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VN news (Mar 31, 1997)
Thai premier ends first Vietnam visit vowing closer ties
China agrees to meet with Vietnam over maritime dispute
Austrian Parliamentary delegation wraps up first Vietnam visit
Vietnam To Try Nike Plant Manager For Labor Abuse
Cam was speaking after a meeting with visiting Thai Prime
Nike in Vietnam to inspect labour conditions at suppliers
Vietnam court upholds death sentences in corruption scandal
Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [38]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] Thai premier ends first Vietnam visit vowing closer ties_
Hanoi (AFP) - Thai Prime Minister Chaowalit Yonchaiyuhd left here
Monday after pledging closer economic cooperation during his two-day
visit and pressing on with talks to end fishing disputes with Vietnam.
Before he left, he laid a wreath in the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh,
visited a literature temple and met with representatives of the Thai
business community in Vietnam.
On Sunday he met with his Vietnamese counterpart Vo Van Kiet to
discuss stepping up cooperation in the banking sector as well as
boosting air links and building two highways linking Thailand, Laos,
Vietnam and Cambodia.
Kiet said that he hoped to see more Thai investments in Vietnam.
Thailand currently ranks ninth among foreign investors, with more than
one billion dollars in approved investments since 1988.
Two-way trade last year was 646.8 million dollars, a figure the two
countries hope to boost to more than a billion dollars in 1997,
foreign ministry spokesman Tran Quang Hoan said.
Although they did not draw up any specific measures, the two premiers
also discussed ways of moving ahead with fishing disputes in the Gulf
of Thailand.
Chaowalit, who arrived Sunday, was visiting Vietnam for the first time
since taking office.
Although the talks produced nothing substantive, Hoan said the visit
itself was an important indication of the strong bilateral relations
between the two countries.
"This first visit comes in the same month as the visit of Thai foreign
minister (and) means there is good will on both sides to continue
friendship and cooperation not only on bilateral relations but in the
framework of ASEAN," he said.
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Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [39]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] China agrees to meet with Vietnam over maritime dispute_
by Frederik Balfour
Hanoi (AFP) - China has agreed to meet with Vietnam to discuss the
disputed maritime claims triggered by a Chinese oil rig outside the
Gulf of Tonkin, officials said Monday.
But observers cautioned that the talks will yield little progress.
A senior foreign ministry official from the law and international
treaties department told AFP China had agreed to meet with Vietnam to
discuss overlapping claims in an area outside the Gulf of Tonkin.
"They offically informed us over the weekend that they will agree for
Vietnam and China to have talks about Kantan-O3," he said.
The official said a date had not yet been set but that he expects the
talks to be held in Vietnam.
"We have invited them to come to Hanoi," he said, adding that China
has not indicated it will come here.
"We are the ones who proposed talks, therefore we invite our guests
here. But if they have reasons for not being able to come, we are
ready to go to China," he said.
A Chinese official in Hanoi refused to confirm the news saying merely:
"We have't any time or date for negotiations but China always
advocates the peaceful resolution of disputes."
Meanwhile, analysts warned there was still a long way to go.
"While it is an encouraging sign, I really don't have high
expectations for these talks," said Lee Lai To, a political science
professor at Singapore National University who specializes in South
China Sea disputes contacted by telephone from Hanoi.
"I suppose the talks will last a long time before we see anything
concrete," he added.
He said domestic pressures made it extremely unlikely that either side
would back down on its claims.
"They will stick to their own positions, firstly for sovereignty and
nationalistic reasons. I think domestically they cannot afford to be
soft," Lee said.
A senior western diplomat agreed, pointing out that China and Vietnam
have yet to resolve any outstanding border and maritime disputes since
relations were normalised in 1991.
The Vietnamese official said that the agenda for the talks had not yet
been set by the two sides.
"This area is at the entrance of the Tonkin gulf, and both sides have
the right to claim the Exclusive Economic Zone and the continental
shelf. So I think there are differences in definition," he said.
Vietnam sent an urgent request to China on March 20 to hold
expert-level talks over the latest territorial row between Hanoi and
Beijing.
Several ASEAN ambassadors to Hanoi indicated at the time that they
would support Vietnam's claims.
"We are all for one and one for all," said the ambassador of one
member country of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The dispute flared on March 7 when a Chinese oil rig moved into the
contested area prompting Hanoi to demand China cease exploration and
move the rig.
Vietnam and China both lay claim to a potentially gas rich area which
lies 64.5 nautical miles (119 kilometres) from Vietnam's coast and 71
nautical miles (130 kilometres) from China's Hainan Island.
