[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
VN News (FEb. 28-Mar. 1/1997)
Mar 01: Vietnam metes out 20th death sentence for drug traficking
Mar 01: Suicides among Vietnamese soar in Ho Chi Minh to up to 10 a day
Mar 01: Fashion begins at forty for women in Vietnam
Feb 28: Vietnam military in limited glasnost phase as seen ...
Feb 28: Vietnam-Ship Crash Boat accident kills one, injures two in Vietnam
Saturday - Mar 01, 1997
Vietnam metes out 20th death sentence for drug traficking
Hanoi (dpa) -- A Vietnamese provincial court has sentenced a
28-year-old unemployed man to death for selling opium, the 20th time
capital punishment has been meted out for a drug trafficking conviction,
a news report said Saturday.
Tran Xuan Thi, 28, told police he had carried more than 80 kilogrammes
of opium from the northern part of the country to more prosperous
southern provinces during 11 trips made over the past two years, Lao
Dong (Labour) newspaper reported.
Thi was convicted and sentenced earlier this month by the People's
Court in Dong Nai province, the newspaper said.
Dong Nai is adjacent to Ho Chi Minh City, where Vietnam's biggest
concentration of drug addicts is found.
Officials said they believed most of the opium was sent through to
Cambodia, where authorities recently warned there is a growing drug
abuse menance.
Thi started working as a drug courier soon after being laid off from a
state textile company in Nam Dinh province.
Vietnamese courts sentenced more than 100 people to death last year.
It is only in the past few years that drug convictions have brought the
most severe punishment in an effort to stem a rising trafficking
problem.
Most judicial executions - carried out by firing squad - have been for
murder, aggravated rape and increasingly for major instances of
corruption.
Saturday - Mar 01, 1997
Suicides among Vietnamese soar in Ho Chi Minh to up to 10 a day
Hanoi (dpa) - Between 200 and 300 Vietnamese are committing suicide
each month in southern Ho Chi Minh City, mostly out of despair over
family problems, a newspaper reported said Saturday.
The vast majority are women, the newspaper said in a report on a
recent conference on the subject in Ho Chi Minh City, a metropolis of 5
million people.
The Cho Ray Hospital, one the city's largest, reported a three-fold
increase in suicide patients last year compared with figures in 1995,
the Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper said.
In the first two months of this year, 73 suicide patients were
admitted to the hospital and 60 of them died shortly afterwards,
hospital officials said.
``The stress of the industrial environment, compounded by family
pressure deepens the misery of people today,'' Dr. Doan Minh Huong,
director of Ho Chi Minh City's Social Studies Institute, told the
newspaper.
More than 90 per cent of Cho Ray's suicide patients - up to 90 per
cent of whom are women - reported they were driven to despair by family
problems, the report said.
Swallowing pesticides was the perferred method for suicide.
A recent string of dramatic collective suicides - including that of a
young and very popular film star - have given new prominence to the
underreported phenomena.
Four teenage girls tied themselves together and then jumped off a
bridge recently, while three others burned themselves alive in a house
they set on fire.
The Cho Ray Hospital had 446 suicide patients last year, and only 150
in 1995, the officials said.
According to figures compiled by the World Health Organization,
suicide in the Asia-Pacific region is increasing at a rate of 12 per
cent annually, the newspaper said.
Fashion begins at forty for women in Vietnam
Hanoi (Reuter) -- Middle-aged women of all sizes will take to the catwalk at a
fashion show in Ho Chi Minh City next week, the sponsor of the ``Fashion at
Forty''
show said on Saturday.
``It doesn't matter about vital statistics -- they can be fat, thin, tall or
short,'' said Thuy Ha.
She said 15 women would be selected from a cross-section of local society and
would don tailor-made outfits to demonstrate to Vietnamese women that smart
dressing was possible at 40.
Friday - Feb 28, 1997
Vietnam military in limited glasnost phase as seen in US visit: Analysis
By Ken Stier
Hanoi (dpa) - The current two-week visit to Washington by six
Vietnamese defence colonels is an important step in improving relations
between the two former adversaries but it is also part of Hanoi
military's broader effort to integrate itself into a web of more
normalized defence relations, say analysts.
That effort - which one Hanoi-based Western diplomat has dubbed a
``charm offensive'' - is primarily aimed at strengthening the country's
regional security environment, especially against the only real
strategic threat from China.
It is also an integral part of the Vietnamese brass's long-term
strategy to modernize itself and build up its still very modest
indigenous military industrial complex.
The new openess by the secrecy-bound Vietnamese military is being
welcomed, but the results to date have only confirmed that old habits
die hard.
In the past few months there has been a marked increase in the pace of
international visits with Hanoi playing host to high-level defence
delegations from countries outside of their traditional circle of allies
in the former Soviet Bloc countries, Cuba, Cambodia and Laos.
These have included visits to Hanoi by the most senior military
officers of France and South Korea, as well as the deputy defence
minister from Japan. The Vietnamese naval chief recently visited the
Philippines and Vietnam's Defense Minister Doan Khue is expected to
visit Paris in April.
