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The American dream -- in Vietnam U.S. IMMIGRANTS INVESTING IN SPACIOUS PROPERTIES By K. Oanh Ha - Mercury News Posted on Wed, Feb. 12, 2003

When Michael Tran and his wife decided to invest in real estate, they wanted something close to home. So the Newark couple purchased a plot for a three-bedroom home -- in Vietnam.

The Trans, immigrants from Vietnam, are among the first to take advantage of a relatively new Vietnamese law that allows some Vietnamese expatriates to legally own property in the communist country for the first time. California companies are teaming up with Vietnamese construction firms, some partially owned by the Vietnamese government, to attract Vietnamese-American buyers -- and appeal to the immigrants' American sensibilities.

This twist on the American dream of homeownership is not without controversy. Many would-be buyers are wary of reaction from parts of the Vietnamese-American community that disavow any dealings with the communist regime.

For Tran, the decision to buy was personal. At 34, he and his wife are already planning their retirement, which they hope to spend in Vietnam. ``It's been my dream to be able to buy a home in my country and retire there,'' Tran said.

Many buyers like Tran are purchasing the homes as investments. Some older Vietnamese plan to use the houses for extended visits, and some business people who travel frequently to Vietnam see homes as more comfortable than hotels.

John Thi Nguyen, a high-tech worker in Silicon Valley, turned to Vietnamese real estate because of the terrorism threats and turbulent economy here.

``Especially after 9/11, Vietnam is now considered to be one of the safest places in the world,'' said Nguyen, who already owns a home in Morgan Hill. ``It's a better investment than anything here in the United States.''

The deciding factor for many is that they'll legally ``own'' their Vietnamese properties. (Because Vietnam is a communist country, no one technically owns the land their home sits on. Instead, the government issues a land-use permit and individuals can own the actual house or structure.)

Though many Viet kieu, or overseas Vietnamese, have invested and owned real estate in Vietnam for a long time, it wasn't until late 2001 that the government passed a new law allowing Viet kieu who meet certain criteria to legally own property. Before the new law took effect, expatriates who bought property in Vietnam had relatives in the country hold title to the properties.

Americanized homes

The law, which is only now gaining wide public notice, comes on the heels of a real estate boom in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, where some land values have tripled and quadrupled in the past five years. Much of the real estate spree is occurring just south of overcrowded Ho Chi Minh City, home to 7 million people, with thousands of Americanized homes under construction.

Ironically, the name of the new city being developed -- Saigon South -- harkens back to the pre-communist era, when Ho Chi Minh City was known as Saigon.

The area attracts a small but growing Vietnamese upper class, Viet expatriates and foreigners. In a country where the per capita income is $438, the luxury apartments and homes in Saigon South run from $65,000 to $850,000 -- with most buyers paying up front in cash or gold. By comparison, a typical upscale home in the city might run $100,000.

Tran's home costs $113,000, and it's being built specifically to suit Americanized tastes. Tran and his wife chose the ``San Francisco'' model, featuring walls of windows and modern architecture. It will also have a very un-Vietnamese feature in this country where motorbikes are the dominant form of transportation: a garage.

The developer, Intresco, is part of a major construction conglomerate in Vietnam and is developing 252 homes in a gated community dubbed the ``Viet Kieu Village'' in Saigon South. It's also building homes elsewhere in the main city for expatriates.

The company's sales and marketing partner in the United States is Milpitas-based Donnelley LT Group. The two firms last year hosted a focus group of Vietnamese-American real estate agents to help them understand what home buyers here want.

``Vietnamese in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese have completely different tastes,'' said Paul Hoang, Donnelley's managing partner. ``Viet kieu who have been in the United States for a very long time are used to a more American style.''

Atypical architecture

Besides the ``San Francisco'' style, Intresco offers the ``Santa Barbara,'' a one-story ranch-style home, and the ``San Luis Obispo,'' a two-story ranch with dormer windows, which are unheard of in Vietnamese architecture.

The Vietnamese builders are perplexed by some of the demands of Vietnamese-American buyers: front and back yards and gardens, lots of picture windows and homes that don't sit right at the street line.

