LVA NEWS
During White House Visit Of Top Vietnam Communist
Vietnam's communist government will visit the White House later this month is drawing the ire of some Vietnamese-Americans and is likely to prompt protests across America, activists said yesterday.
In a statement issued Friday, the White House announced that the prime minister of Vietnam, Phan Van Khai, would meet with President Bush on June 21. The trip will make Mr. Khai the highest-ranking Vietnamese official to visit America since the Vietnam War.
"A lot of Vietnamese-Americans who supported Bush during the campaign were very mad at Bush, thinking that Bush is now betraying the cause," said an Orange County, Calif.-based community leader, Chuyen Nguyen.
The official announcement of the visit came on the Friday before the holiday weekend, which virtually guaranteed a muffled reaction in the mainstream press. However, word of Mr. Khai's trip to America quickly spread through Vietnamese-American communities.
"It's the talk of the town," Mr. Nguyen said. He said the recent publication of a photo of Mr. Bush meeting with the Vietnamese ambassador to America also upset Vietnamese refugees who backed Mr. Bush's re-election.
"There was a lot of campaigning for Bush, saying Bush would defeat Vietnamese communism. They were very disappointed to see that photograph broadcast," said Mr. Nguyen, a Democrat who works as an adviser to a California state senator.
However, a California state assemblyman who is the highest-ranking Vietnamese-American officeholder, Van Tran, issued a statement that stressed the potential upside of Mr. Khai's visit.
"I acknowledge the normalized relations that the United States has with Communist Vietnam and realize that the two countries will continue to find ways to strengthen cooperation through a policy of constructive engagement," said Mr. Tran, a Republican. "I would call on the Bush administration to take this opportunity to pressure Vietnam to improve its dismal record on human rights and to allow for Vietnamese citizens to freely worship and select their elected representatives. This is a golden opportunity for President Bush to bring forth these important and fundamental issues with the Vietnamese authorities."
Asked in an interview yesterday whether he viewed the visit as a welcome development, Mr. Tran said, "I don't see it as positive or negative." He also offered some invective that wasn't included in his written statement: "You have a representative of a tyrannical regime visiting the White House. ... There will be plenty of protest," he said.
Last year, Mr. Tran warned his fellow Vietnamese-Americans that the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, could not be trusted to deal with the communist government in Vietnam. Mr. Tran stood by that critique yesterday. "I still wouldn't trust Kerry to be at the same table with the communists," the California lawmaker said.
Mr. Kerry's office had no reaction yesterday to the White House announcement.
Mr. Tran said the high-level visit was in keeping with the rapprochement that began during President George H.W. Bush's term. "There has been a policy of constructive engagement which started under the Bush I administration and continued through Clinton and into Bush II," Mr. Tran noted.
The White House statement noted that Mr. Khai's visit comes on the 10th anniversary of the restoration of diplomatic relations between America and Vietnam. The announcement made no mention that the trip also marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam to the communists.
A spokesman for the Vietnamese Embassy, Chien Bach, said Mr. Khai's visit to America is scheduled from June 19 to 25, but a detailed itinerary has not yet been released. "We have a delegation headed by the prime minister and some senior officials, along with about 80 businesspeople in Vietnam coming to look for partners," Mr. Bach said.
The State Department lists Vietnam as a "country of particular concern" for its record of violations of religious freedom. However, community leaders said that before Mr. Khai's visit was announced, State Department officials had backed away from talk of imposing sanctions on Vietnam.
"Right now, I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the way President Bush is handling human rights," said a spokeswoman for the Maryland-based Committee for Religious Freedom in Vietnam, Hien Ngo. She said she supports the planned meeting with Mr. Khai, but fears that economic concerns will drown out other issues.
"If we don't have human rights, the money does not go to the people, it goes to the highest ranks of the Communist Party," Ms. Ngo said.
At least a dozen senators have signed a letter circulated by Senator Brownback, a Republican of Kansas, calling on Mr. Bush to put the human rights issue at the center of talks with the Vietnamese leader. "While Vietnam has made a number of public statements and gestures that give us hope, concrete results are lacking," the letter said. The senators point to harassment and imprisonment of Catholic and Buddhist leaders, as well as religious members of minority groups, such as the Montagnards and the Hmong.
A Vietnamese-American attorney and school board member, Lan Quoc Nguyen, said he is eager to learn if Mr. Khai's trip will include two California communities that officially disinvited Vietnamese communist officials last year, Garden Grove and Westminster. "That is something we're waiting to see. That would be very confrontational," Mr. Nguyen said.
Mr. Nguyen also noted that the California state Senate is considering a resolution that would declare that the state officially recognizes the so-called "yellow flag" of the former South Vietnam. The measure could pass days before Mr. Khai's arrival.
"That would be an affront to the Vietnamese government," the lawyer said.
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Yahoo Had to Help China on Jailed Reporter, Yang Says
Sept. 10 Yahoo! Inc., the most-visited Web site, had to pass documents to the Chinese government that led to the conviction of a local journalist because the company must follow local laws, co-founder Jerry Yang said.
Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media rights group, last week accused Yahoo of helping Chinese authorities to convict Shi Tao, a reporter for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao. Tao was sentenced in April to 10 years in prison for sending a Chinese government memo about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre to foreign Web sites, the group said.
``The government asked for the documents and backed it up with a court order,'' said Yang, who was speaking at an Internet conference in Hangzhou, China today. ``We had to hand over the documents. We have to comply with the law.''
Yahoo helped the investigation by linking Tao's Yahoo e-mail account to the memo, Reporters Without Borders said. The case highlights challenges U.S. Internet companies face in China, a country where the Web is subject to state censorship and businesses must deal with the changing government regulations.
Yang was attending an Internet conference sponsored by Alibaba.com Corp., China's biggest online commerce company. A scheduled media conference hosted by Yang and Jack Ma, the chief executive of Alibaba, was canceled.
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo is expanding its operations in China, the world's second-largest Internet market in terms users. The company acquired Chinese keyword search engine 3721 Network Software Co. in January 2004 and agreed last month to pay $1 billion for 40 percent of Alibaba.com, China's biggest online retailer.
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HUAY NAM KHAO, Thailand (AP) - About 6,500 ethnic Hmong have been forced from shelters in Thailand after authorities threatened to punish the landowners hosting them.
The Hmong, including about 1,100 families, were told to move from bamboo houses they had built in a remote village in Thailand's Phetchabun province, after the government told landowners they had until Monday to either expel the Hmong or face charges of sheltering illegal immigrants.
Last month, Thailand's National Security Council pledged to deport Hmong living illegally in the country. Hundreds of thousands of Laotian refugees, mostly Hmong, streamed into neighboring Thailand after the Vietnam War in 1975.
The Hmong people fled Laos for fear of being killed because of their war-era links to the United States. They had fought under CIA advisers on behalf of a pro-American government during the War, but were largely abandoned after their communist enemies won a long civil war.
After being asked to leave the area, Hmong parents and their children who had settled in Phetchabun after fleeing Laos last year slept in the rain along a roadside, carrying their belongings in plastic bags.
"The Hmong would like to call for the United Nations to help us survive," said 43-year-old Jongli Saeloh, who had built a temporary hut in the area.
Many said they had received death threats from Lao authorities since 2000 because officials feared that former Hmong soldiers who helped the United States in the 1970s and their family members could revive their anti-communist campaign.
In May, Thailand closed its last Hmong refugee camp, where more than 15,000 Hmong had lived. The U.S. states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and California have accepted many of them for resettlement.
