Wrong time to look a Charlie in Hanoi?

Press, 28 August 1979, Page 16

Wrong time to look a Charlie in Hanoi?

From the “Economist,” London

Ambassadorial morning dress, at the wrong time and place, can make its wearer look a charlie. The wrong time and place for American tails is sultry Hanoi this northern summer. Yet a sudden mutter of demands for American recognition of Vietnam has come both from the Vietnamese Government and from a group of bright-eyed American congressmen visiting Hanoi. President Carter can afford to ignore the congressmen, whose leader, Mr Benjamin Rosenthal, seems to believe Vietnam’s assurances that it

is committed to “an orderly exodus of refugees” — after several months of one of the most disorderly refugee scrambles in history, with maybe a third of the escapers dying in the rush to get away. Another argument, from another credulous congressman, is that Vietnam could be drawn out from under Russia’s wing by offers of American help. More likely Vietnam, which was described recently by a defecting former member of its Politburo as subservient to Russia “politically, militarily and economically,” would take the

money and stay under the wing. But Vietnam’s acting Foreign Minister, Mr Nguyen Co Thach, this month claimed that talks about recognition had been going on between his country and America since June. Nonsense, said a State Department spokesman: no meetings on the subject, “secret or otherwise,” had taken place since last autumn. The next day another American official admitted that talks had indeed been going on since June, and that “impediments to normalisation” had been discussed. Mr Thach decided to jog the State Department’s memory some more by claiming

that America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Mr Andrew Young, had relayed an offer of talks on recognition to Vietnam’s United Nations Ambassador. When Mr Young lost his job this month for having talked, “on his own initiative,” to Palestinians at the United Nations, thereby breaking his Government’s word, Mr Thach’s story was almost believable. • Why not recognise Vietnam? The Americans have come round, in the last decade, to embracing the sound principle that you send ambassadors to governments in control of their countries even if they treat their people horribly (because you

have less influence in asking them not to do so if you stay away), and even if they sharply disagree with you (because maybe you can solve your disagreement peacefully by talking). The Secretary of State, Mr Cyrus Vance, was moving towards a resumption of diplomatic relations last year. But then Vietnam did two things which ruled that out of court. It sent its soldiers in to overthrow the Government of a neighbouring country, Cambodia; those soldiers still show no sign of departing. And it hounded its ethnic and social minorities so brutally that hundreds of thousands of people fled the coun-

try, pretty certainly with official connivance, either to drown at sea or to unbalance still further the wobbly stability of other South-East Asian countries. These are not just interna) matters. The refugee flood has slowed down for the moment. But, if they want American money and a handshake, the Vietnamese will have to stop it for good — by stopping the policies which drive people out — and withdraw from Cambodia. Otherwise American recognition would look like a friendly nod and a wink at a country practising, along with Cuba, one of the most blatantly peace-disruptive foreign policies in the world.