From: mtruong@ccs.carleton.ca (Minhtri Truong)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: Re:  WHAT DO THE AMERICANS WANT?
Date: 15 Apr 92 16:49:46 GMT
Reply-To: mtruong@ccs.carleton.ca
Organization: N/A
Originator: daemon@media.mit.edu


> 
> 
> 
> 		"WHAT DO THE AMERICANS WANT?"
> 
>    "U.S. policy is strangling hopes of 67 million Vietnamese"
> 
> by T.T. NHU
> 
> 
>     One evening after dinner, I walked Nguyen thi Binh back to her room.
> The Regency Hotel in Nadi, Fiji, had a series of elaborate intersecting 
> walkways that connected hundreds of rooms and were baffling in the dark.  
> In the humid, velvety night, Binh laughed as she took my arm and we plunged 
> into a dark passage: "Now, let us descend into the labyrinth.  Ever since I 
> have been negotiating with Americans, it's been impossible to figure out what 
> they want.  Tell me, what do Americans want?"
.................................................................................................................> 

> because she is the granddaughter of one of Vietnam's greatest anti-colonial 
> patriots, Phan Chu Trinh, who has a street named after him in almost every 
> town in Vietnam.  Binh has been dealing with Americans for the past 25 years, 
> and she's still puzzling over the contortions the United States has convoluted 
> into policy in order to rationalize the war and its aftermath.

*          I think Nguyen Thi Binh is now very disillusioned with the
Communist regime.  I wonder why she still lets them use her to carry
their propaganda message around the world.

> 
>     Seventeen years after the end of the war in Vietnam, the light is still 
> at the end of the tunnel.  Only this time it is Vietnam that is seeking to 
> get out of the tunnel, and the United States is bloking the exit.  The Bush 
> administration is not ready to end the de facto economic war - the embargo - 
> which has put the squeeze on Vietnam since 1975, making it one of the poorest 
> countries in the world.
> 
 *         Go ahead and put all the blame on the Americans.  Forget
about how the Communists mismanaged the economy.  Forget about how the
Communists treated the country's professionals and intellectuals that
they had to flee abroad.


> 
>     In 1990, there were indications that the United States was considering 
> renewing relations with Vietnam.  I was invited to the White House in May that 
> year along with two dozen other Vietnamese-Americans to discuss the 
> implications of normalization among the Vietnamese in America.  It seemed 
> fairly certain at the time that the administration intended to move in that 
> direction and was putting the Vietnamese-American community on notice.  
> Although publicly there was opposition to normalization, privately many 
> Vietnamese were relieved.  There was a feeling that ending Vietnam's isolation 
> would open up more possibilities for democracy and begin to resolve the 
> desperate poverty that is strangling the nearly 67 million people of Vietnam.

  *        Mind you, poverty is just one strangling factor.

.......................................................................................................................................
> 
>     The issue of the remains of 2,273 unaccounted-for Americans is what blocks 
> the normalization process.  This stumbling block is bewildering to the 
> Vietnamese, who have more than 300,000 MIAs of their own and have spent 
> 600,000 working days in efforts to recover American MIAs.  

   *       You are going to make me cry soon.

....................................................................
> recrimination.  The Vietnamese desperately want to resolve the issue and are 
> acutely aware that the POW/MIA issue will continue to be used to humiliate 
> them until the United States considers it politically expedient to end the 
> punishment.
> 
........................................................................
> 
>     For Hanoi, lifting economic sanctions so that Vietnam can rejoin the 
> international market is the top priority.  Whether the US decides to resume 
> diplomatic relations is not all that urgent.  "All we would like is for the US 
> to remove the impediments which prevent the international banks from lending 
> us money and other countries from trade investments which could revive us," 
> said Binh.  "Let us breathe."
     
    *      Binh meant "Let the regime breathe". If you want to rejoin
the world, let me give you a hint.  Most civilized people prefer a
pluralistic system to a dictatorship.


>     Whether it is a question of 2,273 missing persons or one, the POW/MIA 
> issue is really a poor excuse not to recognize Vietnam.  Almost everyone 
> except Jesse Helms and a few others agree that re-establishing ties would 
> improve the chances to resolve the MIA issue and other matters such as 
> refugees and humanitarian concerns more directly.  But the Bush administration, 
> facing a tough re-election campaign, swamped by economic woes and nervously 
> reacting whenever the Republican right wing says "boo," is too timid to 
> normalize relations with Vietnam and risk losing more votes.
> 
>     So the question of normalization must wait until after the November 
> elections.  A Democratic president would have no qualms about bringing the 
> Vietnam War to a close in the spring of 1993, 47 years after the United States 
> first became involved in Vietnam by trying to help the French regain the 
> colonial empire they lost in World War II.
> 
> -- end of article
> 
          The Communists and Nguyen Thi Binh do not represent the 67
million people of Vietnam.  They are just being a bunch of hypocrits.

tri'
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese