VN news (June 23)

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

Vietnam appears set for top leadership change with new election
Former foes poles apart as Vietnam War meet ends
McNamara: Vietnam War Could Have Been Avoided
"Apocalypse Now" director wins nod for film project in Vietnam
Vietnam reserves in Hanoi defence exercise--paper 
Nike's Troubles Simmer in Vietnam 
Workers Speak Up in Vietnam
Hanoi prepares for rights attack by visiting Albright
Agent Orange Haunts U.S.-Vietnam Ties
Albright to seal copyright pact with Vietnam
Vietnam may curb foreign content in advertising: report

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Vietnam appears set for top leadership change with new election

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
06/23/97

Hanoi (dpa) - The three top Vietnamese leaders have not registered to
run for the upcoming National Assembly, strongly suggesting that they
will step down in the next few months, political analysts said Monday.

The state-controlled press reported Monday that 666 candidates have been
accepted to contest 450 seats in the National Assembly but the names
of President Le Duch Anh, 76, Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet, 75, and Communist
Party chief Do Muoi, 80, were not among those listed.

The elections are to be held July 20 and the new National Assembly, which
will have a five-year term, must convene its first meeting within two
months of that date to ratify new state leaders.

According to the current constitution, the president and prime minister
must also be National Assembly members, and in practice this has also
been the case for the party chief.

Replacing the ageing troika with younger leaders has been a major issue
within the ruling party, which seeks to maintain its leading role in
governing an increasingly complex reform process.

But as the reform process has sputtered to a near standstill -with a
consequent drop in foreign investment - there is a mounting sense of
urgency within the party for more dramatic change, analysts say.

"More important than these personnel changes are policy changes and
I think they [the Party] are aware that they are soon going to have to
make some major decisions," one foreign analyst with close ties to the
party said.

He said the banking sector - now generally regarded as in a state of
crisis with fast-mounting debts - is one example of an area in which
the party realizes it must implement sweeping changes but about which
it remains deeply unsure of how to proceed for fear of exacerbating the
situation.

It is unclear how much new thinking would be ushered in by a change in
leadership, which at any rate is expected to maintain a traditional balance
between conservatives and the more reform-minded.

It is generally acceptable that Deputy Prime Minister Pham Van Khai,
64, a highly regarded technocrat, will succeed his mentor, Prime Minister
Kiet, a fellow southerner.

Nguyen Manh Cam, 68, currently Hanoi's foreign minister, is widely viewed
as the favoured candidate for the presidential post, generally the least
powerful of the three top positions.

Le Kha Phieu, 65, a political commissar who has spent his entire career
in the army and who is regarded as the most conservative of the three,
is seen as the heir-apparent to Muoi.

"He is already running the party," says one well-informed diplomat,
who notes Phieu's ascendancy to what is in effect the first-among-equals
position reflects the increasing importance of the military in the ruling
party.

Nong Duch Manh, 57, the chairman of the National Assembly, is sometimes
also cited as a possible presidential candidate.

But most observers think Cam's ability to speak French and English -
in addition to Russian, a language he shares with Manh, a forester trained
in Leningrad - makes him more suitable for the often ceremonial post.

These skills are especially important given that Hanoi will soon host
two major international conferences - the Francophone summit in November
and the ASEAN summit the following year.

Intense infighting during the months leading up to last summer's landmark
national party congress failed to resolve the leadership issue, which
now appears to have been settled during a recent plenum of the much smaller
party central committee.

Long regarded as rubber-stamp body, the Vietnamese National Assembly
is gradually assuming the role of most other parliaments as an independent
branch of government.

But today it still remains largely a creature of the Communist Party
which vets all candidates, only 11 of which are non-party members, according
to press accounts Monday.

Another Party Central Committee meeting after the July elections will
finalize leadership changes which will be formally approved by the assembly,
say diplomats.

Monday's edition of the party's principal propaganda organ, Nhan Dan
(People), ran an incomplete listing of assembly candidates but other
sources say the top current three leaders are not expected to appear
in subsequent lists.