Since normalizing relations in 1991 Vietnam and China have set up
groups to negotiate three areas of disputed claims. One deals
exclusively with land border disputes.
A second deals with joint claims over the Gulf of Tonkin separating
Vietnam's northeast coast from the southern tip of China and Hainan
Island, and the third deals with overlapping claims to the Spratly
Islands and the Paracel Islands.
However, no existing mechanism for talks cover the contested area,
which Vietnamese seismic maps list as block 113, lies about 54
nautical miles (98 kilometres) beyond the southernmost boundary of the
Gulf of Tonkin, 164 nautical miles (298 kilometres) northeast of the
Paracels, and 530 nautical miles, (960 kilometres) from the Spratlys.
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Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [40]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] Austrian Parliamentary delegation wraps up first Vietnam
visit_
Hanoi (dpa) - An Austrian parliamentary delegation wrapped up a
three-day visit to Vietnam Monday - the first by Vienna deputies -with
the expectation that there would be more such exchanges in the future,
officials said.
Nong Duch Manh, the chairman of Vietnam's National Assembly accepted
an invitation to visit Austria, extended by parliament speaker Heinz
Fischer.
The seven-member delegation, led by Fischer, had previously spent six
days in China before arriving in Vietnam Saturday.
Taking advantage of the Easter Weekend his delegation visited scenic
Ha Long Bay besides having meetings with a number of the Hanoi's top
leaders, including Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam and Communist
Party Chief Do Muoi.
``This was more or less an intial exchange...to see how the system
works,'' said one official traveling with the delegation.
``The took a favorable impression from the visit, especially the
Speaker and I can imagine that he will try to create more awareness
[of Vietnam] in political circles [in Austria],'' he added.
Officials note that while bilateral ties are not saddled with residual
problems such as the roughly 40,000 Vietnamese living illegally in
Germany but ad that the mostly small and medium-sized companies that
dominate the Austrian economy find it difficult to travel so far from
home.
There are just four joint ventures between Austrian and Vietnamese
companies worth just over 40 million dollars currently.
Bilateral trade last year was roughly 60 million dollars with Vietnam
exporting two-thirds of that.
Manh was reported in the lcoal press to have said that the visit was
``an important milestone in bilateral relations'' and he offered
Vietnam as Austria's bridge into the economically dynamic Southeast
Asian region.
There are thousands of well-educated Vietnamese that are nearly fluent
in German, a legacy of former communist East Germany's close ties to
Hanoi.
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Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [41]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] Vietnam To Try Nike Plant Manager For Labor Abuse_
Hanoi (AP)--Authorities in southern Vietnam have charged a Nike Inc.
(NKE) factory manager with abusing her employees, a police spokesman
said today.
The charges come just days after U.S. shoe giant suspended the same
manager for allegedly forcing factory workers to run laps to punish
them.
Capitalizing on Vietnam's low labor costs, Nike has five manufacturing
plants here but has run into a storm of bad publicity in the last week
over conditions at those plants.
The manager, identified by Vietnamese authorities as a 27-year-old
Taiwanese woman, was charged with abusing laborers, police said. Her
passport was taken away.
She was accused of making 56 female workers at the Nike plant run laps
as punishment for not wearing regulation shoes, labor right activist
Thuyen Nguyen said in a report released last week.
At least 12 of the women fainted and were hospitalized, Nguyen's
investigation revealed.
The woman charged was a technical manager at Nike subcontractor Pou
Chen Co. in Dong Nai, on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. She was
suspended by Nike in response to the labor rights report.
Police in Dong Nai confirmed the charges against her, but refused to
elaborate. Pou Chen company officials said she had not been take into
custody.
She is the second foreign factory manager working for Nike in Vietnam
to be brought up on charges of mistreating workers.
Last year, a South Korean factory floor manager working for Nike
subcontractor Sam Yang Co. was convicted of beating Vietnamese
employees with a shoe.
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Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [42]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] Cam was speaking after a meeting with visiting Thai Prime_
Hanoi (Reuter) - Cam was speaking after a meeting with visiting Thai
Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who told a news conference on
Sunday that it was not Thailand's place to take a position on the
bilateral dispute.
Thai diplomats said senior Vietnamese officials had not raised the
issue of the spat during meetings with Chavalit because they
understood that a Vietnam-China meeting on the issue was imminent.
``We heard unofficially that China has agreed to send an expert team
to Vietnam to discuss the issue this week,'' one diplomat said.
Last week, Vietnam restated its claim to the area of the South China
Sea, which is some 64.5 nautical miles off its central coast. It
called for the rig to be withdrawn immediately and said it wanted
negotiations as soon as possible.
