Cohen Visits Vietnam for Landmark Talks

by Vu Kim Chung

17-3-2000

United States Defence Secretary William Cohen kicked off an historic visit to former enemy Vietnam on March 13, 2000 with wide-ranging talks with his counterpart that an American official described as "incredibly comfortable". The US ambassador to Vietnam, Pete Peterson, said Mr Cohen and General Pham Van Tra discussed possible military cooperation in demining and search and rescue operations. Mr Cohen also referred to joint efforts to account for the some 2,000 American servicemen listed as missing in action (MIA) from the Vietnam War as a "partnership", Mr Peterson added.

William Cohen walks past an honour guard accompanied by Vietnamese Defence Minister Pham Van Tra.

"I would characterise the meeting as very cordial, very comfortable," Mr Peterson told reporters travelling with Mr Cohen. "It [the exchange] was rather free-wheeling, without reading from notes. It was incredibly comfortable," he said. Mr Cohen, who later briefly met Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, was the first US defence secretary to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 in which the US-backed South Vietnam fell to the communist North.

His March 13 to 15 trip coincided with two months of events across the Southeast Asian nation to mark the 25^th anniversary of the end of that conflict on April 30.

Mr Peterson said Mr Cohen's visit signalled a new phase in relations between Hanoi and Washington, who only normalised diplomatic ties in 1995.

President Tran Duc Luong (r) received in Ha Noi on March 14 US Defense Secretary William Cohen , who was on a working visit to Vietnam.

"This today was a real step and what I felt is a maturity in this relationship," said Mr Peterson, a former US pilot who spent more than six years in the "Hanoi Hilton" prison after his jet fighter was shot down in 1966 during the Vietnam War. "You couldn't have imagined this occurring four or five years ago, certainly, maybe not even two or three years ago. And here we are now, two nations standing side by side with essentially the same purposes, the same goals." Earlier on March 13, Vietnam gave Mr Cohen a red-carpet welcome at a French-style colonial military guesthouse.

Mr Cohen reviewed 100 Vietnamese troops holding rifles with bayonets affixed as Vietnam's national flag and the Stars and Stripes of the United States swayed from poles. A Vietnamese military brass band played the national anthems.

President Tran Duc Luong (l) and US Defense Secretary William Cohen in talks

Other topics on Mr Cohen's agenda in Hanoi included humanitarian aid, flood relief and tropical medicine. But Mr Cohen has said he did not bring any apologies for the Vietnam War, which killed some 58,000 American soldiers and an estimated three million Vietnamese troops and civilians. Mr Cohen has also said military relations were important "but [this] has to proceed in the context of an overall improvement in our bilateral relations". "This [trip] is an important step forward and I look forward with some anticipation that I can help put in place the foundation that is slowly being built for normalisation of relations and improvements for the future," he said before arriving in Hanoi from Hong Kong.

Later the same day Mr Cohen visited an MIA site in a paddy field south of Hanoi where a US F-4 Phantom jet crashed during the conflict. Analysts say Vietnam's cooperation in resolving the fate of MIAs has been a key reason for the strengthening of ties.

Vietnam's Prime Minister Receives Cohen

Prime Minister Phan Van Khai received in Hanoi on March 13, US Defense Secretary William Cohen. Khai welcomed the Viet Nam visit by Defense Secretary Cohen and other US officers. He spoke of the positive contributions made by Viet Nam and the U.S. in searching for remains of U.S. servicemen listed as missing in action in the US war in Viet Nam. He said that so far hundreds of thousands of families in Viet Nam have not yet found the remains of their relatives who fell in the war and millions of people have been affected by Agent Orange sprayed by US aircraft during the war. As a result, said Khai, many families have three to four children born with deformities. The Vietnamese Government has decided to grant allowances to these Agent Orange victims, he said. In the spirit of closing the past and looking to the future, he said he hoped that the US will join Viet Nam in humanitarian efforts to overcome war consequences.

