VN news (Apr 26)

[Dam Son <son@fermi.phys.washington.edu>]

April 26: Vietnam: Staff At Nike Inc. Contractor Strike Over Wages
April 26: Drug trafficker sentenced to death in Vietnam 
April 26: Troubles remain in U.S.-Vietnam relations: Analysis
April 26: Vietnam Ensures Amnesty For All Returness for Their Illegal 
April 26: Directors of troubled Vietnam trading companies charged with fraud 
April 26: Vietnam to tighten security on "state secrets" 
April 26: Two Vietnamese police colonels linked to drug trafficking case 


Vietnam: Staff At Nike Inc. Contractor Strike Over Wages

Hanoi (DJ) -- Approximately 3,000 employees at a South Korean company
producing shoes in Vietnam for U.S. footwear giant Nike Inc. (nke)
staged a one-day strike Friday to protest their salaries and working
conditions.

Managers of the South Korean firm, Samyang Corp., reportedly locked
employees in the factory cafeteria for three hours when they attempted
to contact local trade union officers.

Saturday, officials from Samyang, the union representing factory
employees, and the Ho Chi Minh City Labor Department are meeting in an
attempt to resolve a continuing dispute about the labor contract at
the plant, worker and management representatives said.

The workers were striking largely because Samyang hasn't yet honored a
promise to lift salaries to $50 a month, according to a report
Saturday in the official newspaper Lao Dong (Labor).

Currently, workers receive 470,000 dong a month (about $40), the
newspaper said.

Additionally, factory staff are angry that their contract doesn't have
clear provisions concerning vacations, bonuses at the lunar new year
and extra pay for work in potentially hazardous parts of the plant,
Lao Dong said.

The Labor Confederation, an umbrella union organization for Ho Chi
Minh City, has repeatedly asked Samyang to improve staff employment
terms, but the company has refused, a Confederation official said in a
telephone interview.

He spoke on condition of anonymity.

A Samyang official, who also declined to be identified, confirmed the
strike had been motivated by salary and other contract issues but
declined to give further details.

According to Lao Dong, the Friday strike began after Samyang officials
threatened to dismiss workers unless they signed the disputed
contract.

Samyang managers locked employees into different parts of the factory,
including the cafeteria, at two different points during the job
action, the newspaper said.

Samyang, which is one of five companies producing footwear for Nike in
Vietnam, has had a history of difficult labor relations. In March, 250
employees staged a brief strike over their conditions and contract.
And in 1996, in an incident infamous locally, a Samyang technician was
convicted for beating a group of employees on their heads with a
half-made sports shoe.

Officials from Nike couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

The latest episode at Samyang occurs at a time when Nike is under
scrutiny for the practices of some of its contractors in Vietnam.
                 ___________________________________


Drug trafficker sentenced to death in Vietnam 

Hanoi (Reuter) - Hanoi People's Court has sentenced one man to death
and another to life imprisonment for trafficking heroin, a court
official said on Saturday.

He said Nguyen Van Dung and Le Van Chinh, both born in 1958, were
arrested in possession of 0.7 kg (1.5 pounds) of heroin.

Thursday's ruling against the two men came just a week before the
trial of several state police officials and dozens of others for their
alleged part in an international dealing ring.

The government is worried that Vietnam is being targeted as a conduit
and growing market for illegal drugs from the notorious Golden
Triangle region which borders Vietnam, Laos and China. It has vowed to
hand out stiffer punishments to traffickers.
                 ___________________________________


Troubles remain in U.S.-Vietnam relations: Analysis 

UPI Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON -- In peace as in war, American objectives in Vietnam have
proven elusive.

When he and Foreign Minister Nguyen Manh Cam signed the official
documents of normalization 21 months ago in Hanoi, Secretary of State
Warren Christopher called it a ''new era in relations.'' But after
that, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Middle East and Russia seemed to push
Vietnam off the Clinton administration's radar screen.

Other than Cam, the only high-level Vietnamese visitor to Washington
since the establishment of full diplomatic relations has been Hong Ha,
the Communist Party's top foreign policy official.

