VN news (June 29)

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

Vietnam Congratulates China on Hong Kong's Return 
Consulate Signals New Era With Vietnam Diplomacy
Albright Bricks Over Saigon's Past
Vietnam appeal court likely to upheld drug death sentences 
Worker at Vietnam Nike supplier gets prison term ... 
Albright Impressed by Vietnamese 
Vietnam's Trade Deficit Declines in First Half of Year 

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Vietnam Congratulates China on Hong Kong's Return 

BEIJING (June 29) XINHUA - Vietnamese leaders have sent congratulations
to the Chinese leadership on Hong Kong's coming return to the motherland
on July 1.

On the occasion of Hong Kong's return to China, "we, on behalf of the
Communist Party of Vietnam and the Vietnamese government and people and
in our own names, extend our warmest felicitations to the Communist Party
of China, the Chinese government and people," Do Muoi, general-secretary
of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Le Duc Anh, Vietnamese president,
Vo Van Kiet, Vietnamese prime minister and Nong Duc Manh, chairman of
the Vietnamese National Assembly, said in their message on June 28.

"July 1, 1997 will mark the end of foreign colonial rule of more than
100 year over Hong Kong, which is a significant event that will go down
in the Chinese history," they said in their message to Chinese President
Jiang Zemin, Premier Li Peng and Chairman of the Standing Committee of
the National People's Congress Qiao Shi.

The event is also of great significance to international and regional
situation, the Vietnamese leaders said.

"We believe that under the creative formula of 'one country, two systems,'
'a high degree of autonomy in Hong Kong and Hong Hong people governing
Hong Kong,' Hong Kong will sustain its stability, prosperity and development,
which is not only in conformity with the wish of the Chinese people and
Hong Kong people, but also conducive to peace and the trend of development
in the region," they said.

The Communist Party of Vietnam, the Vietnamese Government and people
have persistently attached great importance to strengthening and developing
good neighborly relations and various mutual-beneficial cooperation between
Vietnam and China.

"We hope that the relations will be he Vietnamese government and promoted
on the basis of a long-term stability for the sake of the interests and
wishes of the people of the two countries as well as for the sake of
peace, stability and cooperation in the region and the world," they said.

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Consulate Signals New Era With Vietnam Diplomacy: Albright lays
brick of new building near old embassy, amid hopes for improved trade.

Los Angeles Times
06/29/97

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came
to the abandoned American Embassy compound here Saturday and in a vacant
lot laid the first brick for a new consulate, reestablishing after a
22-year absence the U.S. diplomatic presence in what was once Saigon.

The future consulate's site stands in the shadow of the old fortress-like
embassy, where U.S. Marines fought off Viet Cong attackers in the 1968
Tet offensive and from whose roof Ambassador Graham Martin and his staff
fled in 1975 at the end of what Vietnamese people call the American War.

"To be able to look toward the future while standing in the shadow of
the past makes this a very special occasion," Albright later commented.
She is the highest-ranking American official to visit this city since
Martin lifted off from the embassy roof in a helicopter.

The old embassy, which will probably be razed, has been empty since the
end of the war except when it was temporarily occupied by a state-run
Vietnamese oil company. Barbed wire still stretches across the top of
a high cement wall around the compound, and antennas that have not transmitted
any messages in a generation still sprout from the roof.

In a brief ceremony attended by diplomats, Communist officials and Vietnamese
businessmen, Albright, on her first trip to Vietnam, spoke of two peoples
making a shared journey from the depths "of tragedy to the destination
of deeper mutual respect." She said both sides are working toward a trade
agreement that could lead to the full normalization of relations between
Washington and Hanoi.

Because of the 1 million Vietnamese Americans who live in the United
States as a result of the war exodus, as well as because of growing U.S.
business interest in Vietnam, the future consulate is expected to be
extraordinarily busy. Albright said its staff of more than 100 Americans
and Vietnamese will probably issue upward of 20,000 immigrant visas and
75,000 non-immigrant visas a year. They will also provide services to
the 100,000 Americans who visit Vietnam annually.

Under terms of an agreement announced in Hanoi on Friday, Vietnam will
also open a consulate in the United States, in San Francisco. The two
sides also signed an agreement Friday protecting the copyrights of "intellectual
property such as books, films and CDs."

Beyond its importance for the 3,000 Americans who live in Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam's economic engine, the real significance of Albright's
visit was the promise that it could lead to improved conditions for foreign
investment and business.

