VN News (May 25, 1997)

[Vu Thanh Ca <vuca@envi.env.civil.saitama-u.ac.jp>]

Monday - May 26, 1997 

Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong to find new homes: UNHCR 



GENEVA (AFP) - Four Western nations have agreed to admit Vietnamese 
refugees from Hong Kong amid last-ditch efforts to solve the problem before 
the colony reverts to China, a senior UN official said here Monday. <p>

   The United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden jumped on board while 
France vowed to follow suit at a meeting in Geneva, the assistant High 
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Sergio de Vieira de Mello, said.<p> 

   Hong Kong has 1,550 Vietnamese boat people who have been classified as 
refugees but who have been rejected by resettlement countries and 1,495 
non-refugees who are being voluntarily repatriated.<p> 

   China, which resumes sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, has said it does 
not want to inherit the problem of the boat people, all of whom it wants out 
by the handover.<p> 

   "We have asked the traditional resettlement countries to make a final 
effort in Hong Kong," de Mello said. "We only presented those (cases) which we 
realistically believe can be accepted."<p> 

   Many of the Vietnamese refugees have criminal records and a problem with 
drug addiction which have so far undermined their chances of finding new
homes.<p> 

   Last week the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) put 128 cases -- 
those with "mild" criminal records and drug problems -- to western countries, 
urging them to reconsider their positions.<p> 
   The United States on Monday agreed to accept nine families, the United 
Kingdom seven families -- about 19 individuals -- and Sweden 15. France put 
forward no number, but said it would go along if other countries agreed to 
accept a last batch of boat people.<p> 
   "We can accept more positive decisions," de Mello said, adding that other 
governments around the table had not had time to receive replies from their 
capitals on the refugee issue.<p> 
   If further offers were not forthcoming, "we would have to look for other 
solutions," the UNHCR official said, insisting that voluntary repatriation 
would be the last possible option for the Vietnamese refugees.<p> 
   Around 500 non-refugees are expected to still be in Hong Kong when the 
British colony returns to China.<p> 
   The UNHCR has asked China to take an open-minded attitude about the 
remainder. <p> 
   "I believe we can count on (China's) flexibility," de Mello said, adding 
that he had not received a "positive or negative reply" from Chinese 
authorities.<p> 

   Some 214,648 Vietnamese refugees have passed through Hong Kong since
1975.<p> 

   A representative from Hong Kong and from the China's permament UN mission 
here attended the meeting.


Monday - May 26, 1997


Vietnam's Revisited PBS' 14-Year-Old Examination Of America's
Most Divisive Conflict Still Holds Up


By Steve Johnson, Tribune Television Critic.
<br>Chicago Tribune <p>


Perhaps the easiest way to describe the impact " Vietnam: A
Television History" had when it first aired in 1983 is to call it
the "Civil War" of its era.

<P>Like Ken Burns' public-television documentary from the next
decade, it was a critical, peer and popular triumph, greeted by
glowing reviews, a bevy of awards and more viewers than any similar
PBS program had ever won. Like Burns' documentary, it forced
Americans to confront their feelings about a murky, deeply divisive
national conflict.

<p>
And like Burns' "The Civil War" (1990), it was very, very
long: 13 hours in its original incarnation, 11 in the edition that
will air again starting Monday for the first time since 1984.

<P>Beginning with two hours Monday (9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11) and
continuing with hourlong episodes on subsequent Mondays through
July 28, " Vietnam" will air under the banner of PBS' superb "The
American Experience" documentary series.

<P>But " Vietnam" was different from "The Civil War," not only in
its filmmaking approach-- frank and direct, rather than artful and
elegiac--but also in the place its subject matter occupied in the
national consciousness.

<P>The  Vietnam War in 1983, and certainly in 1977 when the
project was first suggested, was an open and painful wound. After
all, the fall of Saigon, the final act in a long, grim denouement,
had only occurred in 1975.

<P>So when PBS President Lawrence Grossman first broached the
idea to veteran print journalist Stanley Karnow--on a beach in
Nantucket, of all places--the first discussion was whether the time
was right.

<P>"At the time, 1977, there was really not much interest in the 
Vietnam War," Karnow said recently. "It was as if people had been
to a very bad play, and the curtain had come down, and they walked
out and they said, `The hell with it. Forget it.' "

<P>But Karnow, who had covered Asia and the war for journals
including Time magazine, knew there was an important story to tell,
however painful it might be.