Like Christopher, aides to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright say
she has found little time for Vietnam in her first five months at the
helm of the department and and is unlikely to visit Hanoi when she
travels to Hong Kong this summer to witness the transfer of power from
Great Britain to China.

Discussions among senior American policymakers on Hanoi tend to expose
all the old frustrations over soldiers still unaccounted for more than
a quarter century after the end of a war that claimed nearly 58,000
American lives, and latter-day frustrations about human rights abuse
and the excruciatingly slow trade negotiations that must be completed.

''There are still important problems that remain, but we are hoping
the next few years will bring improvements in the relationship,''
State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told United Press
International. ''The (soldiers missing in action) issue is the most
important for the American people, and human rights remains a central
concern.''

Concerns also have been raised, formally on at least three occasions,
over such breaches of protocol in Hanoi as searching the American
diplomatic pouch, impounding Pentagon forensic equipment used in the
search for soldiers' remains and security around the embassy that U.S.
officials refer to as ''sloppy at best.''

Burns and other officials at the State Department, White House and
Pentagon predict the arrival of recently confirmed Ambassador Pete
Peterson, a former congressman from Florida and prisoner of war, will
go a long way toward placing ''the relationship on solid footing.''

Recognition of Vietnam was a wrenching political decision for
President Clinton. In his re-election bid, he promised to ensure
continuing efforts to determine what happened to some 2,134 soldiers
still listed as missing in action.

Although only seven sets of remains were positively identified last
year, U.S. officials say they are satisfied with the degree of
cooperation from Hanoi. They attribute the slow pace to the rigors of
recovering remains in long-overgrown jungle battle sites and the
tedious forensic testing that must be done at the Pentagon's Central
Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.

''It's a large undertaking, but we are absolutely satisfied with the
pace and cooperation,'' said Marine Lt. Col. Pat Sivigny, Pentagon
spokesman for the POW-MIA issue.

The pace of negotiating a trade agreement, which must be completed
before Vietnam receives such benefits as preferential tariff rates or
government-insured investments for American firms, is far less
satisfying for Hanoi and U.S. companies eager to enter the rich,
emerging markets there.

In March, the Clinton administration finally delivered a draft of the
trade pact, and the only commercial agreements reached so far cover
the protection of American intellectual property rights and repayment
of $145 million owed Washington by South Vietnam.

In an unusually blunt statement for a diplomat, Foreign Minister Cam
complained during his visit to Washington more than a year ago that
''we have lost and wasted much of our time'' on the trade agreement.

Virginia Foote, President of the U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council, which has
been lobbying the administration on behalf of such clients as IBM,
Mobil and Motorola to step up the trade negotiations, said American
companies are losing important contracts to French, Japanese and
German firms.

''Our companies would like to see this progress more quickly,'' she
said. ''It puts American companies at a competitive disadvantage.''

Clinton administration officials say Vietnam's shoddy human rights
record must improve if the trade pact has any hope of gaining support
from members of Congress, many of whom opposed establishing relations
with Hanoi.

Officials cited ''minor improvements'' on that front late last year
when Doan Thanh Liem, imprisoned six years for publishing leaflets
advocating democratic reform, was released and permitted to immigrate
to the United States. But U.S. officials say hundreds like him still
remain in jail, including two Vietnamese-Americans sentenced to
15-year terms on charges of ''subversion.''

''The Vietnamese government's record continues to be poor,'' the State
Department said in its annual report on human rights practices
worldwide. ''The government continues to repress basic political and
some religious freedoms and to commit numerous abuses.''

The Clinton administration also has lodged formal protests _ demarches
in diplomatic parlance _ over three violations of agreements governing
the protocol of international relations, U.S. officials say.

The complaints, none of which have been made public, were presented in
Hanoi last year after the Interior Ministry seized and searched a
diplomatic pouch, and Vietnamese customs officials refused to release
several containers with equipment for Pentagon teams combing the
countryside to uncover remains of American soldiers.

