From: Nhan Tran <tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com>
Subject: NEWS/VN: VN looks to old US foe for economic break
Originator: daemon@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Reply-To: tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com
Organization: N/A
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 14:38:08 GMT


08/11

VIETNAM LOOKS TO OLD U.S. FOE FOR ECONOMIC BREAK

    By Kathleen Callo
    KHE SANH, Vietnam, Aug 12, Reuter - There is little evidence in Khe Sanh
nowadays of the fighting that raged here between U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese
communist forces in 1967 and 1968.
    Holes in the red dirt pockmark one part of this central Vietnamese valley a
few miles (km) from Laos, surrounded by mountains and once an important U.S.
Marine garrison.
    Vietnamese scrap metal scavengers dig ditches in search of anything from
American mortar shells to wristwatches to vehicles buried by the bombing.
    "There are many old mines. Mines have killed about 100 people," says Nguyen
Van Thuan, a 28-year-old scavenger armed with a shovel and a metal rod for
probing the earth.
    "We're not afraid of the mines. People know where they are and are used to
them," he said.
    Across the windswept stretch that was once a U.S. airstrip, some of his
colleagues are unearthing rusty casings of 105-mm shells.
    A cement memorial marker placed there by the Hanoi government says
victorious North Vietnamese troops in 1968 turned Khe Sanh into a "Dien Bien Phu
for the U.S." -- a reference to the northern valley where the Vietnamese
defeated French colonial forces in 1954.
    Vast stores of equipment, weapons and vehicles left behind by the United
States when communist forces defeated the Saigon government in April 1975 proved
a bonanza for Vietnamese officials, soldiers and enterprising black-marketeers.
    But now most of the piles of war-time scrap metal that lay along national
Route One from the north to the south of the country even as late as last year
have been sold and melted down.
    And Vietnam, having lost aid and preferential trade from the former Soviet
Union, is now looking to the United States for a more lasting economic break --
a lifting of the trade embargo that Washington imposed on Hanoi in 1964.
    Prospects for normalisation of ties between Washington and Hanoi may have
been damaged by the emotional firestorm President George Bush has encountered
recently over the Americans listed as missing from the Vietnam War.
    The uproar at an annual U.S. convention of Missing in Action and Prisoner of
War families in July underlined for Bush the dangers of making overtures to
Vietnam during a presidential election year.
    Many Vietnamese officials, businessmen and students asked this Reuter
correspondent travelling recently through 15 provinces down the winding coast
the same question -- when would the U.S. embargo be lifted?
    The authorities in central Khanh Hoa province, which has some of Vietnam's
most beautiful beaches, say they are convinced the embargo is keeping away
would-be investors, not only from the United States but other Western and Asian
countries.
    Nguyen Van Anh said discussions with foreign partners about building hotels
in Khanh Hoa had never resulted in deals because the province lacked
infrastructure and the embargo was discouraging investors.
    "Countries that want to have joint ventures with us are waiting for the
embargo to be lifted," he said.
    Do Van Ngan, a cafe owner in the northern coastal resort town of Do Son,
said investors from Taiwan and Hong Kong had come to discuss hotel construction
projects, but seemed never to finalise anything because of the embargo.
    Some Vietnam-born Americans, once hostile to Hanoi, now say it is the time
for Washington to lift the embargo.
    Le Ly Hayslip, a naturalised American businesswoman born near Danang, said
Vietnam desperately needed international help to rebuild its shattered economy.
    "I don't see any reason why the United States has to keep the embargo
against Vietnam. Seventeen years have passed (since the war ended). Many wounds
have been healed. Many friends have been made," she said in an interview in
Danang.
    Hayslip had flown to Danang to help the American film-maker Oliver Stone
make the film "Heaven and Earth," adapted from her autobiography, "When Heaven
and Earth Changed Places."
    The book describes her war-torn youth in the village of Ke Ly where she
worked as a messenger for the Viet Cong, was imprisoned and tortured by South
Vietnamese soldiers.
    She was released, only to be raped and marked for execution by Viet Cong
guerrillas who thought she had betrayed them.
    Hayslip has built two health clinics, with help from American Vietnam War
veterans, and done other humanitarian work here.
    One east European diplomat who asked not to be identified said recently that
Hanoi, despite decades of alliance with China and the Soviet Union, had always
considered the United States the key to Vietnam's economic future.
    "They've always seen the United States as being the one that could really
help," he said.

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