<P>And while he had first told Grossman that he would have to be
paid for doing an outline for such a series, "I banged out the 13
episodes right there on the basis of my memories," he said. "As a
treatment, the 20 or 30 pages turned out to be pretty much what the
script was going to be."

<P>From there, it was a question of putting the filmmaking team
together--executive producer Richard Ellison was a key
addition--and, more difficult, finding the money to pay for it all.

<P>Lawrence Lichty, now a Northwestern University professor of
radio/television/film, had spent much of the time during the war
becoming the national expert "on every inch of film that was ever
made on  Vietnam," Karnow said.

<P>Lichty signed on, later would quit a good teaching job to
stay on, and he and Karnow would serve as, in essence, the
project's editorial directors. (Karnow would also write the series'
book "companion," " Vietnam: A History," credited as a vivid and
wise history, not just a rehash of what was in the documentary, and
which has continued to sell).

<P>"The biggest problem raising the money," Lichty said, "was
the people who said, `It's too soon; the nerves are too raw,'
versus the people who said, `It's too late; America wants to forget
about it, put it behind us.' "

<P>But the filmmaking team believed they were on to something,
enough so that they took pay cuts to expand the story from the
original six hourlong episodes to nine, Lichty said. By airdate
they had, by methods Karnow described as "scratch and mooch,"
scraped together enough to make Karnow's original 13.

<P>"I've done all the things an academic's supposed to do, the
articles, the books," Lichty said. Working at National Public
Radio, he helped establish the durable "Morning Edition" format.
But " Vietnam," he said, "in some ways was the most rewarding
professional thing I've done."

<P>Those involved wanted it to be so. "In the back of all of our
minds," said Lichty, "was, `Can we do the definitive analysis of
the war? Can we do it in a way that hopefully it doesn't have to be
done again?' I grew up on `Victory at Sea' and `Crusade in Europe.'
While interesting and beautiful, those documentaries left a lot out.

<P>" `Victory at Sea,' that's really the history of World War II
from the point of view of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. You're cued
how you're supposed to react," Lichty said. "In the case of
`Crusade in Europe,' it's the war from Eisenhower's point of view.

<P>"We were trying to let (the principals in  Vietnam) tell the
story from their point of view: `I was a GI, and this is what it
was like,' `I was a pilot, and this is what it was like.' "

<P>They decided early on they would interview participants only,
not journalists, and they tried to tell the story in their sources'
own words and in pictures, keeping the narration sparse.

<P>They also made sure they could answer the question of what it
was like for the  Vietnamese--leaders, soldiers and citizens in
North and South  Vietnam alike. Two film crews gathered footage from
that land, the first American crew, Karnow believes, to go into
North  Vietnam. The June 16 episode, "America's Enemy," in
particular offers the North  Vietnamese viewpoint, whose inclusion
drew heated criticism from arch conservatives in 1983.

<P>Karnow shrugs off such criticism: "We didn't want any
ideology at all in it." And Lichty defends against it by pointing
out that "even 14 years later, in light of new scholarship, the
documentary holds up. . . . No one can say, `Now we know that is
wrong.' "

<P>Asking questions of the  Vietnamese also helped uncover some
hidden truths about the war, Lichty said. The documentarians kept
hearing that the My Lai civilian massacre was not an isolated
incident. Although the team could find no official U.S. record of
what supposedly happened in one particular village, Lichty was able
to find in Marine records that on one particular day a combat unit
in that area "had seemed to reorder a lot of ammunition."

<P>From there, they tracked the GIs in that unit, and the
segment's concluding interview, Lichty said, has one of the
soldiers saying, " `I know my men didn't do that. I'm pretty sure
that half the men didn't do anything.' " The episode is detailed in
the "America Takes Charge" segment about U.S. GIs, airing June 9.

<P>There is a chicken-and-egg question about the documentary and
the American feelings toward  Vietnam, Karnow said.

<P>"While we were doing this thing, which took us six years,
attitudes toward  Vietnam were changing," he said. "The initial
revulsion against the veterans, for example, was changing. We came
out about the same time the  Vietnam Memorial was unveiled in
Washington, a very popular monument and a poignant one. It was sort
of the redemption of the veterans, so to speak. During the war the
veterans were either baby killers or losers.