Prime Minister Khai welcomes Cohen

Prime Minister Khai briefed the US Defense Secretary of Viet Nam's socio-economic situation and external policy. He said he hoped that during his visit the US Defense Secretary would better understand Viet Nam's economy and help the US Government make right decisions in line with the two countries' relations and international relations. PM Khai asked Secretary Cohen to convey his regards to President Bill Clinton. US Defense Secretary Cohen thanked Prime Minister Khai for his reception. He spoke highly of the positive cooperation and assistance given by the Vietnamese Government in searching for remains of US MIAs from the war.

He said that over the previous five years, the two countries' relations had been improving step by step. He said he hoped that after his visit, the two countries' relations would be developed, especially in economic and commercial fields. Vietnamese Deputy Defence Minister Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Huy Hieu was present at the reception.

On the same day, Defence Minister Pham Van Tra and his US counterpart William Cohen held talks. Cohen and his entourage also visited an excavation site for US servicemen's remains in Dong Phu commune, Chuong My district, Ha Tay province. Minister Tra offered a banquet in honour of US Secretary Cohen that evening.

Cohen visits downed-jet site

US Defence Secretary William Cohen visited the crash site of a navy jet on March 13, just one of hundreds of locations scoured for the remains of American servicemen who disappeared in Indochina during the Vietnam War. The search for the remains of Navy Commander Richard Rich, whose F4 Phantom was shot down on May 17, 1967, was nothing less than a sophisticated archaeological dig which employed state-of-the-art forensic techniques and cost American taxpayers millions of dollars.

Mr William Cohen visits a MIA excavation site in Ha Tay.

But although the United States remained determined to discover the fate of every single US serviceman still missing, the bodies of more than 300,000 Vietnamese dead remained unaccounted for. The skeletons of 25 Vietnamese soldiers were uncovered somewhat earlier by a road gang in central Quang Tri province, but it was highly unlikely that the vast majority of those still missing would ever be recovered.

In February 2000, US President Bill Clinton saluted the Vietnamese for their co-operation in helping in the search for America's missing-in-action (MIA), and in September 1999 Mr Cohen publicly stated his commitment to the MIA cause.

Watching villagers dig for remains, Mr Cohen said accounting for the 2,029 MIAS remained "paramount for us". US experts told him a two-week search of the site had gathered five bags of metal fragments and two bone shards, and evidence an F4 had indeed crashed there. The US offered some assistance to Vietnam and in 1999 invited a team of researchers from Hanoi to visit the US war archives in Washington. The Vietnamese team returned to Hanoi bearing a number of documents which revealed the sites of mass graves where Vietnamese soldiers were buried after fire-fights with American soldiers.

But Vietnam - a country whose Confucian traditions demand the spirits of the dead be honoured by the proper disposal of their earthly remains - is simply too poor to mount a recovery scheme anywhere near the sophistication of the MIA programme. The cost of such an operation in a country where the average annual income is just US$370 means that thousands of Vietnamese families would never know the fate of their loved ones from what they call the American War.

Cohen Continues Vietnam Visit with Trip to Ho Chi Minh City

Defense Secretary William Cohen is went to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as he continued his visit to America's former war enemy. On his way to the former Saigon, Cohen told reporters he was pleased with the talks thus far. He said no one was "looking back into the past."

Cohen winds up Vietnam visit

The American Defence Secretary, William Cohen, met military and civilian officials in Ho Chi Minh City, on the final day of his visit to Vietnam. One military officer, Lieutenant-General Phan Trung Kien, who fought in the Vietnam war against the Americans, said Vietnam was happy to put aside the past and look to the future. But painful memories have hung over this visit.

Regional allies

Even a quarter-of-a-century after the American military's ignominious withdrawal from the Vietnam war, the two countries still found it hard to forget the long years of bloodshed and enmity that once divided them. But Mr Cohen clearly believes his discussions in Vietnam have gone a long way towards laying a dark chapter of history to rest.

Following talks with President Tran Duc Luong and other senior officials, he said he could envisage a time when the US will have the same warm relationship with Vietnam that it already enjoys with regional allies like Japan and Thailand.