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Former foes poles apart as Vietnam War meet ends 

By Adrian Edwards

HANOI, June 23 (Reuter) - Former top policy-makers from the United States
and Vietnam ended an historic conference on the Vietnam War on Monday,
but substantial gaps remained between the two sides over one of the bloodiest
conflicts of this century.

At a news conference after the meeting ended, former U.S. Defence Secretary
Robert McNamara said the four-day event had demonstrated that as early
as 1961 both Hanoi and Washington had been "seriously mistaken" about
each others' motives and intentions.

"These basic misperceptions, in my opinion, prevented each side from
moving to terminate the conflict at several different points between
1960 and 1968," he said.

"Had we in the U.S. recognised that, we would have had a very different
outcome."

Vietnamese officials responded by saying that while there had been missed
opportunities to end the war sooner, or even to avoid it, they were missed
by Washington and not Hanoi.

"War was imposed on us," said Tran Quang Co, a senior member of the
Vietnamese delegation. "This was not our decision. It did not take place
in U.S. territory. Given that fact, who suffered more? It was our people."

The United States never declared war against Vietnam, but its entanglement
began during the late 1950s and early 1960s in a conflict which was to
escalate and drag on until the climactic fall of U.S.-backed Saigon on
April 30, 1975.

By then some 58,000 Americans, 3.6 million Vietnamese and thousands of
others from third countries who took part were dead.

In South Vietnam, millions who had lived under a capitalist regime backed
by the United States found themselves under Hanoi's communist rule. Thousands
were sent to re-education centres or so-called New Economic Zones.

More than a million others left the country in a refugee exodus which
has still not been finally resolved.

Since the war ended, Hanoi's victory has remained a central theme of
state propaganda and is considered a mainstay of the Communist government's
claim to legitimacy.

Analysts said that could explain Vietnam's difficulty at the meeting
-- a first-ever gathering of leading academics and former decision-makers
from both sides -- in viewing the conflict in any other way.

McNamara said that in his opinion the United States had misjudged the
degree to which Hanoi had been willing to sacrifice human lives to achieve
its goal of an independent and unified Vietnam.

But he replied to Co's remarks by saying that there had been opportunities
for Hanoi as well as Washington to end the conflict sooner.

"I submit to you that the Vietnamese mindset was just as firm (as ours),
and I think firmly wrong," he said.

"For God sakes apply this lesson to today and tomorrow. Think about
it...There are misconceptions in the minds of political leaders (worldwide)
that stand in the way of moving towards their common interests."

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McNamara: Vietnam War Could Have Been Avoided 

By Adrian Edwards

HANOI (Reuter) - Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key
architect of the Vietnam War, said Monday the conflict could have been
halted more than a decade before it ended, or avoided altogether.

McNamara, 81, told Reuters in an interview here following a weekend conference
with former top Vietnamese policymakers that it was clear both Hanoi
and Washington had missed chances to halt a war which cost more than
3.6 million lives.

"I think in some respects it could have been avoided," he said. "If it
hadn't been avoided, I think it could have been terminated much, much
earlier."

For example, he said, Vietnam and the United States had failed to study
fully a proposal made by France's General Charles De Gaulle in the early
1960s for neutrality in Vietnam.

"It got very short shrift," he said. "And yet in discussing the subject
here it appears to me that we could each have been in roughly the same
position we're in today...had we accepted neutralisation along the lines
de Gaulle probably had in mind in 1962-64. So that was a missed opportunity."

McNamara, who served as defense chief under the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations before leaving office in 1968, oversaw the build-up of
U.S. combat troops and personnel in Vietnam and Indochina in a war that
eventually proved unwinnable. 

In memoirs published in 1995, he sparked controversy by saying that he
and other U.S. policymakers had been "terribly wrong" to have allowed
the conflict to escalate.