Albright told Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet that she is disappointed in
the pace of Vietnam's economic and social reform and believes Vietnam's
sometimes uncertain steps toward a free-market economy need to be re-energized.
Western businesspeople eager to invest in the emerging economy of this
nation of 75 million people appear to agree.

*

The Western euphoria that accompanied Vietnam's move away from a state-run
Communist economy and the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo in 1994 has
clearly faded, and many businesspeople now say they were premature in
thinking that Vietnam would suddenly join Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia
and other economic "tigers" of Southeast Asia.

"I think what happened was that the enthusiasm of both sides [was] somewhat
based on ignorance," said American businessman Don De Vivo, whose group
has invested $60 million in Vietnam. "There is a learning curve, and
relationships like this take time.

" Vietnam really didn't know what foreign investment was and what implications
it held for the society and the government," De Vivo continued. "And
I think a lot of foreign investors saw Vietnam in terms of Thailand or
Singapore. So many of the signals were the same.

"We're just starting to understand how ignorant we were in the first
place, and the Vietnamese are starting to understand that foreign investment
isn't just money coming in. Investors want to take out more than they
put in. That is known as profit."

Albright, accompanied by Douglas "Pete" Peterson, the new U.S. ambassador,
who spent six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, greeted a
curious, friendly crowd of Vietnamese outside the old embassy after the
bricklaying ceremony. She then stopped to tour the central market, which
Viet Cong terrorists attacked regularly with grenades during the war
to cause civilian casualties. Spying a beaded black purse she liked and
having no local currency, she had to borrow 85,000 dong--about $7--from
Peterson to make the purchase.

Before leaving for Hong Kong to attend ceremonies marking the end of
British rule there, Albright and her advisors toured a hospital where
a U.S. organization called Operation Smile surgically corrects children's
cleft palates. At the end of the long table at which she and Peterson
were briefed, a bust of Ho Chi Minh stared down on them.

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Albright Bricks Over Saigon's Past
Consulate, Called `Milepost,' to Be Built Near Shell of Old Embassy 

By Thomas W. Lippman
Washington Post Staff Writer

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, June 28 -- With the abandoned hulk of the
former U.S. Embassy looming in the background, Secretary of State Madeleine
K. Albright troweled in a symbolic brick today to start construction
of a new American consulate here.

The United States is officially back in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh
City, 22 years after helicopters lifted off the embassy roof carrying
the last U.S. officials to safety as North Vietnamese troops took what
was then the capital of South Vietnam. Albright described her activities
today as "rebuilding the American presence in Saigon."

The new consulate will mark "a very significant milepost in the
development of relations between the United States and Vietnam," Albright
said. "U.S.-Vietnamese ties have broadened steadily as we have been able
to deal more and more successfully with the legacy of the past and thereby
been able to focus more and more of our attention on the promise of the
future. And it will be a very very busy future," she said, because the
consulate will rank near the top of U.S. missions in the number of visas
issued annually. 

Albright is the first secretary of state to visit the former Saigon since
the ignominious end of the war in 1975. Her program took her on an emotional
tour of the area's geography, familiar to tens of thousands of American
servicemen and civilians who served here a generation ago.

>From the construction site, adjacent to the abandoned embassy, she went
to the central market, on the edge of downtown, a few blocks from the
former military residence known as the Rex Hotel, to shop for gifts.
Then she went out to Cholon, the Chinese quarter, formerly home of the
troops' main PX, to talk to American business representatives gathered
in a lavish new hotel.

And then her motorcade rumbled out the Bien Hoa Highway, once the main
road to the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa and Army headquarters at Long Binh.
She visited a prosthetics and rehabilitation center where Vietnamese
disabled by war or disease are given wheelchairs and artificial limbs.
Founded by Vietnamese who fled to the United States after the war, the
center is partially funded by the U.S. foreign aid program.

There she helped a 9-year-old girl unable to walk because of polio roll
her wheelchair and saluted a man as he walked for the first time on an
artificial leg. He had lost his leg to a land mine.

"What has really moved me so deeply here the last couple of days is that
it is very hard to get away from the past," Albright said at an impromptu
news conference outside the Thu Duc Prosthetics and Vocational Training
Center. "We all, whether Americans or Vietnamese, are never going to
be fully able to put the past entirely behind us. But what I have been
deeply moved by is the desire to look to the future."

Twice a refugee during World War II, Albright was little affected personally
by the war in Vietnam. But her companion on her rounds today was Ambassador
Douglas "Pete" Peterson, who was a prisoner of war for six years after
his jet fighter was shot down over North Vietnam.

