh, the provincial capital of Nghe An.
U.S. B-52s flattened the town, leaving only one building standing by the end of
the war. Townspeople were evacuated to the countryside, but many were still
killed.
    "No square kilometre of the province escaped the bombing," said Vo Sy Hoa,
an official of Nghe An people's committee. Many of the 300,000 Vietnamese
missing from the war were from Nghe An.
    Five hundred of the 3,500 people living in Hoa's village -- or one out of
every seven -- died in the war, he said, including his mother, a brother and 26
other relatives.