VN news (June 17)

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

New round of drug ring arrests
Vietnam drugs trial appeals to be heard next week
Terrorist trial in Vietnam delayed
Winds kill two, hit rice crops in central Vietnam
Vietnam pledges support for Burma's entry into ASEAN
Vietnam official defines future for journalism
Vietnam to release confiscated US documents on Agent Orange
Vietnamese Newspaper Highlights - June 16, 1997
Vietnam Issues New Regulations On Drugs
McNamara in Hanoi
Statoil to build liquefied petroleum gas project in Vietnam
Over 1,500 Vietnam boatpeople in Hong Kong limbo
After 27 Years, Vietnam Is Almost Fun...
  _________________________________________________________________

New round of drug ring arrests

Hanoi, June 18 (Asia Times News) An additional 40 arrests have been
made in connection with last month's spectacular drug trial which saw
eight people given death sentences and a further eight sent to prison for
life, Vietnamese court officials and police confirmed on Tuesday. 

A total of 22 people were convicted in May for their roles in an
international drug trafficking ring that brought hundreds of kilograms of
heroin and opium into or through Vietnam over the past few years. Of those
sentenced 11 were either police or guards working at the Lai Chau border
crossing with Laos in northwestern Vietnam. 

A Hanoi People's Court official confirmed the 40 new arrests but refused
to disclose any information on who the accused were. A Hanoi police
officer involved in the case said: "It is under the process of
investigation so it is not the proper time to release information." 

By the end of last month's court case a total of 43 people had been
arrested or investigated for alleged involvement in the drug ring, but
only 22 have been brought to trial and officials would not confirm if any
or all of the remaining 21 were included in the 40 new arrests. 

A court official also confirmed that a court would sit in Hanoi from June
24 until June 30 to hear the appeals of 21 of those originally convicted. 

The only person not to seek an appeal hearing was former police major Vu
Huu Chinh, who had been deputy chief of the powerful Interior Ministry's
Anti-Narcotic Bureau under the Economic Police, and who was sentenced to
life in prison. 

Also on Wednesday, Ho Chi Minh City-based newspaper Tuoi Tre (Youth)
reported that Pham Chuyen, director of the Hanoi Police Service, said he
advocated commuting a death sentence handed down in mid-1996 to a Lao
national, Xieng Pheng, who provided information that helped police uncover
the drug ring. 

"According to [Chuyen], if we spare him it is more beneficial to the fight
against drugs and will reflect the humanity of our legal system as well as
the traditional righteousness of our people," the newspaper said. 

Pheng was caught in January 1995 while transporting 15.5 kilograms of
heroin over- land to Hanoi. His dramatic last-minute confession as he was
about to face the firing squad resulted in a spate of arrests of
high-ranking police officers late last year. 

The 10-day trial in early May attracted widespread media coverage of
details of the drug ring, which was supposedly led by 36-year-old former
police captain Vu Xuan Truong, one of the eight sentenced to death. 

The extent of the scandal, which penetrated deep inside Vietnam's powerful
internal security apparatus, rocked the country's establishment. 

Truong, shortly before the case was heard, vowed he would implicate some
"extremely important people" if the lives of his wife and brother, who
also stood trial, were spared. Their lives were spared, but it remains
unclear whether he came good on his promise as the trial proceedings were
closed to all but relatives of the accused and a handful of carefully
selected Vietnamese journalists. 
  _________________________________________________________________

Vietnam drugs trial appeals to be heard next week 

Hanoi, June 17 (Reuter) - Appeals in a heroin-trafficking case which
shocked the nation are due to open in Hanoi next week, the Tuoi Tre
newspaper said on Tuesday. 

The state-controlled journal said appeals by former police captain Vu Xuan
Truong and most of the 21 other defendants sentenced to death or jail last
month would run from June 24 until June 30. 

Truong and seven others, including police officers and border guards, were
sentenced to death for their part in a syndicate which flooded the country
with hundreds of kilos of heroin from the notorious opium poppy-growing
Golden Triangle region. 

Eight people were given life jail terms and six received terms from a
suspended sentence to 20 years in jail. 

Tuoi Tre did not say whether the appeals were against verdicts or
sentences and court officials were not available to comment. 

About 20 others who have been arrested in connection with the case are due
to go on trial at the Hanoi People's Court soon. 