Slowly does it

The process would be a cautious one, however, stressing co-operation in non-controversial matters, such as land mine clearance and flood water control. Fully-fledged military ties would have to wait, probably for a long time. One reason is that the Vietnamese would not want to upset their powerful neighbour to the north, China.

It was notable, for example, that the state-controlled media here gave little or no coverage to Mr Cohen's comments to the defence academy in Hanoi on March 14. Addressing military officials, he urged Vietnam and its Asean partners to put pressure on China and encourage Beijing towards moderation in its foreign policy. For the Americans, too, there was a reticence stemming from their continue preoccupation with the issue of US servicemen still missing in action. In this respect, Mr Cohen's visit to the MIA recovery site in Ha Tay Province on March 13 was not only symbolic but a reflection of an enduring policy commitment.

Stance on defoliant a hypocrisy

William Cohen left Hanoi for southern Ho Chi Minh City without meeting requests by Vietnam's leaders for Washington do more to help the country deal with widespread contamination by toxic chemicals sprayed over large parts of Vietnam during the United States' chemical warfare tactics during the Vietnam war. Prime Minister Pham Van Khai and the US Secretary of Defence briefly discussed the issue of Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant which has caused a range of serious illnesses and which was used extensively by the United States in the Vietnam War.

"I indicated we were certainly prepared to conduct joint research into the effects [of Agent Orange] and that hopefully we can reach an agreement over co-operation on science and technology," Mr Cohen reportedly said.

But the promise of help with scientific research has been a long-standing policy which they say is tantamount to hypocrisy. Among critics of the American policy is Chuck Searcy, a veteran of the war who manages a humanitarian program in Vietnam, and who told the South China Morning Post that the US was guilty of double standards when it came to Agent Orange and its toxic dioxin residues.

"It's interesting that the health problems . . . associated with dioxin are elevated to matters of national and international concern when the issue arises in Europe or the US," he said. "For nearly 30 years the situation in Vietnam has been much worse than anywhere in the world, but we, the United States, have refused to acknowledge the problem."

The reality is that despite all the grandiose speeches and overtures, the United States cannot forget it lost the Vietnam War to the Vietnamese and it still wants to economically dominate and neo-colonize Vietnam.

Short trip proves long on rhetoric

William Cohen's Vietnam visit may have been symbolic, but both sides agreed little of substance emerged from his three-day tour. Mr Cohen and Vietnamese Defence Minister Pham Van Tra agreed to forget the past and look towards a stronger future relationship, and President Tran Duc Luong acknowledged that stronger links would contribute to regional stability. American officials described the visit as "one small step" on the road to fully normalised relations, adding it had further opened the door to a possible visit by President Bill Clinton towards the end of the year.

Independent observers agreed that Mr Cohen's talks with Vietnamese leaders would help strengthen ties, but cautioned a military relationship at the levels enjoyed between the US and other Association of Southeast Asian member nations could be decades away.

"There's still a lot of baggage associated with the war," said one Western diplomat, adding America's reputation in Vietnam was severely damaged by its leadership of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

"We also should remember 2,000 years of Vietnamese-Chinese history. The Vietnamese political and military establishment will continue to be wary about being seen to be too close to the Americans," he said.

During his brief stay, Mr Cohen offered US military assistance in several areas, including disaster management, clearing unexploded ordnance and providing forensic expertise to help Vietnam recover more of its estimated 300,000 war missing. Mr Cohen also reiterated a longstanding US vow to investigate the effects of Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant Vietnam says poisoned more than half a million people. But one well-informed observer said he expected to see little movement on the Agent Orange front.

"The Vietnamese don't want scientific assistance. They know they have a problem with dioxin already. But they don't want to make too much of a fuss because of the potential the Agent Orange issue has to impact on their agricultural exports," he said. "Furthermore, the bureaucracy would rather see money being provided, so they can then steal it." He was referring to Vietnam's increasing problem of corruption among government officers who view money for development and aid projects as cash cows.