Within a year of the bloodbath, Indonesia's economy was redesigned in America, giving western capital access to vast mineral wealth, markets and cheap labour. What has since emerged is evidence of the extent to which American officials designed the bloodbath. In reporting Bill Clinton s visit to Vietnam, the BBC s diplomatic correspondent declared that what the Vietnamese needed was more economic growth . On the eve of his election in 1968, Richard Nixon secretly conspired with the South Vietnamese government to wreck all-party Vietnam peace talks as part of a deliberate effort to prolong a conflict in which more than 20,000 Americans were still to die, along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians. 26 Jul 2000 Sovereignty is about pointing your guns at invading aircraft.
Trade liberalisation has nothing to do with sovereignty.
This was the confident response from a visiting Canadian expert to a concerned Vietnamese official's question during recent discussions in Hanoi on economic integration. At certain times and in certain places, Vietnam's capital still feels like a Cold War bunker. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself looms over a small park in the center of Hanoi. Street-corner loudspeakers play tinny music and blare out official pronouncements. Posters and banners exhort apple-cheeked workers to give their all for the national communist good.