The third protest followed a series of incidents in which the
automobiles of American diplomats and embassy staff in Hanoi were
vandalized _ windshields were broken and tires were slashed. American
security officials say they are ''suspicious'' about the cases and
''suspect'' Vietnamese forces guarding the perimeter of the embassy
may have ''looked the other way.''

Le Dzung, a senior diplomat at the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington,
acknowledged the protests in an interview but he said Hanoi has
discovered ''conflicting information'' in the course of its
investigations into the incidents, which he declined to reveal.

''Our policy is to obey the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic
Relations,'' he said.
                 ___________________________________


Vietnam Ensures Amnesty For All Returness for Their Illegal 

Hanoi (Xinhua News) - Vietnamese authorities have ensured that all
returnees are given amnesty for their illegal departure, the Vietnam
News today quoted an official of the United Nations High Commissioners
for Refugees (UNHCR) as saying.

Assistance high commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello said, "there were
no instances of persecution of returnees reported by UNHCR monitoring
teams, demonstrating that Vietnam fully adhered to the commitments
provided in a memorandum of understanding it signed with the UNHCR in
1988."

The UNHCR representative believed that the saga of Vietnamese boat
people, one of the most tragic examples of human suffering in the
region's recent history, was finally coming to an end.

The vast majority of some 2,600 persons in Hong Kong were expected to
return to Vietnam in the coming weeks.

According to Vietnam News, Vietnam wants to try and repatriate the
last Vietnamese boat people from Hong Kong by the end of next month.
But it is concerned that the identification screening process will be
too slow if it does not receive due support from Hong Kong
authorities.

A number of people, when they left the country, gave false names and
addresses, which will make it impossible to repatriate them to their
villages of origin, as stipulated in the 1988 memorandum of
understanding.

Since 1989, a total of 109,199 screened-out Vietnamese boat people,
who had been determined to be illegal migrants and not refugees, have
returned to Vietnam from camps or detention centers in ASEAN
countries, Hong Kong and Japan.

The UNHCR has spent some 59 million U.S. dollars in Vietnam to
facilitate the reception and reintegration of returnees within the
comprehensive plan of action for Indo-Chinese refugees, the Voluntary
Repatriation Program, and the Orderly Return Program.

Of the money, 33 million U.S. dollars was distributed to the returnees
as a reintegration cash grant, and 11.5 million U.S. dollars spent on
construction or repair of schools, dispensaries, bridges and roads for
the communities receiving returnees.
                 ___________________________________


Directors of troubled Vietnam trading companies charged with
fraud

Hanoi (AFP) - Directors of two Vietnamese trading compannies arrested
last month for defaulting on a payment to a local bank have been
charged with fraud, a report said Saturday.

Tang Minh Phung, former director of Minh Phung Export Garment Co.
Ltd., was prosecuted Friday on an additional charge of "defrauding and
appropriating socialist properties" by investigators of Ho Chi Minh
City police, the Lao Dong newspaper reported.

Lien Khui Thin, general director of EPCO Import Export Co. also
received the same fraud charge while prosecutors dropped a lesser
previous charge of "abusing confidence and appropriating socialist
properties".

Phung and Thin were apprehended in Ho Chi Minh City in March after it
was discovered that the collateral they allegedly offered on a 17.3
million dollar loan to state-owned Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam
(Vietcombank) disappeared.

Separately, as of the end of March, the two companies had secured
letters of credit (LC) for 44 million dollars, of which 13.8 million
had fallen overdue, it was reported earlier this week.

Vietnamese commercial banks have honored 7.9 million dollars of the
LCs leaving the remaining 5.9 million dollars outstanding.

In an attempt to recover funds owed to state-owned banks, the central
State Bank of Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee have
frozen the assets of Minh Phung and Epco, which are tied up in
property projects that have gone sour.

The management of these two companies has been the focus of lively
debate in the National Assembly, and the case is being watched closely
by foreign bankers who expect more LC defaults in coming weeks.