Tuoi Tre said Hanoi's police chief had told reporters on Monday that the
life of one of the defendants -- a Laotian drugs trafficker whose
death-row confession helped expose Truong and his accomplices -- should be
spared. 
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Terrorist trial in Vietnam delayed 

Hanoi, June 17 (AP) - Five suspected anti-communist terrorists will be
brought to trial early next month after a lengthy, low-profile
investigation of a 1994 grenade attack, a court official said Tuesday. 

The trial, originally set to begin Tuesday, was delayed for undisclosed
reasons, said the court official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Few details about the case have been made public, although the court
official said all five defendants are overseas Vietnamese, including one
who had fled his homeland by boat. 

The trial will focus on an October 1994 attack in the southern economic
hub of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. Masked assailants
tossed several grenades at a group of Chinese and Vietnamese tourists
leaving a dinner cruise boat. The grenades exploded just in front of the
famed Majestic Hotel, wounding at least 18 people. 

The state-controlled newspaper Police reported that six men linked to a
group calling itself Vietnam Salvation Resistance Front planned the attack
and plotted several other attacks. 

"The main contents of the plans are to propagate and provoke acts of
terrorism," the newspaper quoted an investigator as saying. 

Police first speculated that the attack was motivated by a business deal
that went sour within Vietnam's organized crime gangs. 

Since then, however, investigators have linked the attack to the allegedly
U.S.-based Resistance Front. 

Police say the front also sent threatening letters to diplomatic
consulates in Ho Chi Minh City and several government offices. 

Investigators in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City traced the group to Vietnamese
living in the United States and Canada. 

A small core of members belonging to the Resistance Front raised about
dlrs 50,000 from private donations, the newspaper said. 

More than 20 years after unifying South and North Vietnam under socialist
rule, Vietnam's Communist Party continues to face staunch opposition from
some Vietnamese who fled the country after the fall of Saigon in 1975. 

Earlier this year, 19 ethnic Vietnamese were deported from Cambodia to
Vietnam when they were linked to groups looking to topple the communist
government in Hanoi. 

Police say they were members of the People's Action Party for Vietnam. The
San Jose, California-based party has about 50,000 members who advocate the
non-violent ouster of the Communist Party. 

The Vietnam Salvation Resistance Front, however, allegedly has been
plotting a series of terrorist operations under the code names
"Flamboyant" and "Orchid." 

It is not the first time overseas Vietnamese have been accused of planning
terrorist acts in Vietnam. In 1993, a Vietnamese-American was sentenced to
life in prison by Ho Chi Minh City's Supreme People's Court for plotting
to set off bombs in the city. 
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Winds kill two, hit rice crops in central Vietnam 

Hanoi, June 17 (Reuter) - A cyclone and whirlwinds with torrential rain
killed two people and damaged hundreds of hectares of rice fields in
central Vietnam at the end of last week, the official Vietnam News Agency
(VNA) said on Tuesday. 

VNA said the cyclone hit Me Linh village in the central highlands province
of Lam Dong on Saturday, killing two, injuring two, damaging several
houses and destroying trees and crops. 

Whirlwinds and heavy rains in Thang Binh district of Quang Nam province
the previous day destroyed 149 houses and blew the roof off hundreds of
others. 

"The disaster also pulled down trees, damaged electricity lines and badly
affected hundreds of hectares of rice," it said. "Losses are estimated at
about one billion dong ($85,800)." 

Meanwhile, a drought lasting from April to mid-June in the northern
mountainous province of Son La has caused serious water shortages,
destroying 20 hectares (49 acres) of newly planted summer rice. 

It said the drought and heat-wave had also caused heavy damage to other
crops on terraced fields, causing an estimated 45 billion dong ($3.86
million) in agricultural losses -- nearly half of the province's targeted
revenue for 1997. 
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Vietnam pledges support for Burma's entry into ASEAN

HANOI, June 17 (AFP) - Vice Prime Minister Phan Van Khai told a visiting
Burmese senior official Vietnam would do everything possible to help Burma
join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a report said on
Tuesday. 

Receiving U Than Shwe, cabinet minister and Director of the Prime
Minister's Office of Burma, Khai on Monday said: "Vietnam would do its
best to support Myanmar to soon join Asean." 

