Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Thu, 5 Nov 1992 10:27:23 -0500
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: news from Far Eastern Economic Review

Forward from soc.culture.vietnamese
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F.E.E.R Oct 22, 1992 - Post without permission

POLITICALLY CHALLENGED


	Vietnamese Premier Vo Van Kiet is under mounting pressure from the
ruling communist party only a few weeks after being re-elected to head the
government.  During his acceptance speech, Kiet talked eight times of "
challenges facing his cabinet," which observers understood as a reference to
growing criticism of his performance.  Former party chief Nguyen Van Linh, a
long-time ally of the premier, recently complained openly in a meeting with
officials in Ho Chi Minh City that Kiet and his wife had become corrupt.  Kiet
has not been appointed to the politburo's standing committee - which includes
party chief Do Muoi, President Le Duc Anh and ideology chief Dao Duy Tung -
effectively locking him out of the most important decisions.

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F.E.E.R.  Oct 22, 1992 - Post without permission

Clinton's Asia Hand

	Were Bill Clinton to win the US presidency, one indication of his
policy towards Asia may be gleaned by those he has selected to advice him.
Clinton's principal foreign policy adviser, Anthony Lake, has long association
with the region.  In 1970, Lake resigned from his position as director of the
State Department's policy planning office in protest against the US invasion of
Cambodia and went into academic life.  In January 1984, he visited Cambodia and
Vietnam, and in subsequent magazine article called for Western pressure to
remove Pol Pot from the Khmer Rouge leadership - something that is yet happen.
He also called for pressure to be exerted on Hanoi to resolve the issue of
American servicemen missing in action during the Vietnam War.  However, he
cautioned that accounting for the MIAs should not be made a pre-condition for
US normalising ties with Vietnam.  "Such a position," he then wrote, " only
encourages the Vietnamese to see it as a bargaining point."

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Ho Chi Minh , the author of Prison Diary NOT

Brought to Book

(F.E.E.R Oct 15,1992)
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The Vietnamese army's Saturday magazine has been criticised by the ruling
communist party for publishing a report on a literary conference held in Denmark
during August where some participants challenged  the assumption that Ho Chi
Minh was the author of the book, Prison Diary.  The party charges that the
report has raised doubts in the minds of many Vietnamese about the country's
widely revered former president.  According to the party's official history, Ho
wrote his book of poetry in a prison cell in China in the early 1940s to
encourage his compatriots to fight for independence from France.

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Black Hole of Hanoi

( F.E.E.R. Oct 15, 1992)
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Members of a US military POW/MIA Joint Task Force seeking evidence that
American servicemen had been held after the end of the Vietnam War were stunned
when they were granted access to the section of Hanoi's Hoa Lo prison better
known as the "Hanoi Hilton".  US team members found 19.8 metre by 16.8 metre
room packed with approximately 2,000 inmates living in appalling conditions.
Several hundred women and about 80 older prisoners were seperated from the
majority of inmates, who were maily males in their 20s and described by the
Vietnamese authorities as common criminals.
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