``Most Vietnamese value a home that's right at the street, the closer the better!'' said Ngo Tung Chinh, general director of Intresco in Ho Chi Minh City.

That's because many Vietnamese homes, which are often narrow and are three or more stories, often house a business on the bottom floor: a small restaurant, a sundry shop or, more likely these days, an Internet cafe.

City homes also don't usually have gardens and yards because space is such a premium. And while Westerners like large windows that bring in sunlight, some Vietnamese think too much glass is hazardous because it could break.

Besides the Western-style designs, Vietnamese-American buyers are also lured by marketers' promises to help them avoid the Vietnamese government's bureaucracy.

Tymes International, based in Southern California, charges a 5 percent fee to handle all the paperwork on the Vietnamese end. The firm is selling homes for Saigon South-based Phu My Hung, which is developing thousands of properties for rich Vietnamese and expatriates. The fee also includes a round-trip ticket so buyers can view their homes and sign the necessary paperwork.

Overall, ``It's a good deal. You can't even buy a condo for $100,000 in California,'' said Khoa Nguyen, a San Diego acupuncturist, who travels annually to Vietnam to do philanthropic work. ``And it looks just like my home in San Diego.''

There are a few wrinkles. Some would-be buyers may be staying away for fear of disapproval by a very visible part of the Vietnamese-American community that rejects any relationship with the Vietnamese government, said Hoang of Donnelley. Many home buyers refuse to talk publicly about their purchases because they fear retaliation.

Qualifications

The Vietnamese government itself is limiting who can own property. The new law only allows expatriate Vietnamese who meet one of four criteria to own property: if they have business investments in Vietnam, have made ``significant contributions'' to Vietnam, plan to resettle permanently in Vietnam or if they are cultural activists, scientists and economists who have been invited by the Vietnamese government to Vietnam. Many, but not most, potential Viet kieu buyers qualify under those definitions.

Since Tymes International began advertising its home sales program a few months ago in Vietnamese-American newspapers in the Bay Area and Southern California, it has sold 44 homes -- but could have easily sold 100 had the law been applicable to all overseas Vietnamese, said President Christopher Tran. Tran and others in the industry think the law will be amended soon to be more inclusive.

``You have to be patient when you're dealing with the Vietnamese government,'' said Tran, who's been doing business in Vietnam since 1993, a year before the United States lifted its trade embargo with the country. ``Things happen slowly. They like to do things on a small scale first, but eventually they open it up.''

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Contact K. Oanh Ha at kha@sjmercury.com or (408) 278-3457.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam - His career and reputation are in tatters. Now, Don Duong, the Vietnamese actor who was vilified by authorities for acting in two U.S. films, says he feels like ``a bird with no wings.''

``I'm a professional actor,'' Duong told the Mercury News last week in his first interview since his ordeal began last fall. ``I want to act. But my acting career in Vietnam is finished. I can do nothing. It is painful.''

He is in limbo, waiting for the government here to return the passport he will need in order to move to San Jose, where he hopes to live near his sister, Susie Bui, and try to rebuild his broken career. He also wants a fresh start for his two sons, who have been taunted frequently at school.

Duong called on Vietnamese officials to return his passport, which authorities seized Sept. 24 amid a furious anti-Duong onslaught in Vietnam's state-owned media. Newspapers branded Duong a ``sellout'' and a ``national traitor'' for his roles in ``We Were Soldiers,'' a film about the Vietnam War, and ``Green Dragon,'' which depicted the experience of Vietnamese refugees arriving in America.

``Without my passport, my citizenship is not complete,'' said the 45-year-old Duong, whose career spans 20 films. ``Like any other citizen of Vietnam, I should have a passport. I'm not a criminal.''

Vietnamese authorities last week declined to say whether they had Duong's passport or whether they intended to return it. But Foreign Ministry official Phan Thuy Thanh made a statement suggesting that the government would not block his efforts to emigrate.