Shwe told Khai he was pleased with the working results with the Ho Chi
Minh Communist Youth Union in the fields of education of cultural
tradition, revolutionary struggle and patriotism among the youth, the
official Vietnam News Agency reported. 

Burma, Cambodia and Laos are set to join the regional grouping which
includes Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and
Vietnam at the annual ministerial meeting on July 24 to 25 in Malaysia. 
  _________________________________________________________________

Vietnam official defines future for journalism

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, June 17 (Reuter) - A senior Vietnamese military
official spelt out on Tuesday his vision of the future for the communist
country's state media, saying journalists should remain a vanguard of
socialism. 

Lieutenant-General Le Kha Phieu, one of the most senior members of the
elite politburo and considered a contender for a future leadership role,
said in an interview that Vietnam's journalists would continue to be
required to place ideology above all else. 

Phieu said the past decade of reforms had seen a maturing and development
of a media born out of the suffering of war, but added that the new
post-renovation period would present Vietnam's press with more complex
challenges. 

"My wish is that you will always be vanguard soldiers in the political and
ideological front," he told the Ho Chi Minh City Police newspaper in an
interview to mark this week's Vietnam Journalists' Day. 

"Be tough, strong soldiers in the causes of reform and of building and
defending the socialist fatherland while devoting all your heart and
wisdom to those causes." 

Le Kha Phieu is a powerful member of Vietnam's ruling elite, ranks fifth
on the politburo and holds a position in the inner Standing Board -- the
country's core decision-making body. 

Political analysts say his influence and power have been in the ascendancy
since President Le Duc Anh, 76, suffered a stroke in November. He is
therefore seen by some as a possible candidate for a future leadership
role. 

But his comments about the media also come in the run up to an expected
policy meeting about the future role of newspapers, television and radio
in Vietnam. 

Phieu said that while progress had been made over the past decade in
improving the quality of the national media, it would be necessary at that
meeting to examine issues including the balance between the quantity of
newspapers available in Vietnam and their quality, as well as the impact
of commercialism. 

"There are many things we will have to do," he said. "We will, and have
to, successfully fulfil the function of the media in the new period to
build spiritual sections in a bridge connecting the Party and people, and
policies, life and reality." 

Vietnam's state media remains tightly controlled and subject to close
political scrutiny, despite a big increase in the number of newspapers and
periodicals available since capitalist-style reforms were launched in
1986. 

A major Communist Party congress last year defined its continuing and
primary role as being a propaganda tool for the state. Since then,
government officials have called for measures aimed at enhancing its
accuracy, presentation and readability. 

State control of what the media reports is partially defined through
secrecy laws. But a range of other topics are also considered sensitive
and, therefore, off-limits, including contradictions between Vietnam's
communist ideology and free-market economy. 
  _________________________________________________________________

Vietnamese Newspaper Highlights - June 16, 1997 

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

NHAN DAN:

- The Hanoi People's Committee in coordination with the Ministry of
Construction started the construction of a housing area on outskirts of
Hanoi yesterday. 

- In response to the Month for Vietnamese Children, the Ministry of Health
will perform operations on 1,000 cases of deformed children in the second
half of this year. 

VIETNAM NEWS:

- Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet has announce that future sporting and
cultural events in Vietnam could not longer be sponsored by foreign
tobacco and alcohol companies. 

- Vietnam nationals living abroad who return in time can vote in the
National Assembly election. 

- Vietnam's first ever International Interactive Networking and
Intranet/Internet Technology Expo97 opened in Ho Chi Minh city last
Saturday. 

HANOI MOI:

- Iran's First Vice-President, Hassan Habibi, will pay an official visit
to Vietnam next week. 
  _________________________________________________________________

Vietnam Issues New Regulations On Drugs 

Hanoi, June 16 (VNA) - The Drug Administration of Vietnam under the
Ministry of Health has organised a conference to inform foreign companies
of Vietnam's amended drug regulations in Hanoi. 

At the conference, the ministry issued changes to the regulations for the
registration of domestic and foreign-made drugs sold in Vietnam, effective
from April 25 and regulations on the provision of information and the
advertising of drugs and cosmetics, effective from March 1. 

The amended registration application for domestic or foreign drugs must be
prepared in triplicate of which at least one set is an original or
notarised legal copy. Registration documents for foreign drugs must be in
Vietnamese and supplemented by English or French versions. 