McNamara, who last visited Hanoi in 1995 just months after the normalization
of diplomatic ties, said he now felt the risks of Vietnam succumbing
to Chinese or Soviet control -- a tenet of the so-called domino theory
-- had been overstated.

"Did we exaggerate the danger? I think so," he said. "It is less and
less likely to me that they (the Vietnamese) would have permitted a unified,
independent Vietnam to be used as a Chinese base or Russian base for
extension of Chinese or Soviet hegemony across Asia. And yet that's what
we feared at the time."

But McNamara added that U.S. concerns about the risks associated with
an all-out invasion of North Vietnam -- including the possibility of
a nuclear war with China -- had nonetheless been justified.

He said delegates to this weekend's conference had learned that Vietnam's
late President Ho Chi Minh and its former Prime Minister Pham Van Dong
had visited Beijing twice during the early 1960s and received assurances
from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai that Chinese combat forces would help
counter any U.S. invasion.

"What I've heard here makes it (an invasion of North Vietnam) sound even
more dangerous. Thank God we didn't do it."

The Vietnam War ended in 1975 with the fall of U.S.-backed Saigon to
the forces of Communist North Vietnam. Agreement for the withdrawal of
U.S. forces had been reached in January 1973 at talks in Paris.

At the end of the war the cost in terms of human lives was 58,000 Americans,
3.6 million Vietnamese and thousands more combatants from third countries.

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"Apocalypse Now" director wins nod for film project in Vietnam

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
06/23/97

Hanoi (dpa) - American director Francis Ford Coppola's film company is
set to make the first U.S. film in Vietnam since the end of the war after
winning permission from cultural authorities, officials said Monday.

The film is based on the book "Sparring with Charlie", an account of
writer Christopher Hunt's 1994 motorbike trip along the famous Ho Chi
Minh Trail, used by North Vietnamese Communists to infiltrate men and
material to the southern battlefields.

Charlie Sheen, son of "Apocalypse Now" star Martin Sheen has been mooted
to play the leading role, according to local press reports.

It is unclear if Coppola himself would be directing the film or someone
else contracted by his Zoetrope Film studio.

"We have checked the script and we are sure its content is positive,"
said Do Duy Anh, international relations chief for the Vietnam Cinema
Department, part of Hanoi's Ministry of Culture.

Some changes were reportedly made to the scripts in accordance with the
Ministry's "suggestions", a report in the weekly Vietnam Investment
Review said, but Anh stated he did not know about these.

Anh said officials would be present during the shooting to make sure
there were no deviations from the approved script.

Four other American film projects have been approved by Vietnamese officials,
including a script based on Grahman Greene's "The Quiet American",
but none have actually gotten underway because of financing difficulties,
Anh said in an interview Monday.

He said shooting for Coppola's film, which will take the crew the length
of the country, could start anytime after permission was granted last
week.

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Vietnam reserves in Hanoi defence exercise--paper 

HANOI, June 23 (Reuter) - Vietnam's military reserves carried out large-scale
manoeuvres in Hanoi at the weekend to practice defending the capital,
the official Hanoi Moi daily said on Monday.

Military officials declined to confirm the report, which said that the
live-ammunition exercise took place on Saturday in an area stretching
120 km (75 miles) across the city and its rural suburbs.

The exercise went unnoticed by many city residents.

"The reserve force's technical and tactical knowledge is quite solid
and skillful," the paper said, noting that reserve groups had demonstrated
their readiness to destroy the enemy, restore normal life and protect
the lives and property of the people.

Vietnam's armed forces number an estimated 572,000 people plus a strategic
reserve force of three to four million.

The ruling Communist Party, which derives much of its legitimacy from
military victories against the French and Americans in the past 50 years,
frequently calls for efforts to keep the army in readiness to defend
the country.

Hanoi Moi said that along with developing the economy and society, Hanoi's
authorities and party branches should create favourable conditions to
build security forces in the capital.

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Nike's Troubles Simmer in Vietnam 

CU CHI, Vietnam (AP) -- Nike promotes its athletic shoes around the world
with the ringing imperative "Just Do It!"