___________________________________
Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [43]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] Nike in Vietnam to inspect labour conditions at suppliers_
Hanoi (AFP) - US sportswear firm Nike has sent a representative to
Vietnam to make an inspection of labour conditions in its suppliers'
factories, a company spokesman said Monday.
"I am in Ho Chi Minh City and will am going to the factories to
inspect conditions," Martha Benson, a Hongkong-based spokesman for
Nike told AFP by telephone from Hanoi.
However Benson said that her Vietnam trip was not in response to
allegations of labour abuse at the factories made in a report released
in New York last week by labour activist group Vietnam Labour Watch.
"This trip was planned well in advance," said Benson, who nonetheless
said that the situation warranted examination.
"We recognise that it is something that is a really big issue, that's
why we are dedicated to issues like that," she said.
Benson will visit the Pou Chen Shoe company, a Taiwanese factory
located in Dong Nai province employing 8,000 workers who produce shoes
exclusively for Nike.
Pou Chen hit the news earlier this month when a Taiwanese supervisor,
Hsu Jiu Yun allegedly forced 56 Vietnamese female workers to jog
around the company workshop area twice, a distance of more than one
kilometer (0.6 miles). Twelve of the workers fainted and were taken to
hospital.
Benson said Hsu had been suspended and was awaiting prosecution for
allegedly mistreating her workers. The 12 workers had been compensated
for the time they spent visiting hospital and took several days of
paid leave, she said.
Benson said Nike has been working closely with its suppliers in
Vietnam and elsewhere in the region to "improve a number of issues."
The shoe manufacturing giant maintains extremely close scrutiny of its
suppliers, who produce exclusively for Nike.
"We have had production managers who are Nike employees working in the
factories (in Vietnam) since day one. But we recognise the need to
increase the level of oversight, especially in working conditions and
labour practices," she said.
"There are things we can do to improve working conditions," she added.
Last fall, Nike -- which operates a representative office in Vietnam
but contracts all its manufacturing to suppliers -- appointed a
dedicated labour practices manager in Vietnam after an incident at its
Korean supplier, Sam Yang Company.
In April, a South Korean offcial slapped 15 Vietnamese factory workers
across the face with the sole of a shoe. She fled the country before
facing charges.
Benson said the 35,000 employees working for the five foreign owned
factories supplying Nike make an average of 45 dollars per month for a
60 hour work week.
Benson will also visit South Korean owned Taekwong Corp, which employs
9,00O workers and churns out half a million pairs of shoes per month.
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Monday- Mar 31, 1997 [44]... Back to headlines
_[INLINE] Vietnam court upholds death sentences in corruption scandal_
Hanoi (AFP) - A Vietnam appeals court on Monday upheld death sentences
imposed on four people in the country's biggest corruption scandal, a
court official said.
The Supreme People's Court of Ho Chi Minh City announced its decision
after a one week appeal trial in the case of Tamexco trading company,
in which more than 40 million dollars in state funds was
misappropriated.
Fifteen people, including the four condemned to death appealed
sentences handed down on 20 defendants on January 31 in the case which
has attracted massive public interest and media coverage.
Pham Huy Phuoc, former head of Tamexco, a company directly linked to
the ruling Communist Party was given the death penalty on January 31
for his role masterminding a web of deceptive business practices.
Two company executives and a public notary officer were also sentenced
to death while another 16 defendants, including two former deputy
general directors at the Bank of Foreign Trade of Vietnam,
(Vietcombank) received stiff prison sentences.
The Tamexco case laid bare a network of corruption plaguing Vietnam's
banking system, including city officials and a number of private
companies whose managers were linked to Phuoc, a flamboyant high
roller on the Ho Chi Minh City business scene.
Last week two other private businessmen, directors of Minh Phuong
Company and Epco Trading Company were arrested on corruption charges
after the two companies defaulted on a loan worth 17.4 million dollars
to Vietcombank in Ho Chi Minh City.
Phuoc was personally linked to at least 27 million dollars in missing
funds. He reportedly bought his mistress a 200,000 dollar villa in Ho
Chi Minh City and is said to have gambled away company cars and
hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.
Even though corruption is pervasive at all levels of Vietnam's
government, the enormous sums of money involved have outraged many
people in a country where the average annual income is just 250
dollars.
Recently the Vietnamese government announced stiffer penalties for
corruption cases, suggesting courts hand down death sentences for all
cases involving losses of more than 27,000 dollars.
The death penalty in Vietnam is carried out by firing squad of five
shots to the body and a final "coup de grace" to the head.
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