<P>"But people were beginning to throw off this feeling that
they didn't want to talk about the war and were beginning to be
interested in it. In one sense we benefited from the change, and
then I think us, the memorial, a number of books also contributed
to the change."

<P>The two hours missing between the original airing and now are
a one-hour, where-are-we-now conclusion that was very specific to
1983, Karnow said, and the original first two hours have been
condensed into one.

<P>The money was not available to do a new where-are-we-now
hour, he said. But he thinks if anything,  Vietnam has only cemented
its hold on the American mind.

<P>"It's the longest war in American history," said Karnow.
"It's the first war we lost. When we went into it, the leadership
was rudderless. Why did we cling to the whole thing? It was an
unwinnable war. It was a ghastly experience. Whether people were
pro-war or anti-war, they have to agree it was a terrible tragedy.

<P>" Vietnam was a great lesson for America. In Kennedy's 1961
inaugural address, you remember the famous words, `We will go
anywhere to support any friend, oppose any foe'? Well, nobody
believes that anymore. What  Vietnam has taught everybody is we're
not John Waynes. There are limits to what we can do in the world.

<P>"We paid a very high tuition fee for that lesson: 60,000
dead, not to mention that we're beginning to realize there were
also something like 2 million  Vietnamese killed."

<P>As Lichty said, summoning up the reasons for looking at
" Vietnam: A Television History" anew: "If we're supposed to learn
from history, then I suppose we've got to refresh ourselves once in
awhile."


Monday - May 26, 1997


Vietnam, U.S. experts to examine lessons of war 


Hanoi (Reuter) - America's Vietnam War Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara,
and Vietnamese officials are due to meet next month in Hanoi to examine
possible lessons from the conflict, a foreign ministry official said on Monday.
<p>
McNamara, the most senior member of a non-government U.S. delegation
comprising some 54 researchers and historians, will attend a ``Missed
Opportunities'' conference between June 19 and 22 with Vietnamese government
ministers and academics.
<p>
But the official said General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam's foremost military
strategist and mastermind of victories over both the French and Americans,
was not expected to attend. No reasons were given.
<p>
Robert McNamara resigned as U.S. Defence Secretary in 1968 after overseeing
the U.S. military buildup in Indochina in a conflict which became known as
McNamara's War.
<p>
In memoirs published in 1995 he sparked debate in the United States by
detailing wrong decisions under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
which he said had led Washington to stumbling into an unwinnable war.
<p>
The war finally ended in 1975 with the fall of U.S.-backed Saigon to the
forces of communist North Vietnam.
<p>
In terms of human lives the cost was 58,000 American dead and around four
million Vietnamese either killed or injured.
<p>
McNamara visited Vietnam in 1995 a few months after the two countries
normalised diplomatic ties.
<p>
His forthcoming visit follows the first exchange of envoys between the
former foes.
<p>
Former fighter pilot and prisoner-of-war Douglas ``Pete'' Peterson arrived
in Vietnam on May 9 to take up a post as the first U.S. ambassador to
Vietnam since the war. His Vietnamese counterpart, Le Van Bang, arrived in
Washington at around the same time.
<p>
Asked last week if he viewed the conflict as a mistake, Peterson told
reporters he was not qualified to decide on what was still ``instant history.''


Monday - May 26, 1997

Vietnam Will Not Tighten Ad Limits 

Hanoi (AP) -  Vietnam has  dropped  plans  to  tighten
advertising limits  on foreign companies,  citing pressure  from foreign
investors, state-controlled news media said. <p>

The  limits  had  been  proposed   to  help  Vietnamese  firms,  which
generally  have  less  money  to   spend  on  advertising  than  foreign
companies. <p> 

The  Ministry  of  Finance  had intended  to  limit  foreign  companies'
spending  on  advertising to  2  percent  of  their total  budgets,  the
English-language Vietnam Investment Review said. <p> 

Pressure  from foreign  investors forced  the ministry  to maintain  the
current 5-percent limit, the newspaper reported. <p> 

``We  have  heard  many  complaints,'' the  newspaper  quoted  a  senior
official at the Finance Ministry as saying. <p> 

The  concept  of  advertising  is  still  relatively  new  in  communist
Vietnam, where  market-oriented reforms have recently  offered product
and brand variety in many sectors.


