Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Thu, 5 Nov 1992 10:21:57 -0500
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: Pressure to alter Hanoi's political system urged

PRESSURE TO ALTER HANOI'S POLITICAL SYSTEM URGED

Diplomacy: US should take no major steps toward normal ties until
Communists open way for democracy, critics say.

By JIM MANN
TIMES STAFF WRITER
L.A. Times - 10/30/92

Washington - As the Bush Administration begins to move toward normal relations
with Vietnam, some critics are raising a delicate, long-submerged issue
whether Hanoi's Communist government must first be pressed to open the way for
democracy before major steps are taken.

Even if Vietnam accounts for all the American servicemen missing in Indochina,
these critics argue, the United States should not agree to establishing normal
relations with Hanoi until the autocratic regime changes or abolishes its
Leninist political system.

"Our price for normalization should be freedom for the people of Vietnam,"
Sen. Bob Kerry (D-Neb.), who lost a leg during the Vietnam War, said last week.

His sentiments are echoed by other prominent Vietnam veterans, such as former
Navy Secretary James H. Webb and by a number of Vietnamese-Americans such as
Ky Ngo, co-chairman of the Bush-Quayle campaign in Orange County who
threatened last week to resign if Bush proceeds with normalization.

If these views are translated into U.S. policy, they would have profound
implications both for Vietnam and for America's future role in Asia.

Any U.S. effort now to press for democratic freedoms in Vietnam probably would
delay normal relations between Washington and Hanoi for many more years, since
there is no sign that Vietnam's Communist Party is either about to open
itself to elections like Poland's in 1989 or to collapse like former leader
Mikhail S. Gorbachev's Soviet regime in 1991.

Although President Bush asserted last week that he would like to see Vietnam
move toward democracy, neither he nor any other U.S. President has ever made
that a precondition for normal relations. For more than a decade, the United
States has said that it would establish normal ties with Hanoi and lift the
17-year-old American trade embargo against it if Vietnam pulled its troops out
of Cambodia and cooperated fully in accounting for U.S. Servicemen missing
since the war.

Vietnam withdrew its forces from Cambodia three years ago, and the President
declared last week that Hanoi's recent help on MIAs has amounted to "a major
breakthrough."

"We're not going to put on an additional codicil now," a senior Bush
Administration official said after Bush's announcement. "Democracy is an issue
that will come up in its own way, later on."

The record shows that Vietnam's regime remains as repressive as it was in the
past - indeed, in some ways, it may be more repressive.

"The June 4, 1989 Tian An Men massacre and events in Eastern Europe have put a
brake on Vietnam's modest course of political reform," wrote Indochina expert
Nayan Chanda of the Far Eastern Economic Review last year. "... Since the
summer of 1989, Hanoi has cracked down on free expression, silenced some of
its domestic critics and has forcefully ruled out multi-party democracy."

The State Department's most recent human rights report, issued last winter,
asserts that it is now easier for Vietnamese to travel inside and outside the
country than it was a few years ago and that people talk more easily with
foreigners. Nevertheless, it says, Vietnam maintains "severe restrictions on
freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, movement, worker rights and
the right of citizens to change their government."

Some American specialists argue that establishing normal relations with
Vietnam may help in the long run to bring more freedom to the country and its
people.

"Hungry people make poor democrats," said New York University Prof. Jerome
Cohen, a lawyer who represents American firms seeking to do business in
Vietnam.

Cohen contends that making democracy a new condition for normal relations with
Vietnam would amount to "moving the goal posts" - since Hanoi was told for
years that as soon as it met American requirements on Cambodia and the MIAs it
would have normal relations with the United States.

Some Vietnamese-American groups disagree with the contention that normal ties
with Hanoi will help bring democracy to the country. They argue that as soon
as the American trade embargo is lifted, the United States will lose much of
the leverage it now has over Vietnam.

"We know they are desperate for a lifting of the embargo, so we should push
some more," said Tran Dieu Chan, editor of the San Jose-based newsletter
Vietnam Insight. "It is important for us to keep our principles, to uphold
human rights."

For some American veterans such as Webb, bringing freedom to Vietnam
represents a way of returning to the original purpose of the war that cost
58,000 American lives.

"Vietnam is the great unfinished morality play of our time," he wrote last
year. "The main issue the renewal of relations poses is whether we can sort
through past errors while not forgetting the sincere intentions of our failed
effort to preserve South Vietnam from communism."
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