VN news (May 29)

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

May 29: Thai Supreme Commander to Visit Vietnam 
May 29: Vietnam Agrees to Receive Returnees From Hong Kong
May 29: A catalog of U.S. woes surrounding Vietnam
May 29: UN says unacceptable malnutrition in Vietnam, a major rice exporter 
May 29: The Road to Hell: Vietnam combats corruption 
May 29: Saigon official issues warning on Party purity 
May 29: Man sentenced to death for child rape in Vietnam 
May 28: Vietnamese Newspaper Highlights - May 28, 1997 
May 28: Vietnam To Accelerate Administrative Reform 


Thursday - May 29, 1997

Thai Supreme Commander to Visit Vietnam 

BANGKOK (Xinhua News) - Gen. Mongkol Ampornpisit, supreme commander of
the Thai Armed Forces, will pay a one-day official visit to Vietnam on
Friday, according to a military source today.

It will be Gen. Mongkol's first visit to Hanoi since he became supreme
commander last October.

He will be accompanied by commanders-in-chief of the navy and air
force, Adm. Vijit Chamnankarn and ACM Amorn Naewmalee.

During the visit, he is expected to meet Vietnamese Defense Minister
Doan Khue and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Pham Van Tra.

Thai Army Commander-in-Chief Gen. Chettha Thanajro paid a brief
official visit to Vietnam late last year after his promotion to the
top army post.
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Thursday - May 29, 1997

Vietnam Agrees to Receive Returnees From Hong Kong 

Hanoi (Xinhua News) - Vietnam has reiterated its agreement to receive
over 1,000 Vietnamese boat people back from Hong Kong before the
return of Hong Kong to China on July 1.

The Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said it had asked for help from the
British-Hong Kong Authorities and the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) to send back the refugees.

As agreed upon with Vietnam, some the boat people were to fly home
between May 28 and 30, and the 18 of them now under medical treatment
and their relatives were allowed to return later.

The ministry said Vietnam's position on the repatriation of boat
people from Hong Kong at the final stage of the Comprehensive Plan of
Action (CPA) for Indochinese refugees were unchanged.

On Wednesday, 93 boat people arrived at Noi Bai International Airport
in Hanoi and 152 others at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City on
U.N.-chartered voluntary repatriation flights.

After the last U.N.-chartered flights on May 30, about 600 boat people
would remain in camps in Hong Kong.

The official Vietnam News Agency said Wednesday night that these
remaining people were scheduled to return before June 30, a day
earlier than the return of Hong Kong to China.

Vietnam so far has received 57,594 people who voluntarily returned
since the first flight from Hong Kong on March 2, 1989.
  _________________________________________________________________

Thursday - May 29, 1997

A catalog of U.S. woes surrounding Vietnam -- A growing archive at
Texas Tech strives to enlighten those seeking to make sense of
America's most divisive war. 

By DAVID LAMB
Los Angeles Times

LUBBOCK, Texas -- Our fascination with America's longest and most
divisive war did not end with the fall of Saigon in 1975. At least 680
novels about the Vietnam War have been published by U.S. authors.
Dozens of movies have been made. College courses on the war--and those
using it as a point of departure--are in great demand.

At Yale University, Dan Duffy teaches a course on Vietnamese
literature. At Boston University, Stephen Lyne, a retired State
Department officer, teaches one on the foreign relations of the
Vietnam era. At Colorado State University, John Pratt teaches the
literature of the war.

Here in Lubbock, Texas Tech University has put together the largest
private Vietnam archive in the country and has become one of the
nation's most important centers for scholarly research into the war.
Leading educators and former military leaders from both the former
North and South Vietnams recently gathered at the university to offer
some personal insights into a conflict that redefined America's role
in the world.

During the conference, Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., commander of U.S. naval
forces in Vietnam from 1968-70, referred to the war as "long and
erroneously fought." But he added that defeat in Vietnam helped
contribute to the West's eventual victory in the Cold War by forcing
the United States to devise other techniques for thwarting communism.

He recalled that in the initial stages of the U.S. involvement in
Vietnam, some military planners wanted "to strike at the heart of the
insurgency" with landings in Hanoi and Haiphong.

"They were overruled, but we could have taken those places with less
than 5,000 American casualties," he said. "As it was, we lost 58,000
dead. Clearly in the view of the military, that should not and need
not have happened."

Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese Army colonel who accepted South
Vietnam's surrender in April 1975, said he believes both U.S. hawks
and doves during the war were motivated by honest convictions. But he
said the American public still has one responsibility in Vietnam to
fulfill.

"You can create the pressure of world public opinion so that the
authoritarian regime in Hanoi is forced to reform," said Tin, who now
lives in Paris and is a critic of the government he served on the
battlefield.

Tin's old enemy, Nguyen Khanh, a former general who headed South
Vietnam for a year, recalled that when he was overthrown and exiled to
the United States in 1965 he left carrying a handful of Vietnamese
earth. He now lives in California, home to more than half a million
Vietnamese.

Reflecting on assimilation, he said: "From my generation, you'd get
different answers, but my children's generation think of themselves as
100% American, and my grandchildren are 110% American."

