Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese


04/10 

U.S. VETERANS GROUP WANTS END TO VIETNAM EMBARGO

    By Kathleen Callo
    HANOI, April 10, Reuter - A group of American Vietnam War veterans wants an
end to a 28-year-old U.S. embargo they term vindictive and destructive,
dismissing as a myth rumours of U.S. servicemen still held captive.
    Steven Stratford, executive director of the private Veterans Vietnam
Restoration Project, said the sanctions resembled war because they denied Hanoi
World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans, high-technology transfers and
much Western trade.
    "Until the embargo is over, the war is still going on. The effects of the
embargo...are killing people," he said in an interview on Thursday in Hanoi.
    Washington said last October it was ready to start moving towards
normalising relations and lifting the embargo it imposed against Hanoi in 1964
and extended to a reunified Vietnam in 1975 when the communists won the war.
    It says it will do so gradually and Vietnam must first account for U.S.
servicemen missing from the war and help to bring peace and free elections to
Cambodia.
    Stratford, asked what his California-based group thought of rumours
Americans were still held 17 years after the Vietnam War, said: "We think that
it's a myth that has been perpetuated by our government to justify the embargo.
    "Our government has known for more than 10 years that there are no live
Americans being held by the Vietnamese government."
    Washington lists 2,267 servicemen as missing or killed in action in
Indochina, but whose remains were never recovered, including 1,656 in Vietam.
    Most Americans did not know Washington still maintained a trade embargo
against Vietnam, Stratford said.
    He said he thought Washington was being vindictive in its demands Vietnam
account for missing servicemen.
    "It's the first war we ever lost -- and we're bad losers. From what I've
seen the Vietnamese government is bending over backwards on this issue," he
said.
    Since 1989, joint U.S.-Vietnamese teams have excavated graves and
interviewed villagers around the countryside, in search of remains or clues of
missing servicemen.
    Stratford and 11 other U.S. veterans recently built a community health
clinic in southern Dong Nai province.
    Stratford, 41, who worked in air force intelligence in the Vietnam War from
1970 to 1971, said more than 40 veterans had healed psychological wounds from
the war by building four clinics in Vietnam since 1989.
    "For the more than 40 veterans who have come back, it has been without
exception a healing experience," he said.
    The Veterans Vietnam Restoration Project spent $157,000 in U.S. donations on
the four clinics and planned to build a fifth later this year outside Hanoi,
Stratford said.

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04/09 

11 MISSING IN LANDSLIDE IN SOUTHERN VIETNAM

    HANOI, April 10, Reuter - Eleven Vietnamese were missing after a bank of the
Tien river collapsed in the Mekong Delta province of Dong Thap, the official
Vietnam News said on Friday.
    It said eight people were injured in Monday's cave-in, which left a hole in
the bank measuring 25 metres (82 ft) long by 21 metres (70 ft) wide. Two houses
were swept away and a two-storey building had been damaged.
    Local authorities were evacuating peasants with homes along the river banks,
it said.