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2001 NEWS ARCHIVE

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Powell Returning to Vietnam
By GEORGE GEDDA c The Associated Press, 7/23

WASHINGTON (AP) - Colin Powell, reflecting on his Army service in Vietnam more than three decades ago, said Friday he expects his upcoming visit to Hanoi to evoke powerful memories of the battlefield deaths of many close friends.

``I'm sure the years will peel back three and four decades and the emotions will be powerful and strong,'' the secretary of state said as he looked ahead to his first return visit to the country since 1969, a traumatic time that indelibly shaped his views on how America should fight its wars.

However, Powell said he is not haunted by that wartime past: ``There are no ghosts within me that need exorcism.''

Returning next Tuesday on a mission of peace and reconciliation, Powell said he wants to encourage the nation's erstwhile enemy ``to move forward with reform and openness.''

After a brief visit to Japan, Powell will make a three-day stop in Vietnam, where he will attend a conference of leaders from the Asia-Pacific region. Afterward, he plans stops in China, South Korea and Australia.

Powell arrived in Vietnam as a 25-year old Army captain in %mlink(STRY:; PHOTO:WX102-072001; AUDIO:%mlink) December 1962, well before the United States became involved there militarily in a serious way.

He returned as a major in July 1968, when 545,000 thousand U.S. troops were in Vietnam and the death tolls often ran into the hundreds each week.

In his biography, Powell saw the war unfold from his perspective as an executive officer whose role was to ensure that his battalion had all that it required. He was unforgiving about the way the war was conducted.

``Our senior officers knew the war was going badly,'' he wrote. ``They bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses, the phony measure of body counts, the comforting illusions of secure hamlets, the inflated progress reports. As a corporate entity, the military failed to talk straight to its political superiors or to itself.''

He later recommended a new approach that has since become known informally as the Powell doctrine: ``Have a clear political objective and stick to it. Use all the force necessary, and do not apologize for going in big if that's what it takes. Decisive force ends wars quickly and in the long run saves lives.''

Asked Friday if it was a mistake for the United States to have become in involved in Vietnam, Powell said that although the commitment was not successful, ``I would never say to those young men and women who, as I, were veterans that it was the wrong cause in the beginning.

``Toward the end ... it became clear that we were not going to prevail and maybe a different political and military judgment should have been made at that point.''

Powell has visited all major regions of the world except Asia since taking office. His visit includes a mix of defense treaty allies - Japan, South Korea and Australia - as well as two communist countries, China and Vietnam.

In China, Powell said he will make ``absolutely clear'' to Beijing's leaders that the United States is seeking a better relationship after a somewhat bumpy ride over the last six months.

``The United States is not seeking enmity with China,'' he said, adding that he will tell the Chinese ``we will work with them as they continue on that path of reform, as they join world institutions and adopt world standards in trade and economics.''

On other subjects, Powell said:

It might be useful to have Americans and other monitors oversee a cease fire between Israel and the Palestinians, but no mechanism has been established for that yet. He ruled out the possibility of imposing a monitoring system if one side or the other opposes it.

The administration is looking for ways to give legal status to some Mexican undocumented aliens in the United States and to have a more equitable system of dealing with migration flows.

The administration is disappointed that the recent India-Pakistan summit meeting did not produce more progress. ``We plan to work very hard with both countries to make sure that our relations with both countries are strong and thriving and growing,'' he said.

Media accuses foreign adoption groups of trafficking
Associated Press, BC Cycle, 4/16

Official Vietnamese newspapers accused foreign groups on Monday of illegally trafficking hundreds of Vietnamese children for adoption over the past six years.

The Cong An Nhan Dan (People's Police) newspaper, published by the Ministry of Public Security, accused 70 foreign private organizations of trafficking children for adoption, but only identified one by name.

"Because of the huge profit, the traffickers have resorted to sophisticated and wicked plots to do business on the tears and blood of the desperate mothers," the newspaper said. "This service has, at some point, developed into an industry in Vietnam."

The newspaper accused a former California schoolteacher of handling hundreds of illegal adoptions while she worked as a representative of several adoption groups. It said half of the 70 groups allegedly involved in child trafficking did not have a license to operate in Vietnam. It did not say how many children had been illegally adopted through the groups or identify the groups by nationality.

It said child traffickers often solicited children from unwed women or desperately poor families and then legalized the documents through orphanages. The Ministry of Justice must approve of all foreign adoption. Officials there were not available for comment.

The newspaper said foreigners paid the brokers $12,000 to $14,000 per child, but that little of the money went to the mothers or orphanages. The Nong Thon Ngay Nay (Countryside Today) newspaper said nearly 10,000 Vietnamese children have been adopted by foreigners over the past four years, with 5,500 children going to France and 2,200 to United States.

The newspaper accused foreign brokers of making $27 million in profit over the past six years. U.S. Embassy officials, however, say they have received few reports of problems or fraud involving adoptions from Vietnam. Over the last two years, Vietnamese courts have brought 23 people to trial for involvement in child trafficking for foreign adoption.