The Archive of the Vietnam Conflict was set up almost single-handedly
by James Reckner, a 56-year-old history professor and Vietnam veteran.
The idea came to him eight years ago when he wanted to establish a
graduate course on the war but learned that the Texas Tech library had
little to support researchers.

With a small grant from the university library, he began making
acquisitions and appealing for donations. Among the material now
available at the archive are 16 boxes of papers from former CIA
Director William E. Colby, 16,000 pages of CIA documents, State
Department files on Indochina and documents from the Eisenhower
administration on the initial decisions committing the United States
to aid South Vietnam.

The archive got a bonanza in December when Douglas Pike, a specialist
on the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), moved to Texas Tech with
a collection including 15,000 books, 500 videotapes, 3,000 slides and
15,000 monographs.

The educators at the Vietnam seminar generally agreed that for all the
interest in the war, today's generation is mystified by, and often
ignorant of, the conflict's key figures and details.

Pratt asks his students at the beginning of each class to identify Ngo
Dinh Diem (the U.S.-backed South Vietnam leader who was assassinated
in 1963), the Gulf of Tonkin incident (the alleged North Vietnamese
attack in 1964 on a U.S. destroyer that was used to justify a dramatic
expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam) and the 1968 Tet offensive (North
Vietnam's attack against South Vietnam's cities that helped turn U.S.
public opinion against the war).

Over half his students leave these queries blank.

Texas Tech hopes its Vietnam center eventually will change that. Said
Reckner: "One hundred years from now, people might visit the [ Vietnam
Memorial] Wall as a curiosity. But if they really want to understand
what happened in Vietnam, they will have to visit the Archive of the
Vietnam Conflict."
  _________________________________________________________________

Thursday - May 29, 1997

UN says unacceptable malnutrition in Vietnam, a major rice exporter 

Hanoi (dpa) - Vietnam suffers from the contradiction of being a major
exporter of rice while 40 per cent of its children under five years of
age still suffers from malnutrition, said the United Nations Thursday.

Each year in Vietnam some 200,000 babies are born under-weight
impairing their chances for survival or developing fully, the United
Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) noted in an unusually pointed
release.

The U.N. agency also noted that the situation had not improved since
1991, despite significant economic advances made during that period as
a result of Vietnam adopting more market-oriented policies.

`` Vietnam produces enough food for all its children, and we need to
ensure that all its children can benefit from it,'' declared Rima
Salah, the UNICEF representative in Hanoi.

There are also significant disparities among children in the socialist
republic.

Nowadays only 30 per cent of children living in cities suffer from
malnutrition but this rate has continued to worsen among ethnic
minority children living in the mountainous areas, where the rate is
now higher than 60 per cent.

``All Vietnamese children are not equal in terms of nutrition,'' noted
the UNICEF statement issued in conjunction with Micro-Nutrient Days
marked on June 1-2.

The UN agency called on Vietnam to make more efforts to improve child
feeding and child-care practices, especially among children under two
years of age, who are growing very fast and are most vulnerable to
malnutrition.

The Vietnamese government objective is to reduce malnutrition to 30
per cent by 2000 but the UN says ``urgent and additional efforts are
required''.

Together with UNICEF the Hanoi government wil be providing an
estimated seven million children with Vitamin A capsules and familes
with child care information on the first two days of June.

Vitamin A deficiency can lead to blindness or death, while iodine
deficiency retards the mental capitacities of children and inadequate
iron among pregnant women induces higher child and maternal mortality
rates.

In 1996 UNICEF provided 40 million Vitamin A capsules, nine million
iron tablets for women and children and helped to iodize 420,000 tons
of salt.
  _________________________________________________________________

Thursday - May 29, 1997

The Road to Hell: Vietnam combats corruption 

Far Eastern Economic Review

Why is it that when official corruption is unearthed, the inclination
is to blame the market and not the government? When Vietnam sentenced
eight people -- including two police captains -- to death for their
role in heroin-smuggling, it occasioned new doubts about the country's
economic reforms. Indeed, no less than President Le Duc Anh cited the
case as an example of the "sin" of "individualism."

We might put it a little differently. Like most sins, drug-trafficking
is a human universal: Whether socialist, capitalist, democratic,
authoritarian, developed or undeveloped, all societies have their drug
problems. And though it is true that totalitarian governments have
used a combination of control and ruthlessness to stamp out many of
the plagues associated with freer societies, in today's global economy
that level of control over the long run is, as Vietnam discovered more
than a decade ago, ultimately unsustainable in countries not willing
to reduce themselves to penury.

Yet to blame the market for Vietnam's corruption is to miss half the
story, and the bigger half at that. Liberalization may have opened up
new opportunities for officials to line their pockets, but that's not
so much because Vietnam's market has opened but because so much
remains closed. Nor is it a problem unique to Vietnam. Whether it be
President Kim Young Sam's aides accepting money from Hanbo Steel for a
go-ahead on a mill, the daughter of a Thai prime minister selling land
to the Bank of Thailand, or the late Ron Brown allocating seats on
Commerce Department trips overseas, the opportunities for corruption
and abuse arise only when the politician has something to sell.
Indeed, countries like Vietnam are often in the worst position of all,
because they combine a little bit of economic opportunity with a great
deal of government control over who gets to exploit it.