The 6,000 workers at a Cu Chi factory that supplies Nike feel the slogan
could just as easily be the barked order of a production manager demanding
more output no matter what the working conditions.

Employees at the Sam Yang Co. factory say they have been smacked with
shoes, intimidated into signing unfavorable individual contracts, verbally
harassed, forced to work overtime with no advance notice and threatened
with arbitrary firings.

The claims are troubling for Nike.

"It's a real concern," said Martha Benson, regional spokeswoman for
the American company. "It's important for Nike to be seen as the best
employer in Vietnam."

Calling the reports of trouble at Nike suppliers aberrations, Ms. Benson
said complaints are being addressed and labor relations are on the mend.

She said Nike contributes to Vietnam's development by teaching skills
and creating jobs.

Indeed, in rural Vietnam, where the jobless rate runs upwards of 27 percent,
Nike provides much needed employment.

Some workers wonder, however, at what cost.

"It's difficult to handle the situation with foreign employers," said
Ho Thi Thanh, a union representative at the Sam Yang factory. "There's
shouting and nasty words to get the workers to do more."

According to state news media, sweltering heat, corporal punishment and
degrading remarks from supervisors are routine at the South Korean-owned
Sam Yang, which contracts its work to Nike. Despite continued warnings
from Vietnam's Labor Ministry, the factory's Korean supervisors continue
to clash with workers.

Twice since last year, Sam Yang supervisors have hit Vietnamese workers
with rubber shoe soles, the government has said.

At a second Nike supplier, owned by Taiwanese investors, a manager forced
56 female workers to run laps as punishment for wearing the wrong shoes
to work earlier this year, media reports said.

Thanh said that at Sam Yang, each production line of about 50 women and
a handful of men is provided with one toilet pass and one water pass.

The workers must raise their hands and ask permission to use the toilet.
They are given the pass and told to return promptly, she said. Nobody
else can use the toilet until the card is returned.

The same routine is enforced for trips to the water fountain, despite
sweltering heat inside the factory.

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Workers Speak Up in Vietnam 

CU CHI, Vietnam (AP) -- Workers of the world unite, implored communism's
creator, Karl Marx. And in communist Vietnam, that's just what they're
starting to do.

More than four decades after the communists came to power in northern
Vietnam, this country is facing unprecedented discontent in its labor
force.

Fed up with abusive foreign supervisors and sweatshop conditions, Vietnamese
are walking off the job in record numbers in a country where strikes
were illegal up until three years ago.

Of the 24 legally recognized strikes during the first three months of
the year, 18 were in factories controlled by foreign investors.

The dilemma for Hanoi: How do you balance the country's growing dependency
on foreign investment while standing up for labor rights?

State news media have publicized some worker complaints to pressure foreign
business operations, but the government has remained neutral on the issues
of specific strikes, which often end with labor complaints unresolved.

Authorities are working on setting up labor courts to deal with disputes,
but so far, even with a labor code on the books to define worker rights
and employer obligations, enforcing the rules is proving an elusive goal.

"Strikes are occurring for different reasons. Primarily, we're seeing
that employers aren't protecting the rights of workers," said Phan Duc
Binh, a lawyer in the Labor Ministry. "Now we've got foreign investors
coming in who don't know anything about our rules."

In southern Vietnam, high-profile incidents of physical abuse against
employees at factories working under contract to the American footwear
giant Nike have fueled charges that foreign companies exploit Vietnamese
labor.

That, and the growing disparity between Vietnam's neophyte capitalists
and the labor force, underscores an awkward rift that begs the Communist
Party's authority and mandate.

"This is not only a country that needs foreign investment," said Binh,
"We need to build a system of law that protects the worker."

It is the ultimate contradiction in Vietnam, a self-professed workers
haven.

Ho Chi Minh and other Vietnamese nationalists took on communism in the
1930s as a convenient ally in the fight against French colonial rule.