``The Vietnamese government always pursues policies of humanitarianism and good will on immigration of Vietnamese citizens, especially with the aim of family reunion,'' she said. ``Don Duong's case belongs in this category and it will be considered under that spirit.''

U.S. officials have been watching the case closely, but an embassy official declined to comment on Duong's predicament.

His sister hopes that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service will give him permission to live in America. But even if that request is granted, Duong said, he cannot leave Vietnam without his passport.

Duong is not the only Vietnamese citizen to be punished recently for running afoul of the government's political sensibilities. Several people have been jailed over the past few months for publishing items on the Internet that offended Vietnam's communist government.

Dressed in khaki pants and a black silk jersey, Duong talked at the Ho Chi Minh City restaurant owned by his sister Bui Giang. At times laughing, at times angry, Duong seemed resigned to his fate and relaxed in spite of his troubles.

``I have nothing to lose,'' he said.

It would be painful, he added, to leave his country. He would love to stay in Vietnam, if only he could act again. But officials at the Ministry of Culture and Information recently refused to let him accept a role in a forthcoming Vietnamese film, Duong said. ``That sent a very clear message to everybody: No one should invite me to act in their movies in the future.''

Some of his closest friends come to see him, but others have shunned him. ``I have a lot of friends who are actors and actresses,'' he said. ``Most of them are scared to visit, and I'm very sad about that. Even the ones who love me and want to defend me, they do not dare to voice their opinion.''

``We Were Soldiers'' outraged Vietnamese officials because it included a scene where a Vietnamese general played by Duong killed a wounded prisoner of war. ``Green Dragon'' provoked their fury because, they said, it was critical of the North Vietnamese government while idealizing life in America.

For his part, Duong says he thought the general he depicted in the first film was heroic. And he doesn't understand why, so many years after the war, Vietnamese officials were upset by a film portraying the experience of Vietnamese refugees in America.

But no sooner were the films released last year than the attacks against Duong began. The films are officially banned here, but they are widely available at stores that sell pirated DVDs.

Late one night last fall, there was loud knocking at Duong's front door. When his sons answered, Duong said, two immigration police officers were standing outside, demanding to talk to Duong, who wasn't home.

The next day, Oct. 2, Duong went to the local office of the immigration police, where, he said, he was interrogated for eight hours and encouraged to sign a statement saying he was a criminal who had betrayed his country.

``I got so angry,'' Duong said. ``I raised my voice to him. I said, `These are just roles in a movie. I am not a criminal.' He said I was stubborn.''

The officers called him back to the station a week later for another interrogation, Duong said, and told him that the media attacks and the interrogations would stop if he simply signed a confession. He might even be able to resume his acting career if he agreed to sign, Duong says they told him.

If he gets permission to move to the United States, Duong said, he will bring his boys, Bui Vu Long, 17, and Bui Vu Linh, 12, who are having a hard time at school. ``Their classmates keep asking, `Is your father a sellout and a criminal?' ''

Last fall, Duong said, police kept calling his house anytime he went out, asking his family where he had gone. The monitoring has eased up since then, Duong said, but he still believes that he is under surveillance.

``It feels terrible,'' Duong said. ``It feels just like I am a prisoner. Of course, my house is not a prison, but it feels like one.''

This speech was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, Off'ring each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet 'tis truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong: Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above his own.

Published: Jan 17 2003

(01-13) 01:47 PST PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) --

Chinese diplomats survived for months in the jungles of western Cambodia, nearly dying of starvation and disease, after Vietnamese forces invaded the country in the late 1970s, according to a Chinese account of the period.

The diplomats were forced to move with retreating Khmer Rouge forces after the Vietnamese army attacked the capital of Phnom Penh, said an account published in the journal Critical Asian Studies.

Their story is recounted in a chapter from "Chinese Diplomats in International Crisis Situations," a Chinese-language book by Yun Shui published in 1992 but only now translated into English.

An ambassador and seven other Chinese diplomats, who marched for days at a time and slept in the rain while being stalked by Vietnamese troops, nearly died of starvation and disease, according to the book.