The Drug Administration has licensed 253 foreign pharmaceutical companies
to operate in Vietnam and allowed the circulation of 3,727 medical items
from 28 nations. Companies from India, France, the Republic of Korea,
Singapore, Germany and Switzerland dominate the market. 

The promulgation of Vietnam's National Drug Policy (NDP) in 1996 was the
basis for the pharmaceutical sector and the health sector in providing
high quality healthcare and protection to the people. 

The NDP objectives are to ensure a sufficient supply of high quality drugs
at affordable prices, promote equity in the supply of drugs to patients,
give priority to essential drugs and emphasise the special importance of
traditional medicine. 
  _________________________________________________________________

McNamara in Hanoi

Finacial Times - Former US defence secretary Robert McNamara, US academics
and Vietnamese officials attend a seminar in Hanoi to discuss "Missed
Opportunities in US-Vietnamese History" (to June 22). 
  _________________________________________________________________

Statoil to build liquefied petroleum gas project in Vietnam

HANOI, June 17 (AFP) - Norwegian oil company Statoil is to build a
liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) bottling plant in the southern Vietnamese
city of Can Tho, the Saigon Times daily reported Tuesday. 

Statoil planned to take a 55 percent stake in a 6.7 million dollar joint
venture with state-owned PetroVietnam taking 25 percent and 20 percent
going to Can Tho Livestock and Agro Product Import Export Company, it
said. 

A Statoil official said the group was conducting a feasibility study of
the project but was unable to confirm the detailed ownership breakdown as
it had yet to be licenced. 
           
Statoil will be competing with other foreign oil companies in the LPG
business including Total of France and Royal Dutch Shell of the
Netherlands. 

Statoil also has a substantial interest in an offshore gas field in the
Nam Con Son basin with British Petroleum (BP), ONGC of India and
Petrovietnam. 
  _________________________________________________________________

Over 1,500 Vietnam boatpeople in Hong Kong limbo

HONG KONG, June 17 (Reuter) - More than 1,500 Vietnamese boatpeople are
stuck in a Hong Kong limbo, two weeks before the British colony reverts to
China, a United Nations refugee coordinator said on Tuesday. 

Their future became uncertain after they were rejected for resettlement
abroad or found to be stateless. 

Jean-Noel Wetterwald, Hong Kong representative of the office Of the U.N.
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said there are 2,339 Vietnamese
migrants now stranded in Hong Kong. 

While 1,595 were recognised as refugees entitled to be resettled in third
countries, only about 500 of these were being screened by potential
resettlement countries, and the fate of the rest remained up in the air. 

"About 900 have been rejected and rejected again by the resettlement
countries, so we made a last appeal in Geneva...on the ground that we are
about to close this long saga and we don't want to leave any Vietnamese on
our way," Wetterwald said. 

He acknowledged the remaining refugees were the hardest to resettle, many
with records that made countries hesitate to take them, but stressed they
should be given another look. 

"They are not all serious criminal offenders, they are not all criminal
addicts, they are not all mentally ill," he said. 

Another 526 people were found to be stateless, citizens of no country with
nowhere to go, he said. The final 218 of those remaining are due to be
deported back to Vietnam. 

Wetterwald said the UNHCR had already approached Beijing and the Hong Kong
government-in-waiting about the boatpeople who had been rejected for
resettlement or found to be stateless. 

He said the UNHCR had so far received no response, but added he expected
an answer after Hong Kong becomes part of China and that he hoped to solve
the problem by the end of the year. 

Beijing has demanded that the departing British colonial government in
Hong Kong clear the remaining boatpeople before the territory reverts to
China at midnight of June 30. 

Hong Hong has been struggling to bring an end to the 20-year old
"boatpeople" misery. The few remaining here are among the last of a
two-million strong tide of people who fled Vietnam on flimsy boats after
the Communists won the Vietnam war in 1975. 

Over 200,000 Vietnamese have reached Hong Kong since 1975. 

Of those, 143,000 were resettled abroad, and 67,000 were judged to be
economic migrants ineligible for resettlement and were sent back to
Vietnam. 

Wetterwald said the Hong Kong government's role was essentially over with
the closure of the last detention centre in the territory, the Whitehead
camp, on Monday. 

The remainder, the refugees and the stateless, were mostly housed in an
open camp, Pillar Point, which is run by the UNHCR. 