When North Vietnam in the 1950s proclaimed itself a communist republic,
it was scarcely an industrialized society -- a basic requisite for communism.

Only now, as the economic doctrines of communist rule wane, is the country
beginning to develop heavy industry and a manufacturing capability. And
a labor movement is emerging, bringing demands for equality, respect
and a bigger share of the country's wealth.

Foreign investment is creating more and better paying jobs, and the standard
of living in cities is on the rise -- albeit modestly.

Yet more and more workers feel reduced to cogs in a machine directed
by foreign money and Vietnamese partners.

Less than 3,000 people nationwide went on strike in 1994. Two years later,
quadruple that number walked out in Ho Chi Minh City alone. The trend
is still on the rise.

"We often complain to our supervisors that we aren't machines, we're
human beings," said Ho Thi Thanh, a union representative at Nike's troubled
shoe operation in Cu Chi, some 25 miles from Ho Chi Minh City.

Down a dust-choked road from the South Korean-owned Sam Yang Co. factory,
which works for Nike, Thanh balanced on a tiny plastic stool at a tea
stall and explained the difficulties at her troubled workplace.

Last month, a line supervisor smacked a worker across the hip with the
sole of a Nike sneaker to make the employee work faster.

It was a repeat performance of a highly publicized incident last year,
when a South Korean floor manager used the rubber sole of a shoe to beat
an employee over the head. An ad hoc Vietnamese labor tribunal gave that
woman a three-month suspended prison term.

Nike says it has intervened and now insists labor relations are on the
mend in its factories -- all of which are closed to journalists except
by guided tour with a Nike regional executive from Hong Kong.

Thanh, however, said problems still plague Sam Yang. The factory's workers
are still without a group contract, leaving them vulnerable to random
firings with little recourse as a union, she said.

"Now if you complain, the supervisors begin looking for reasons to fire
you," she said.

Similar troubles are reported at factories in Ho Chi Minh City, the capital,
Hanoi, and the port city of Haiphong.

Apart from outright abuse, many workers at both foreign-owned and state-run
companies complain of harsh working conditions and low wages.

On the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, thousands of young men and women
toil in the state-owned An Lac Footwear Co.

Even outside, the clatter of the factory's manual sewing machines is
a deafening hum. Inside, ceiling fans whirl in a futile effort to cut
the suffocating heat. The summer sun shining down on the factory's corrugated
metal roof can send the temperature inside soaring to nearly 100 degrees.
Women are jammed along a series of assembly lines that churn out up to
7,000 pairs of shoes each day for Adidas, Fila and All-Star.

For their labors, employees at foreign-owned factories earn about 20
cents an hour, the minimum wage set by a government keen to attract foreign
investment.

Although foreign labor activists have focused attention on such wages,
by Vietnamese standards, the pay isn't bad, concedes Thanh, the union
representative at Sam Yang. It produces an annual income of roughly $600
a year, which is half the average income in Ho Chi Minh City but about
four times annual earnings in rural areas.

Employee complaints center more on working conditions.

For Vietnam's one-party government, calming the uneasy laborers is a
delicate balancing act between ideology and pragmatism.

It is the influx of foreign investment that in many cases salvaged factories
that atrophied under Vietnam's centrally planned economy.

Before South Vietnam fell in 1975, An Lac Footwear produced shoes for
Bata, a Canadian footwear company. With the communists ascendant in Vietnam,
An Lac became a primary supplier of shoe uppers for the Soviet Union.
With the Soviet collapse in 1991, An Lac was left holding 70,000 unsold
uppers.

Foreign investment from Taiwan and South Korea in the mid-1990s saved
the factory with orders from major shoe companies from around the world.

"Since foreign employers came to Vietnam they have offered more jobs,"
Thanh, the Sam Yang worker, conceded. "But they are also bringing problems."

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Hanoi prepares for rights attack by visiting Albright 

South China Morning Post
06/22/97

Vietnam is bracing itself for an attack on its human rights record with
the visit this week of American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

The outspoken Ms Albright is set to move rights' issues up the agenda
during her visit on Thursday, the first since the arrival of US Ambassador
Pete Peterson last month.