Sunday - May 25, 1997


Foreign Countries, Firms Help  Vietnam Restore Historic Imperial Citadel
Culture: Project in Hue is expected to cost $90 million. Site sums up 2,000
years of nation's past.

By RICHARD HERZFELDER
<br>Los Angeles Times
<p>

HUE,  Vietnam -- Tran Van Luc hops confidently across the rickety wooden
scaffold lashed 50 feet up on the roof of the Imperial Theater.

<P>Using a hammer, he smashes a green beer bottle and then carefully
picks out a large, jagged shard and fits it into wet cement to form part
of a swirling rooftop mosaic.

<p>
"We use the Chinese beer bottles for leaves, because the color looks
natural," Luc says, gazing out across the great Citadel of the  Vietnamese
emperors, a huge complex of classical Chinese-style buildings that have
been decaying since suffering through one of the  Vietnam War's biggest
battles.

<P>But now that  Vietnam's Communist regime has opened up to the rest of
the world, international aid is coming in to help restore the Citadel to
its former glory.

<P>"The Citadel is only 200 years old, but it sums up more than 2,000
years of  Vietnamese history," says Thai Cong Nguyen, director of the
Monuments and Conservation Committee of Hue, a coastal city about 350
miles south of  Vietnam's capital, Hanoi.

<P>For the Citadel, history climaxed during the Tet Offensive of February
1968, when U.S. Marines and their South  Vietnamese allies threw back
attacking Communist troops. Four weeks of fighting left dozens of the
elegant, elaborately decorated buildings in ruins, and  Vietnam's wet
tropical climate attacked everything that was left.

<P>"The frames are rotten, the roofs and drains are falling apart, and
fungus, insects and termites are eating the wood," Nguyen says.

<P>He estimates full restoration will cost about $90 million and take
more than a decade.

<P>Designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in 1981, the
Citadel is drawing help from foreign governments and companies. Japan's
Toyota and France's Rhone-Poulenc are each paying for work on a building.
The U.S. Fulbright program has provided training, and one of Nguyen's
subordinates is studying management at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

<P>The throne room, or Palace of Supreme Harmony, and several of the
Imperial Palace gates have already been rebuilt.

<P>The palace grounds, which occupy about one-tenth of the 4-square-mile
Citadel, were spared the worst of the fighting because U.S. and South 
Vietnamese troops were forbidden to use heavy artillery or air raids
there. Still, bullets and mortar fire tore holes in walls, roofs
collapsed and some buildings burned down.

<P>The Imperial Theater's basic structure survived, but the roof frame,
tiles and interior are being replaced in a $400,000 project paid for by
the French government and Electricite de France, which like other
sponsors hopes to gain a foothold as  Vietnam's economy expands.

<P>"Our method is quite different from the Japanese, who send their own
experts to do the work," says Jean-Claude Bernay, a Paris-based
construction consultant who visits the site several times a year.

<P>"In Hue they don't like anyone to come in and tell them what to do,
even somebody from Hanoi," he adds. "It's  Vietnam's heritage that is
being restored. They must be responsible."

<P>The pace of restoration, both at the Citadel and at Buddhist temples
and family shrines elsewhere in  Vietnam, has helped revive traditional
arts such as mosaics and tile-making.

<P>Luc's parents are rice farmers, but he had a knack for drawing and an
elderly master took him on as an apprentice as mosaics regained
popularity.

<P>"The most difficult part is the first step, when you have to imagine
the animal or the thing that you start with," Luc says.

<P>He makes an initial shape in concrete, then lays in pieces of broken
china plates, soup bowls and two kinds of beer bottles to give his lion
and dragon heads texture and color.

<P>"The quality is not as good as the old things, but we can't find the
material they used in the past," he says.

<P>Nguyen thinks the Citadel will become  Vietnam's largest tourist
attraction, although only about 200,000 foreign visitors arrived last
year. A fully restored site would attract 2 million visitors a year, he
predicts.

<P>In addition to the foreign money that is coming in,  Vietnam's
government is providing $2 million a year and all tourist revenue is
plowed back, Nguyen says. Even so, he is looking for more foreign
sponsors.

<P>"[In 1995] the  Vietnamese and U.S. governments established diplomatic
relations," says Nguyen, a combat veteran who carries deep scars on his
face and legs from a U.S. artillery shell. "If the Americans decide to
help, nobody can match them."