The point is, if you want your politicians to stop selling their
leverage, the most effective remedy is to take that leverage away. So
long as Vietnam continues to make it so difficult for the honest and
open to do business, can it really be surprised at the rise of the
corrupt?
  _________________________________________________________________

Thursday - May 29, 1997

Saigon official issues warning on Party purity 

Hanoi (Reuter) - A senior ideology official in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh
City warned in an interview this week that not enough was being done
to check moral degeneracy within the ranks of the ruling Communist
Party.

Tran Van Tao, head of the Ho Chi Minh City Party committee's Culture
and Ideology department told the Phu Nu (Women) newspaper that despite
the Party's efforts to expel morally corrupt individuals many still
remain in positions of power.

``It's worrying that there are still a number of degenerate party
members who have not been exposed and dealt with and who continue to
occupy their positions,'' he said an an edition of the paper seen on
Thursday.

``Their actions have a big impact on the people's confidence in the
party and regime.''

Tao said that while party members should support Vietnam's reform
policies they should not become too closely involved as exposure to
the country's capitalist-style economy might risk ``ideological
deviation.''

Vietnam launched free-market reforms in the late 1980s, simultaneously
firing a sometimes intense and still unresolved debate on how a
communist government and a capitalist-style economy can survive
together.

Earlier this year a number of party officials were implicated in a
major corruption scandal surrounding Ho Chi Minh City trading firm
Tamexco -- a Communist Party-affiliated company.

Four people were sentenced to death when the case came to court in
February.
  _________________________________________________________________

Thursday - May 29, 1997

Man sentenced to death for child rape in Vietnam 

Hanoi (AFP) - A Vietnamese man has been sentenced to death by a court
in Ho Chi Minh City on child rape charges, a report said Thursday.

The supreme appeal court of Ho Chi Minh City last Thursday upheld the
death penalty for Do Van Lai on charges of rape, robbery and theft,
the Saigon Giaiphong daily reported.

Lai, 43, was charged with raping 16 people including seven children
aged from 10 to 13 from 1993 to 1996.

He was also accused of robbing his victims, of various items including
one motorycle.

In its full session earlier this month Vietnam's National Assembly
passed an amendment of the Criminal Code which calls for death
sentence against rapists of under seven-year-old children and between
seven and 15 year imprisonment on other cases of child rape.
  _________________________________________________________________

Wednesday - May 28, 1997

Vietnamese Newspaper Highlights - May 28, 1997 

Hanoi (VNA) - Highlights of Vietnam's daily newspapers today:

NHAN DAN:

1. President Le Duc Anh has endorsed the amended Criminal Code, the
Value Added Tax Law, the Corporate Tax Law and the Trade Law, adopted
by the last National Assembly session which ended here two weeks ago.

2. Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet left Rome yesterday for Hungary, the
last leg of his four nation European tour.

HANOI MOI:

1. Vietnam's Ministry of Finance has issued a circular on foreign
investment enterprises' materials and four seat cars exempted from
import-export tax.

2. The first ever British Film Week begins in Hanoi yesterday
including Oscar winners Lawrence of Arabia and Howards End and an
animated comedy Wallance and Gromit.

VIETNAM NEWS:

1. Leasing company KEXIM Vietnam Leasing Co Ltd signed a US$1.5
million lease-finance agreement with the Bao Van Company Limited in Ho
Chi Minh City yesterday.
  _________________________________________________________________

Wednesday - May 28, 1997

Vietnam To Accelerate Administrative Reform 

Hanoi (VNA) - The Vietnam's government has issued an instruction
urging acceleration of the implementation of the May 4, 1994
government resolution NO. 38/ CP on reforming administrative
procedures, which was considered the breakthrough in State
administrative reform.

The instruction pointed out that the pace of reform has been slow and
it showed many weak points over the past three years. Administrative
procedures remain cumbersome, concurrent or contradictory, failing to
meet the demand of the people and organisations due to improper
consideration by many branches and localities of the work.

The government instructed all ministers, heads of ministerial level
and Government agencies, chairmen of provincial and centrally-run
municipal People's Committees to personally take charge of the
following tasks.

* Reviewing the implementation of the May 4, 1994 government
resolution and mapping out detailed measures to continue pushing up
administrative procedures reform in all fields, in all branches and at
all levels.

* Clarifying the responsibilities of state agencies and public
employees assigned with directly processing demands of citizens and
organisations.

The instruction also requested the Ministry of Planning and
Investment, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Construction, the
Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of
Transport and Communications, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of
Science, Technology and Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture and
Rural Developments, the Ministry of Culture and Information, the
Ministry of Fisheries, the Ministry of Public Health, the General
Department of Customs, the State Inspectorate, and the General
Department of Land Administration to review the reform of
administrative procedures within their authority and report the same
to the Prime Minister before June 30, 1997.
  _________________________________________________________________