Peterson, a former member of Congress, took up his post in early May
as the first U.S. ambassador since the end of the war. According to embassy
staff members and Vietnamese journalists, he has quickly become a star,
recognized throughout the country as a living symbol of reconciliation.

Now that a U.S. Embassy is open in Hanoi and Albright has been here for
the symbolic start of work on a consulate, Peterson said, there are "no
more firsts" to be gotten through as relations are reestablished. "We're
here for the long term," he said.

Peterson likes to point out that more than half of Vietnam's 74 million
people are under age 25 and are more interested in pursuing economic
opportunities here than in dwelling on a past that means little to them.

Indeed, the Ho Chi Minh City that Albright toured today is vibrant with
development as the Communist government, like the one in China, pursues
economic liberalization and foreign investment. Hotels and high-rise
office buildings are rising from the Saigon River waterfront to the airport.
Gated communities of lavish villas dot the suburbs. Computer companies,
transportation firms, automobile dealerships and financial services companies
are providing jobs for thousands of young English-speaking workers.

Nevertheless, Albright said, the pace of economic reform is not quick
enough, and she told the Vietnamese leaders she met that they should
accelerate the privatization of state-owned industries and the removal
of barriers to investment.

Vietnam is not yet ready for a full trade agreement with the United States,
she said, but the Clinton administration "is committed to the full normalization
of diplomatic and economic relations."

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Vietnam appeal court likely to upheld drug death sentences 

Hanoi, June 29 (AFP) - Prosecutors in Vietnam's biggest drug smuggling
appeal hearing have recommended the Hanoi Supreme People's Court upholds
the death sentences for eight convicted heroin traffickers, reports said
Sunday.

The court is expected to follow the recommendation that the eight, including
former police captain Vu Xuan Truong, be executed for their part in a
massive heroin smuggling ring.

Prosecutors on Friday urged the court to uphold the sentences because
the defendents failed to provide compelling reasons why they should be
commuted, the Nhan Dan daily newspaper said.

Observers do not expect the court to show any leniency in a showcase
drug trial meant to send a stern signal to other traffickers. The country's
leaders have made a drugs crackdown a priority.

Nineteen of 22 people convicted on May 2 in connection with trafficking
more than 400 kilogrammes (880 pounds) of heroin and 500 kilos (1,100
pounds) of cocaine have appealed their sentences which ranged from a
suspended one-year jail term to the death penalty.

More than 60 people have been arrested in connection with the case.

The court heard four days of testimony from the defendents, but reports
said they gave conflicting evidence that would do little to advance their
defense.

Truong, who admits to having trafficked 4.9 kilos of heroin refused to
reveal to whom he sold the drugs.

Possession of 100 grams of heroin (.45 pounds) is punishable by death
in Vietnam.

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Worker at Vietnam Nike supplier gets prison term ... 

Hanoi , June 29 (AFP) - A Taiwanese supervisor at an exclusive Nike supplier
in southern Vietnam received a six-month prison sentence for abusing
her workers, a court official said at the weekend.

Hsu Jui Yun, who worked at Pou Chen Shoe Factory, was found guilty by
the Dong Nai Province People's court of "damaging the honour and dignity"
of her Vietnamese workers.

Hsu was found to have forced 56 women to run the 900-metre (2970-foot)
perimeter of the factory floor as punishment for wearing incorrect footware
on March 9, International Woman's day.

Twelve of the women reportedly fainted and were taken to hospital.

During the one-day trial which concluded on Friday, Hsu told the court:
"Now I feel what I did was not right. I got angry and lost my temper
and violated the company and Vietnamese law.

The incident at Pou Chen is not the only labour incident involving exclusive
Nike suppliers.

In April 1996 Nike exclusive supplier Sam Yang Company hit the news when
a Korean supervisor slapped 15 Vietnamese workers on the side of the
head with a shoe upper as punishment for poor quality.

In May, Sam Yang employees staged a strike to protest work conditions,
and the company decided to lay off 447 workers in June.

Pou Chen employs some 8,000 Vietnamese workers, most of them young women.
It is one of five foreign-owned exclusive Nike suppliers in Vietnam.

Though Nike has no investments of its own in Vietnam, the giant US shoe
and apparel company closely supervises operations at its suppliers. Nike
officials reached over the weekend declined to comment.

In order to make sure its suppliers toe the line, Nike appointed a dedicated
labour practices manager in Vietnam to help oversee the roughly 35,000
workers turning out products made exclusively for Nike.