It has been estimated by western economists that as much as 900
million dollars in deferred and maturing LCs will fall due in the
second quarter, placing severe strain on cash-strapped local banks.
                 ___________________________________


Vietnam to tighten security on "state secrets" 

Hanoi (AFP) - Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet has issued a directive
calling on all levels of government to tighten vigilance against
revealing state secrets, reports said Saturday.

According to the April 24 directive, portions of which were published
in all daily Vietnamese-language newspapers, "the situation of
revealing state secrets in a number of offices and localities is still
serious," the Communist party's official mouthpiece Nhan Dan said.

The paper quoted the government as saying that since 1991 when the
ordinance on Protection of State Secrets was issued much progress had
been made, but there were "cases of abusing regulations on state
secret protection."

Vietnam has nebulous laws on state security and press freedom that
give the government a free hand in restricting the media. The laws
allow for criminal prosecution and harsh prison terms for those who
reveal state secrets or damage national interests.

The directive did not provide any list or description of what was
included under state secrets.

Instead it called on "ministries, offices of ministerial level,
government offices and People's Committees of provinces and cities
under central authority to submit lists of state secrets to be
approved by the prime minister before the third quarter of 1997," the
paper said.

The directive also said the Ministry of Culture and Information needed
to regulate news reporting in the press in order "to ensure both the
spread of information to the public and the correct implementation of
regulations on preserving state secrets."

The government has closed several newspapers in the past to punish
them for their reporting. Though there are more than 500 journals and
periodicals, the Vietnamese media is state-owned and subject to severe
limitations on freedom of speech.

Last month the ministry of culture and information and the State Bank
issued a circular aimed at curbing and controlling local media
coverage of the banking industry, which included a list of information
considered as state secrets in that industry.

Information is tightly controlled in Vietnam, and statistics jealously
guarded. Economic data considered routine in other countries, such as
the size of the government budget deficit, are not publicly known.

Last year several local journalists were investigated for revealing
"national secrets in violation of Article 97 of the criminal code,"
after reporting possible mishandling of aircraft purchases by Vietnam
Airlines.
                 ___________________________________


Two Vietnamese police colonels linked to drug trafficking
case

Hanoi (AFP) - Two police colonels are suspected of involvement in a
major drug trafficking case here, a newspaper reported Saturday.

Tran Duy San and Dang Van Sang, respectively director and assistant
director of the interior ministry's police finance and police
investigation department, have been linked to the trafficking of 15
kilograms (33 pounds) of heroine into Vietnam, according to the Lao
Dong trade union newspaper.

The two are suspected of helping and protecting a number of police
officers arrested on suspicion of involvement in drug trafficking,
during the investigation which the colonels led themselves, the
newspaper said citing investigation services.

The main drug trafficker, Vu Xuan Troung, a captain in the same
ministry was arrested last July.

He promised investigators he would reveal the names of "certain
extremely important people" if the authorities agreed not to bring in
the death penalty against his wife and brother, also arrested in the
case, the newspaper added. Their trial opens next Friday in Hanoi.

Truong himself has accepted he is unlikely to escape the death penalty
and has asked to be cremated after his execution, the report said.

Deputy colonel Vu Ban, head of an interior ministry anti-drug
department, and Vu Huu Chinh, an officer in the police economics
department, were arrested at the start of the year for their
involvement in the case.

In total 40 people, including three from Laos, 12 police officers and
four border guard officers, all implicated directly or indirectly in
the case, will appear in court.

The arrests followed revelations from Laotian drug trafficker Sieng
Pheng, arrested in January 1995 for carrying 15 kilograms (33 pounds)
of heroine to Hanoi from Laos.

The Vietnamese police believe since 1992 the group has brought some
300 kilograms (660 pounds) of heroine into Vietnam from Laos, enough
to bring 300 death sentences under to Vietnamese law. Anyone caught
with one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heroin faces the death penalty here.

Vietnam has in recent years become a transit point for drugs smuggled
out of Thailand and Laos bound for Europe and the United States.