While not all the refugees will have been resettled or repatriated by Hong
Kong's handover, Wetterwald said Hong Kong authorities and UNHCR had made
great strides in reducing the number from 6,000 just three months ago. 

"Our objective was to come to June 30 with the smallest number of
persons," Wetterwald said. 
  _________________________________________________________________

After 27 Years, Vietnam Is Almost Fun
The war is a fading memory except among Americans coming back to
confront ghosts. 

By ROBERT SCHEER
Los Angeles Times
06/17/97

Hanoi -- Returning to Vietnam after a 27-year absence is a mind-boggling
travel adventure, as one can romp freely in provinces that were dangerous
or off limits during the war. Who would have thought that the once heavily
fortified beaches of Ha Long Bay would now be advertised as Vietnam's
alternative to the French Riviera, with Western tourists on rented Jet
Skis patrolling the waters off the infamous Gulf of Tonkin? Or that even
the chubbiest visiting businessman feels the need to crawl through the
vast network of underground tunnels down south in Cu Chi used by the Viet
Cong to win the war? 

Vietnam has been a war zone for most of this century, and it is only now
that the country is coming to terms with peace as a normal condition. On
my last visit to what was then North Vietnam, the effects of the bombing,
particularly the human costs, were so maddening that I doubted this land
would ever be made whole. But nature is a magnificent healer, and the
cascading green of the rice paddies seems to have forgiven all. Vietnam is
now the third-largest exporter of rice and coffee in the world, and
substantial foreign investment holds the prospect that peace may bring
prosperity to this still very poor nation. 

Best of all, the majority of the population is under the age that knew
firsthand the horrors of war and is optimistic about the future. It may
disappoint their elders that they care more about purchasing a moped than
absorbing political slogans of the past, but then again, this is one
country that has been exhausted by politics. The return as visitors of
large numbers of Vietnamese who fled is further confirmation that life
goes on. 

Finally, the U.S. has given up the ghost on its posture of outraged
innocence. It is somewhat ironic to interview U.S. Ambassador Douglas
"Pete" Peterson at his temporary quarters near the " Hanoi Hilton," where
he spent 6 1/2 years as a prisoner of war. Peterson, the first U.S.
diplomat stationed in Hanoi in almost half a century, has a brick on his
desk from the old jail over a caption saying "closure." Only a small
corner of the prison remains, as a huge multinational joint venture
skyscraper hotel shoots up into the rapidly changing Hanoi skyline. 

Peterson is an impressive man given to a poetic sensibility that
complements the stoicism born of his harsh experience. As he told me in an
interview for Microsoft's online magazine, Mungo Park: 

"This brick represents a significant part of my life in the past, but I'm
going to use that brick as a building block for the future, because that's
what this is all about. I've reconciled, certainly for myself, all of the
experience that I had here, and I'm very comfortable with that. I feel
that it's a great honor for me to be able to come back here, after having
been in a very destructive process, and do something constructive." 

As Peterson reminds, he was a 31-year-old Air Force captain doing his duty
unquestioningly and without access to the data available to those who
sponsored this war. Others do not have that excuse. Continuing to set the
international standard for hubris, Robert McNamara, who sent Peterson into
battle and has since written a memoir concluding that the war was a
mistake, will be here this weekend to address a conference with his former
enemies on "missed opportunities" of the war. 

While it is good that everyone can now make nice, common decency compels a
moment of silence for the 3 million Vietnamese, 2 million Cambodians and
58,000 Americans who died because the best and the brightest in Washington
thought it essential to intrude in a local civil war. The "missed
opportunity" of the Vietnam War was the failure of our government leaders
and leading pundits to ever acknowledge that they didn't know what they
were talking about. 

We fought in Vietnam ostensibly to stop Chinese communism, and the
Vietnamese were pictured as mere agents of their nightmare neighbor to the
north. McNamara was a fool not to know that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist,
and that no Vietnamese nationalist would ever be subservient to China, a
nation that occupied Vietnam for 1,000 years. That's why, when the U.S.
lost and Saigon fell, Vietnam and China went to war. 

It is unconscionable for McNamara not to have known about the historic
tension between China and Vietnam, or the obvious fragmentation of
international communism including the Sino-Soviet dispute, long before he
sent millions to war. He should stop making a career out of the continual
confession of his ignorance. 
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