They ate elephant and rare wildlife to stay alive while moving through the jungle near the Thai border in Battambang province and later, for 47 days, in a clearing in the Cardamom Mountains near the border town of Pailin, it said. Here, they tried to maintain an ad hoc diplomatic presence.

To escape the Vietnamese army, the diplomats crossed into Thailand on April 11 after a grueling 15-day, 125-mile over some 40 mountains, according to the account.

The Khmer Rouge's bloody rule of Cambodia lasted from 1975 to 1979, when an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died from starvation, disease, overwork and execution. China was the regime's most prominent international supporter.

China has revealed little publicly about its role in aiding the Khmer Rouge, which formally called itself Democratic Kampuchea.

Ben Kiernan, a Cambodia expert and professor at Yale University, said the account sheds light on how close China was to the Khmer Rouge, which maintained policies against Vietnam, China's historical rival.

"The gripping story of the Khmer Rouge's flight, despite the propagandistic tone, demonstrates China's role and commitment to the (Khmer Rouge) regime," Kiernan wrote in an introduction to the translated work.

China evacuated its embassy in Phnom Penh with just a just few hours notice during the first days of January 1979.

China was one of a handful of countries that recognized the secretive Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot.

Just a few stark cells are all that remain of the Hoa Lo prison where Lt. Cmdr. John McCain spent three years in captivity during the Vietnam War and where a faded picture of the Navy officer greeted his children during a recent visit.

For three of the senator's children, the eight days in Vietnam were their first to the country where their father was imprisoned for 5 1/2 years. McCain, R-Ariz., said he believes the trip gave them a deeper appreciation of Vietnam _ both the war and the nation itself.

Before the trip, he said, they would ask about what kind of food he ate and the conditions under which he lived there. By the visit's end, they were discussing what caused the war, why the United States was there and why it lost.

"Sometimes it seems a little like reading about ancient history," said McCain. "I think being there they appreciated it more."

McCain, his wife, Cindy, and his children _ 18-year-old Meghan, 16-year-old Jack, 14-year-old Jimmy, and 11-year-old Bridget _ mixed tourist fare with visits to China Beach and Truc Bach Lake, where McCain was captured in 1967. They also saw the Hoa Lo prison _ the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain, both his arms and one leg broken, was detained for three years.

"It's a little unsettling just to walk through that, just because I can't imagine the suffering he must have gone through seeing some of the rooms they had to stay in and the conditions they had," Jack McCain said.

At Truc Bach Lake, where McCain landed after ejecting from his plane in 1967, a crude cement statue depicts McCain being dragged from the water. The inscription notes his capture and misidentifies him as an Air Force pilot.

"It is a great insult. I was in the Navy," said McCain, a third-generation officer in the Navy.

McCain had been back to Vietnam several times since he was released from captivity in 1973, first as a military envoy and later as a congressman.

During a trip in 2000 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the senator nearly caused an international incident by declaring the "wrong guys" had won the war. This time, he had only one official meeting, with Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

But the trip around New Year's, the senator's longest stay in the country, was for the family. But McCain and Jack, who accompanied his parents on the 2000 trip, were struck by Vietnam's transformation.

"He was amazed at how much it had grown," said Jack McCain. "He said every time he came back it just got bigger and bigger and there were more and more people. ... I don't think the country has a grasp of how much Vietnam has changed."

For example, a modern high-rise has been built next to the Hanoi Hilton.

The senator said a visit to China Beach _ an American outpost where troops could take respite from the war _ stuck in his mind.

"Along the beach there are three or four buildings that were obviously built and used by the United States _ a place where you could take a shower and check out a towel or something. They're all crumbling and run-down," he said. It is far different from when he was there as a soldier. "They were bustling and people by the hundreds, servicemen and women, were on the beach and now the beach was deserted. It was kind of eerie."

"I thought it might be nice," McCain said, "to have my children see the country and the place where I spent so much of my time, but also enjoy the attractions of a very beautiful country."

SHANGHAI, Jan. 9 — The Chinese often say students are the conscience of the nation. If so, the nation must be unusually concerned about traffic safety these days.