In April Nike's director of communications for the Asia Pacific Region
Martha Benson flew into Vietnam from Hong Kong just days after a New
York-based Labour activist group highlighted low pay and instances of
corporal punishment at two of Nike's subcontracters in Southern Vietnam.

"We have had production managers who are Nike employees working in the
factories (in Vietnam) since day one. But we recognise the need to increase
the level of oversight, especially in working conditions and labour practices"
Benson told AFP at the time.

Nike followed up Benson's visit with a fact finding mission led by former
US ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, which found no evidence
of worker abuse.

However Young's consulting firm, Goodworks International, did not investigate
wages or living standards.

fb/nj

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Albright Impressed by Vietnamese 

By GEORGE GEDDA

HO CHI MINH CITY, June 28 (AP) - She bought a purse, a coolie hat, a
lacquered box and several large cuts of silk. After 15 minutes in Ho
Chi Minh City's large central market, Madeleine Albright had had enough.

"I feel faint," the secretary of state said.

Her fatigue was understandable: The heat at the sprawling emporium was
oppressive, as was the jostling gang of bodyguards, reporters and Vietnamese
around her.

But Albright found no hostility among the throngs of shoppers at the
market or anywhere else during a 22-hour stay in the city that was
American-dominated Saigon during a bitter 15-year struggle. Indeed, she
was impressed by the willingness of Vietnamese at all levels not to dwell
on the grim past. 

"What I have been deeply moved by is the desire of the people to look
towards the future," she said. "It seems evident to me that Americans
are very welcome."

Reconciliation was Albright's recurring theme in Vietnam. Her day began
a few dozen yards from the old American Embassy, a dilapidated symbol
of the bad old wartime days of a generation ago.

The embassy was once a nerve center for U.S. military campaigns against
the communist-led enemy. From the top of the embassy, streams of American
diplomats clambered aboard hovering helicopters in April 1975 ahead of
the advancing Viet Cong and North Korean troops.

On Saturday, the embassy hulking just next door, Albright presided at
a bricklaying ceremony that marked a symbolic beginning of construction
for a new consular office.

The significance of the event was not lost on Albright. Reflecting on
the ceremony later, she said, "To be able to look to the future while
standing in the shadow of the past, I think, made it a very special event."

The consular office means a renewed American diplomatic presence in Ho
Chi Minh City, capital of the American-backed, now-defunct South Vietnamese
government.

It is one thing for the United States to open an embassy in Hanoi, capital
of unified Vietnam and seat of the North Vietnam government during the
war. It's quite another to re-establish a presence in a city so closely
identified with the failed American war effort.

U.S. Ambassador Pete Peterson said the edifice soon to go up reflects
an American commitment "to the entire country, to bring America back
from north to south."

As part of her quest for reconciliation, Albright seized on humanitarian
efforts being undertaken here by the U.S. government and by American
charities and business.

She visited a facility run by Operation Smile, a Norfolk, Va.-based medical
services organization that has provided corrective surgery for thousands
of Vietnamese and others elsewhere with facial deformities.

Albright later went to a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded
facility providing prosthetic devices for victims of war.

During her stay, Albright repeatedly cited Peterson as a role model for
U.S.-Vietnamese reconciliation.

Peterson spent six years as a prisoner of North Vietnam during the war
and returned to Vietnam as ambassador in early May. He said he hasn't
forgotten but has forgiven his harsh years of imprisonment.

"You're not going to forget issues and experience in one's life. But
you can forgive, and I feel very strongly about that," he said.

"The fact that I suffered here is one part of my life, but the fact
that I can engage in something constructive and something that will take
us into the future is what this is all about."

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Vietnam's Trade Deficit Declines in First Half of Year 

HANOI (June 29) XINHUA - Vietnam's trade deficit declined by 37.8 percent
to 1.4 billion U.S. dollars in the first half of the year compared with
the same period last year, official statistics showed.

The decline was achieved thanks to government measures aimed at balancing
international payments and controlling inflation.

Exports in the six months increased more than 30 percent to 4.1 billion
dollars, figures showed.

The structure of imports has changed in the direction favorable to Vietnam's
economic development with increases registered only in the imports of
machinery, equipment, technology and raw materials.

Raw materials made up 89.5 percent of the total imports of 5.53 billion
U.S. dollars, it is shown.

Meanwhile, imports of consumer goods was down 10.2 percent compared to
the previous corresponding period.

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