In March last year, a court in the northern province of Ninh Binh convicted 12 people of involvement in a child-peddling ring. The alleged leader of the ring, Vu Tien Manh, a senior official in the provincial justice department, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in jail. The group was accused of soliciting children from unwed mothers and poor families and falsifying documents for 174 children who were sold for foreign adoption from 1992 until the ring was uncovered in November 1998. Eleven people were convicted on similar charges of child peddling in 1999 in the southern province of An Giang.

Telephone cafes: The latest hang-up in Vietnam
 The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), 4/14

HO CHI MINH CITY--Cafes in Vietnam are quickly becoming more than just places to relax and enjoy strong coffee. These days, the tables at Chat Phone Cafe in Ho Chi Minh City are filled with twentysomethings who talk not among themselves, but into telephones. Customers visit the cafe specifically to talk to complete strangers over the phone. This cafe, which could be considered the Vietnamese version of a telephone clubs, have become increasingly popular among young Vietnamese.

Chat Phone Cafe, Vietnam's first telephone cafe, is run by former journalist Dang Hong Tuyen and her husband. The cafe has eight two-person tables equipped with one telephone. The idea to open the cafe came to Tuyen, who mainly covered domestic issues during her 15-year career as a reporter, when a 17-year-old girl approached her for advice afer she broke up with her boyfriend. Tuyen recalled that the girl had told her that she wanted someone to listen to her problems.

For an annual membership fee of 50,000 dong (400 yen), clients can register their telephone numbers with the cafe, along with their age, gender, and interests. Currently, Chat Phone Cafe has about 1,000 members. Telephone numbers are managed by the cafe.

Visitors inform the cafe of the type of person they would like to talk to. The cafe then pairs them up with a suitable candidate from their members, whom visitors are introduced to over the telephone. Visitors are required to pay telephone charges--650 dong (5 yen) per minute. The cafe is open daily from 8 a.m. until about 10 p.m.

Chat Phone Cafe's popularity has grown due to word-of-mouth advertising from members and visitors who consider the cafe a good way to talk to people.

"Since most of my friends have families, we don't have a lot to talk about," said Do Minh Hung, a 31-year-old employee at a textile company who visited the cafe for the first time. "To relieve stress from work, I want to be able to talk to people outside my company."

Tuyen, in analyzing the success of the cafe, said, "Young people often can't talk about their problems with their parents because of the generation gap. And people who move to the city from farming areas often have a hard time meeting people. These days, everyone seems to be looking for someone to share common interests with."

Tuyen plans to open Chat Phone Cafe branches in all of Ho Chi Minh City's districts, and many other entrepreneurs have shown interest in venturing into similar businesses.

Vietnam reports explosion of HIV infection among prostitutes
Agence France-Presse, 3/26

The proportion of Vietnam's prostitutes who are infected with the AIDS virus has rocketed over the past two years, social affairs ministry figures revealed Monday.

The HIV infection rate rose from 2.8 percent in 1998 to 21.6 percent last year, according to the figures carried by the Vietnam Economic Times. It is the second study in recent months to suggest an explosion of HIV infection among sex workers.

A health ministry study presented to a regional conference in November reported that infection rates among prostitutes in the commercial capital of Ho Chi Minh City had soared from 3.1 percent in 1998 to 15.9 percent in 1999.

The Vietnam Economic Times report advanced no explanation for the increase, but last year's health ministry report suggested there might be a connection with rising intravenous drug use among sex workers. Needle-sharing among heroin users has long been regarded as the main factor in HIV transmission here.

Aid workers have long expressed fears that a rise in infections among the country's sex workers, few of whom regularly use condoms, could lead to an explosion of infection among the general population.

The US government has expressed growing concern about the potential scale of the problem here. During then US President Bill Clinton's landmark visit here last November, Washington announced six million dollars in assistance to fund AIDS prevention work here.

The Vietnam Economic Times also reported that the country's sex workers were becoming ever younger. Child prostitution was on the increase in the country's vice capital of Ho Chi Minh City, the paper said.

The proportion of the city's sex workers aged between 14 and 17 had risen from 14 percent in 1996 to 15.6 percent last year. Nationwide there was also a sharp rise in the proportion of prostitutes who were under 25.

The 18 to 25 age group now accounted for 70 percent of sex workers against just 43.3 percent in 1996. Only 13,742 prostitutes were officially registered at the end of last year, the paper said, although it acknowledged that the figure was a gross underestimate.

The paper claimed that the "real figure" was in the order of 40,000, to which should be added the roughly 70 percent of the country's 50,000 to 70,000 hostess girls in bars and restaurants who also worked as prostitutes.

"In some of the big cities, hostess girls pose nude to attract clients," the paper said.

In reality, independent estimates put the number of sex workers as high as 600,000, more than during the maximum deployment of US and other foreign troops at the height of the Vietnam War.

The paper blamed the explosion of prostitution inside the country on the sharp increase in the trafficking of Vietnamese women to neighbouring countries, particularly Cambodia, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The official media here regularly reports on the number of Vietnamese prostitutes working in Cambodia and the high proportion returning with the AIDS virus. The Vietnam Economic Times complained that a growing proportion of sex workers were not selling their bodies for any pressing financial reason.

"Alarmingly 50 percent of prostitutes ply their trade for reasons that have nothing to do with poverty and everything to do with laziness and a degenerate lifestyle," the paper charged.