She is expected to detail State Department concerns over religious, political
and immigration freedoms in the Communist-ruled state, diplomats said.

State involvement in all religious affairs is likely to be a particularly
sore point, reflecting considerable congressional fervour over any
international threat to freedom of belief. 

The continued hunt for the remains of missing American servicemen in
Vietnam and slower-than-expected trade talks would also be a priority,
diplomats said.

But Hanoi officials are making clear any rights criticism could fall
on deaf ears given the impact of the Vietnam War and a continuing lack
of development aid from Washington.

"Any criticism from the US is simply not acceptable and is likely to
create problems," one senior official said privately.

In an apparent pre-emptive strike to the visit, Vietnam's state media
have been running a string of reports detailing the impact of the war.

The official Vietnam News Agency has claimed the war, which ended after
22 years, continues to exact a considerable toll in lives and suffering.

Children continued to be killed and maimed by unexploded bombs dropped
across the country by US fighters.

The legacy of the defoliant Agent Orange sprayed by US forces has been
given particular attention. Reports claim that deformed children are
still being born and two million people have been affected by the toxin.

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Agent Orange Haunts U.S.-Vietnam Ties 

By Adrian Edwards

HANOI, Vietnam (Reuter) - Twenty-two years after the Vietnam war ended,
the silent and crippling legacy left here by the use of U.S. chemical
defoliants is stirring passions again.

As Hanoi prepares for a visit this week by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, it's as if all the old wounds have suddenly reopened.

Whether by coincidence or design, old frictions have resurfaced. Talk
of the war, of the appalling costs that Vietnam bore and of the folly
of U.S. involvement has been splashed across the state press.

Now, too, the scientists are publicly slugging things out.

In a telephone conversation this week from his Upper New York State home,
Arnold Schecter, a leading U.S. expert on Agent Orange, told Reuters
that Hanoi's efforts to promote joint research were less than sincere.

Schecter was a prominent member of an official mission which visited
Vietnam in 1995 to study the long-term impact of dioxin, a harmful chemical
contained in Agent Orange.

The mission ran into problems when their papers and samples were confiscated
at Hanoi airport. When Hanoi's 10-80 dioxin research committee recently
offered to hand the two-year-old documents and samples back, the U.S.
scientist blew a fuse.

"This is the second time I've received a fax from the 10-80 Committee
offering to pass on these things," Schecter said.

"But what does this mean? I'll believe it if they get into a car, drive
to the U.S. embassy in Hanoi and actually do it."

Hanoi's 10-80 Committee is a government organisation established to examine
the impact on Vietnam of chemicals used during the war.

Inside its offices, the walls are covered in pictures and diagrams showing
areas where defoliants were sprayed, dissected foodstuffs, deformed victims.
There are jars barely hidden behind a tatty curtain, containing grotesquely
deformed human embryos and babies preserved in fomaldehyde.

But officials are defensive in the extreme to any suggestion that its
function is more about propaganda than science, or that Vietnam's claims
about Agent Orange may be less than precise.

"International research has proven that during the whole war, 72 million
litres (2.43 million gallons) of chemicals were poured onto Vietnam,"
Vu Truong Huong of Vietnam's War Crimes Investigation Department was
quoted as saying in a recent newspaper interview.

"Over 40 million litres of that were dioxins. We have over 50,000 children
that have been born with horrific deformities. There is a link."

At the 10-80 committee itself, officials reacted with anger to Schecter's
comments.

"Schecter doesn't want the samples back. If he did, Vietnam would give
them," says Professor Hoang Dinh Cau, adding that by raising the issue
in public the American was jepoardising the prospects for future joint
research.

Schecter says the samples, which include food bought in local markets
and blood, are now useless. But he adds that political concerns may have
prompted Hanoi's decision in 1995 to seize them in the first place.

