From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: [NEWS] ENVOYS TO HANOI DOUBT VIETNAM HOLDS U.S. MIAs
Date: 14 Oct 92 22:01:10 GMT
Article-I.D.: q2.9210141501.aa12525

By Kathleen Callo
(Reuters News Agency)
>From Washington Times (10/13/92)
Post without permission

HANOI-Senior foreign diplomats and Western aid workers in Hanoi have dismissed
American rumors that Vietnam still holds U.S. servicemen missing from the war
and have urged Washington to make peace with its old enemy.

    Reuters and the British Broadcasting Corp. canvassed the 37 embassies and
about two dozen aid agencies in the Vietnamese capital on the missing-in-action
issue, a main obstacle to Washington's normalization of relations with Hanoi.

    Twenty of the 24 ambassadors or charges who responded said they did not
believe Americans now were being held in Vietnam.  The remainder said they did
not know but had no information suggesting the existence of any captives.

    Vietnam repeatedly has said it released all prisoners of war in 1973 after
signing the Paris peace accord, but some family members, private groups and
politicians in the United States insist men are still being held.

    Sen. Bob Smith, New Hampshire Republican, charged Vietnam in August with
holding prisoners until the late 1980s in a secret underground detention center
in Hanoi, near the tomb of President Ho Chi Minh.

    Diplomats, some with embassies near the mausoleum, dismissed the unconfirmedreport as "ridiculous," "absurd" and "paranoid."

    Eighteen who responded to the confidential survey said they did not believe
such a prison existed.  Six said they did not know but had no reason to believe
it did.

    The respondents came from a mix of Western, Asian and former Soviet bloc
embassies.

   The Russian ambassador, Rashid Khamidouline, described how Soviet experts
worked with Vietnamese in the 1970s to build an underground chamber for
generators and other equipment to maintain the mausoleum.

   Some former senior U.S. government officials told the Senate recently they
believed some prisoners were left behind at the end of the war but they could
present no conclusive evidence.

   Of the 2,266 Americans whose remains never were recovered from Indochina,
Washington believes that in a few dozen cases the man may have survived plane
crashes or other incidents.

   Since 1988, Vietnam has allowed dozens of U.S. experts to investigate those
cases by interviewing villagers and excavating crash sites and graves across
the countryside.

   Several ambassadors sharply criticized Washington for making the resolution
of the MIA issue a precondition for normalizing relations with Hanoi and
lifting a U.S. trade embargo that denies Vietnam loans from the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund.

   "It is plainly unfair to use the MIA issue as a pretext not to normalize.
The MIA issue is also a matter that Americans have to solve with themselves,"
one respondent said.

    "Vietnam has done what can be done in helping to solve the problem...the
search has taken pathetic proportions.  It is hard to find evidence 20 years
afterward in tropical forests.  The MIA question has just been an excuse for
the U.S. administration to postpone normalization," another said.

    "The Americans should not punish Vietnam for winning a war.  The Americans
are so accustomed to winning.  They must exercise mor fair play," said a third.

    Several diplomats said the sanactions, by isolating Vietnam, were hurting
reformists who wanted to open up the country.

    "I think the American policy is a mistake.  If you want to inflluence
somebody, you have to talk to him.  If you can meet him in his home, it's
better," one ambassador said.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese