Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1992 10:29:00 -0500
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: Senators press Hanoi on MIAs

11/17

3 Senators Press Hanoi On MIAs; Vietnamese Attempt To Clear Up Doubts

 By Thomas W. Lippman
 Washington Post Staff Writer

   HANOI, Nov. 16 - Anyone who still doubts that the era of hostility between
the United States and Vietnam is rapidly approaching an end would have been
baffled by the scene that unfolded today around a green baize table in the
government's guest house here.
   With television cameras rolling, three U.S. senators and five Vietnamese
officials analyzed files on Americans still missing from the Vietnam War as
each side pledged to clear up remaining discrepancies and put the issue behind
them.
   Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
POW-MIA Affairs, handed over a blue binder containing some of the 4,800
photographs from the war recently made available by the Vietnamese, and asked
for help in identifying some of the pictured men. Four photos show live U.S.
prisoners whom the Pentagon has been unable to identify, he said, and 11 show
dead Americans who have not been identified.
   Kerry also urged the Vietnamese to evaluate 17 of the remaining alleged
"live sightings" of missing Americans for the committee's final report at the
end of December.
   The Vietnamese agreed, whereupon Army Maj. Gen. Thomas Needham, commander of
the Pentagon's Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, offered to provide U.S.
aircraft or any other equipment the Vietnamese might need to get the job done.
   Senior officials of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who would be in a position
to object if, as expected, a favorable report from the committee leads
President Bush - or later, President  Clinton - to lift the 17-year U.S. trade
embargo on Vietnam, watched the meeting approvingly and said afterward that
they favor the process of putting the MIA issue to rest.
   Even the senators' interpreter, Jean-Andre Sauvageot, got into the spirit of
reconciliation. Sauvageot, who for eight years during the war was one of the
U.S. Army's most knowledgeable analysts of Vietnamese affairs and now has a
similar assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Thailand, told reporters he will
start work Dec. 1 for a new employer: General Electric Co., which sees Vietnam
as a vast market for electrical and transport gear and is eager for the
embargo to be lifted.
   The fate of the 2,265 Americans still listed as missing from the Vietnam War
is the single remaining important obstacle to a decision in Washington to scrap
the trade embargo, a move that will lead to establishment of diplomatic
relations with Vietnam. Japan's recent move to break with the United States and
resume aid to Vietnam has increased pressure on Washington from the American
business community to be allowed to work in Vietnam. A favorable bipartisan
report from the Senate committee is widely anticipated as the lever to make
such a move politically acceptable.
   Vietnam, according to senior U.S. officials and independent analysts, is
pressing for an end to the embargo because it does not want to become an
economic hostage to Japan and because U.S. assent is seen as vital for access
to World Bank loans and international credit markets.
   Ho Xuan Dich, chief of the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Personnel,
spoke with patience and courtesy today as he explained how difficult it is for
his government to answer some of the Americans' questions about the missing
men.  Nothing in his demeanor betrayed any hint of what is widely thought to be
Vietnam's resentment that the country which lost the war is still trying to
dictate terms of the peace.
   "When you had people who were lost on a trail and maybe people who were
buried, can you remember where you buried them?" he asked. "And maybe the
people who buried them have died, too."
   "A larger question," Kerry responded, "is about when you had somebody who
was at a prison site and they died." The U.S. position is that the Vietnamese,
careful record keepers, must be able to find someone who knows what happened to
the remains of such men.
   But Dich said: "If you are the director of a hospital and a patient dies,
you are not going out there with a shovel to bury him, and you may lose track.
Senior commanders of military units cannot pinpoint where someone dies."
   Sen. Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.) observed that in such cases, the artifacts
taken from prisoners who died - helmets, dog tags, weapons - "aren't buried.
If they were made available, they would help clarify" the fate of men never
accounted for.
   Dich said he agreed in principle, and noted that Hanoi has begun making such
material available to the U.S. military team based here to work on the issue.
He said Hanoi has sent instructions to the entire population to turn in any
material, but it was a slow process.
   Only two months ago, Dich said, the government acquired the flight helmet
taken from John McCain, now a senator from Arizona and a committee member who
had been taken prisoner in 1967 when he parachuted into a Hanoi lake. Imagine
the difficulty, he said, of collecting all the material held by villagers.
   This conversation was not an argument, both sides said. It was an attempt to
find a formula by which Vietnam can satisfy the Americans that it is doing
everything possible, while the Americans stop asking Hanoi to do the impossible.
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