"At a high level in the Vietnamese government there is fear that should
dioxins be found in Vietnamese food then rice exports will be affected,
less tourists will come and U.S. chemical companies in Vietnam will be
upset," he said.

But while the arguments rage on, the real questions are why the debate
should happen at this juncture, and why issues related to a war that
ended more than 22 years ago should have surfaced now?

Some diplomats say that by flooding its state press with details of the
war and of the suffering among many who are still alive today, Hanoi
is paving the way for a compensation request from Washington.

Others are not so sure.

Analysts at a key U.S.-Vietnam conference this weekend on the Vietnam
War said Hanoi was raising the issue to pre-empt possible Albright broadsides
on issues such as human rights or cooperation on searching for Americans
missing in action.

That same motive could damage the chances of the conference -- an historic
meeting of U.S. and Vietnamese policymakers -- achieving its goal of
enabling both countries to come to terms.

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Albright to seal copyright pact with Vietnam 

HANOI, June 23 (Reuter) - The United States and Vietnam will sign a bilateral
copyright accord during a visit by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
at the end of this week, Vietnamese government and U.S. diplomats said
on Monday.

The two countries are seeking to quicken progress towards a comprehensive
trade pact and agreed to the terms of the copyright accord in April.

Albright will sign the accord in Hanoi on Friday before travelling to
Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam, Cambodia and then Hong Kong for
the handover of the British colony to China at midnight on June 30.

The agreement will give legal protection to U.S. copyright owners in
a country riddled with piracy, and provide similar security for Vietnamese
authors and producers in the United States.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a coalition
of associations representing U.S. industries, has said that piracy of
copyright materials in Vietnam inflicts more than $50 million in trade
losses a year and threatens the potential of U.S. exports to one of the
world's fastest growing markets.

Copies of foreign compact discs, many of them Chinese-made, sell in stores
in Vietnam for around $2 each and the U.S. computer giant Microsoft Corp
(MSFT.O) said last December that an estimated 99 percent of software
in Vietnam was pirated.

However, foreign business executives say there is no accurate way of
measuring the opportunity cost of piracy in Vietnam and other poor countries
because sales would be much lower if unpirated CDs and software were
sold at full price.

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Vietnam may curb foreign content in advertising: report 

HANOI, June 22 (AFP) - Vietnam may seek to curb foreign content in domestic
advertising campaigns to help boost the domestic industry, a local report
said on Sunday.

The weekly Vietnam Investment Review quoted a Ministry of Culture and
Information official as saying Vietnam is considering a ban on the import
of foreign produced advertisements.

"In the future we plan to step by step replace the image of foreigners
and views from abroad with Vietnamese images," Tran Hung, vice chief
inspector specializing in advertising told the paper.

Such a ban would be a blow for both foreign advertising firms and the
companies which use them, particularly consumer goods producers.

Multinational beverage companies could be most affected, as their slick
television spots promoting an affluent lifestyle are produced mainly
abroad as part of broad regional campaigns.

Vietnam launched a campaign to check the spread of foreign images in
the media for more than a year. In February 1996 it clamped down on foreign
billboards and logos in a move which coincided with an "anti-social evils"
campaign.

Last week the government announced it was clamping down on promotional
sponsorship activities of tobacco and alcohol companies, a move widely
interpreted as an attempt to check foreign influence.

Advertising of cigarettes and alchohol has never been legal, and manufacturers
of these goods have relied heavily on sponsorship.

"It's getting more and more difficult to do business here," said an executive
from the representative office of one of the biggest foreign ad agencies
here when the ban was announced.

She said the new measure is aimed at protecting both the domestic advertising
industry, and cigarette makers.

In another move widely interpreted as restricting the advertising activities
of foreign firms, the government announced last month its intention to
limit the amount of tax deductible advertising expense to two percent
of revenues.

Another instance of government efforts to protect domestic firms occured
earlier this year when Ho Chi Minh City refused Coca-Cola permission
to run a contest arguing it would give the soft drink an unfair advantage
over domestic beverage companies.

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