``Since the introduction of 'doi moi' (renovation) about ten years ago
Vietnam has had a foreign policy of being friends with everyone but for
the military this has only happened in the last few months,'' says a
Western diplomat in Hanoi.
Another indication of normalized relations is the exchange of defence
attaches which for years was limited to officers from Russia, China,
Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, India and Cuba.
France, the former colonial power, was the first Western country to
have a military attache at its Hanoi embassy in 1992 but this has been
followed by military postings from the U.S., Japan and South Korea and
an attache from Britain, who is based in Malaysia.
Thailand, Indonesia, and Burma have defence attaches, and the
Philippines will soon too.
Another sign of Vietnam's openess is its willingness to receive
foreign naval ships. Last year Canada sent one ship and Italy a
destroyer and frigate.
Later this year a British ship is expected to dock in a Vietnamese
port as part of a show of force by London connected with its return of
Hong Kong to China July 1.
But if the door has opened a bit the Vietnamese brass are still not
revealing much.
There are only a few sites that have been opened to posted attaches -
mostly office and school buildings. When field units have been visited
they have been unexpectedly shorn of hardware and guests have been
treated to bromide briefings.
``We have to let them go at their own pace... these are the first
steps and we are grateful to the MOD [Ministry of Defense] but we hope
that the next steps are more interesting,'' says one Western diplomat.
The Vietnamese senior colonels visiting Washington - from the MOD's
External Relations Department - may not get much more.
They are expected to visit Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the
National Defence University on the trip, aimed at paving the way for
subsequent higher-level exchanges.
The trip is considered an important step towards a broader, more
normalized defence relations with Vietnam, not exclusively devoted to
resolving the MIA (Missing-in-action) issue.
This will undoubtably be slow progress. Even among fellow ASEAN
countries - who are grouped in the two-year old security-oriented ASEAN
Regional Forum (ARF) - defence relations are still without much
substance, say analysts.
Vietnam has participated in ARF-sponsored security seminars but it has
yet to publish a defence White Paper as have some other members have
already done. More encouraging though, is that Hanoi did submit its
1993-1995 conventional arms purchases, which included its purchases of
several Su-27s, Russian jet fighters.
Real confidence-building activities are just beginning. Vietnam and
the Philippines held a joint oceanographic research mission last year
among the Spratly islets they claim and Hanoi is to host a second
mission this year, according to Filipino diplomats.
But when push comes to shove - mostly likely with China -membership in
ASEAN is likely to be small comfort to the Vietnamese, who most expect
will have to contend with the Chinese on their own militarily.
That's why modernizing their armed forces is such a priority for the
Vietnamese.
But with an annual budget estimated at about 500-600 million dollars -
over two-thirds of which goes to salaries and operating costs - there is
no much left over for modernization.
Most of Hanoi's recent military purchases are from former Warsaw Pact,
the original source of most of their weapons, and are aimed at upgrading
their maintenance and relatively simple production capabilities.
But as one of major beneficiaries of the country's market reforms -
military companies are thought to generate between 100-200 million
dollars annually - the Vietnamese military will eventually have more
money to spend.
``I think they want to get to the point, which China reached in the
mid-1980s, where they can go to Italy, Germany, France and England to
look around, go shopping [for military technology],'' says another
Western diplomat.
Having attaches posted in key Western capitals will greatly facilitate
this - besides helping Vietnamese military companies.
With this market in mind France is already funding language training
for 50 Vietnamese officers in Vietnam and medical training for military
doctors in France.
Japan is also planning to offer language training with an eye to
hosting Vietnamese officers in their military academies.
The Vietnamese military is already the prefered joint venture partner
for many large South Korea firms operating here and this is expected to
lead to state-to-state defence cooperation.
Some diplomats say international defence ties could develop even
faster if the Vietnamese would shed more of their entrenched habits of
secrecy.
``We don't understand why the Vietnamese armed forces have to be so
closed,'' says one in frustration.
Friday - Feb 28, 1997
Vietnam-Ship Crash Boat accident kills one, injures two in Vietnam
HANOI (AP) -- A fishing boat leaving a port in southern
Vietnam crashed into a cargo ship, killing one person and injuring
two people, a Vietnamese newspaper said Friday.
The fishing boat crashed early Tuesday into the ship
carryingrice, which was pulling into Quy Nhon port on the South
China Seacoast, Vietnam's Communist Party newspaper, The People,
reported.
Four other people on the fishing boat were not injured.
It wasn't clear why the fishing boat slammed into the
cargoship, but the report said poor visibility probably played a
role inthe 3 a.m. collision.
The cargo ship, the Halish Carrier 89, which belongs to
Haiphong
Maritime Transportation Company, was transporting rice north through
the Mekong
delta.
Local police say boat accidents are common in the waters
off the
coast of southern Vietnam. They are often caused by careless and
inattentive driving.