Facing up to the past

The Vietnamese do not want an apology, but they think the Americans should restore what they destroyed. AMIT BARUAH on the recent Clinton visit to Vietnam.

OLD ANIMOSITIES may have been eroded, but they continue to linger. Twenty-five years after the war in Vietnam ended, the American President, Mr. Bill Clinton, paid a four-day visit to Washington's Waterloo last week. He found a businesslike Government in Hanoi; eager to get on with the bilateral relationship but firm in its beliefs and convictions that the Vietnamese path was the correct one.

Lectures on human rights and plurality were not well-received. If Mr. Clinton spoke of the need for more freedom at the Vietnamese National University in Hanoi, he got his answer from the powerful general secretary of the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP), Mr. Le Kha Phieu. Just as Mr. Clinton was keen on not angering Americans back home, the leadership in Hanoi was conscious of the fact that the ``American war'' (as they call it) still continued to enrage many Vietnamese. At a time when 800,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance and 3.5 million landmines continue to claim between three and five victims every day, the war is far from a memory for the Vietnamese people.

``As I see it, the Clinton visit has ended the cold war between the Americans and the Vietnamese. The relationship now has to grow. We have to await what kind of Government takes power in the United States,'' a Vietnamese staffer of a foreign-funded NGO told this correspondent. He was convinced that there were many (especially among the older generation) who did not appreciate the Clinton visit. According to him, the only way in which these people could be appeased was through massive monetary help being advanced.

Though Vietnam and the U.S. restored diplomatic relations in July 1995 and a bilateral trade agreement (BTA) was signed earlier this year, the Vietnamese people want more. They do not want an apology; but they think the Americans have an obligation to restore what they destroyed.

In a post-Clinton visit analysis, Mr. A. J. Langguth, a Vietnam analyst wrote in the International Herald Tribune: ``Last year the U.S. offered Vietnam $3 million, while continuing to hold Vietnam to the $145 million debt that the communists inherited when they took over the South. Vietnam prevailed in the war, but it was Vietnam, and not the U.S., that saw its land devastated, and it is the U.S. that has the power now to deal with the lasting damage both to Vietnam and to the relationship of our two countries. The U.S. should give the kind of substantial aid it once gave to Germany and Japan. It is time America forgave the Vietnamese for winning.''

This perhaps, the core of what the Vietnamese want. But, equally, the U.S. is loath to admit that its war for ``democracy'' in Vietnam was wrong. But substantial amounts of economic assistance will be a way of saying it without actually doing so. However, the U.S. is still not convinced that the spraying of millions of litres of Agent Orange (it is called dioxin or herbicide by the Americans) did damage to Vietnam and its people.

At a briefing in Hanoi, the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, Mr. Pete Patterson, had this to say when asked about the U.S. addressing the consequences of the war: ``And my response is... they would like for us to, obviously, take over all their concerns about that. The problem with that is science does not necessarily support a conclusion. And if one was to have concluded already that the herbicide problem is this, this, this, then why would he enter into a joint scientific effort.'' The Ambassador clearly identified that the Vietnamese want the Americans to ``take over'' their concerns on addressing the consequences of the war; something which Washington is clearly wary of doing.

In a sense, Vietnam is all about America coming to terms with its world view. Can the only superpower admit that it was wrong about the Vietnam war, a distant war in which at one single time in June 1969, 540,000 U.S. troops were committed to fight?

But the U.S. should still be accountable for its role in mercilessly bombing and attacking Vietnam, killing at least three million Vietnamese citizens in the bargain. And that accountability should begin with America putting its money where its mouth is. Mr. Clinton did not even go as far as to renounce the debt of South Vietnam, a gesture that was expected. Some can have the luxury of forgetting history on the path of arriving at a better future. More important, however, is the need to learn from history and then build the future.

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