An estimated 10,000 students at Hefei Industrial University in eastern China took to the streets earlier this week to protest the government's failure to provide a safe way to cross a busy thoroughfare near their campus. The protest erupted after three students were knocked down by a truck that ran a red light, killing two and putting one in a coma, students involved in the protest said.

It may have been the largest student unrest in China since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, which the government ended by shooting hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Beijing. But unlike the Tiananmen protesters, who sought democracy and human rights, students in the provincial capital of Hefei say they want pedestrian rights.

"There is no background to this other than telling the government that traffic safety must be a priority," Li Pan, a student at the college, said in a telephone interview. "Some of our friends have died and this should be taken seriously."

Students said that the university had proposed building a pedestrian bridge over the intersection, but that the city authorities had rejected the request as too expensive.

In China's one-party state, demonstrations of any kind are risky. But they get attention.

Wen Wei Po, a Chinese-language newspaper based in Hong Kong that has ties to the authorities in Beijing, reported today that Hu Jintao, the new chief of the Communist Party, had intervened to address the students' concerns. That report could not be confirmed.

Students taking part in the online discussion said that the authorities in the provincial government of Anhui had acted to mediate the dispute.

As a result of the unrest, students said, the driver of the truck was arrested and the city agreed to build the pedestrian bridge immediately.

"We got results," one student said in a telephone interview. "People are satisfied."

HANOI (dpa) - Vietnam installed a three-ton stone border marker with China in a northern province, one of the first to delineate the new border agreed on with China, official media said Sunday.

The new marker, the third since the 1999 border treaty was signed, was placed in Ban Dai village, Lang Son province, at a height of 472 metres on a mountain so remote it has no name, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

China and Vietnam began the long process of installing border markers last year. More than 1,500 will be installed along the 1,350-km border over the next two years.

The two countries fought a war in the northern frontier in 1979, and did not agree on the common border until 20 years later.

The agreement generated some controversy in Vietnam, where some said the government gave too much away to China.

At least two dissidents who criticised the border treaty on the Internet and called on Hanoi to make it public have been jailed for endangering national security.

However, the treaty was later published in a state-run newspaper late last year.

Christmas came late this year to the hill people in Vietnam known as the Montagnards, and when it came, it was at the point of a gun and the heel of a jackboot.

The Vietnamese government took the largely-Christian holiday as an opportunity to launch another wave of repression against this largely-Christian minority. Late last week, it pronounced another series of long prison terms on eight Montagnards accused of political crimes, and that was probably just a small part of its offensive Christmas offensive. According to the Montagnard Foundation, Degar Christians (a subgroup of Montagnards) were threatened with fines, imprisonment and execution for celebrating the holiday. Moreover, the Vietnamese government backed up those threats with the mobilization of 600 squads of "fast-deployment teams" of soldiers in the highlands last October.

Tragically, this follows the same pattern of brutal repression that the Vietnamese government has been practicing against the Montagnards since early 2001, when the Montagnards rose to protest the already-serious repression against them. According to an Amnesty International report released earlier last month, there have been many reports of the persecution of Protestants, including arrests of pastors, forced closures of churches and mandated renunciations. Those who do not comply face quick trials followed by ill-treatment and torture. (The Amnesty International report notes mildly, "Whilst there are legal provisions for the role of defenders and the presumption of innocence, however, those provisions appear not to be observed in practice.")

Neither the actual abuses nor their true extent can be confirmed, since the Vietnamese government has not allowed outside observers to make unsupervised visits into the Highlands for some time. However, few reasonable people doubt that they occur.

Yet the real crime of the Montagnards is the fundamentally American one of attempting to flee religious repression and finding a land in which to live and worship in peace. Following their failed protests in 2001, at least 1,500 Montagnards fled to Cambodia in search of asylum. They were initially housed in U.N.-administered refugee camps which were closed last March. While the United States gave sanctuary to over 900 refugees, many of the rest have either been deported back into Vietnam, or have gone into hiding.

It's worth remembering (especially since the communist Vietnamese government certainly does) that the Montagnards have long been friends of the United States. During the Vietnam War, they gave sanctuary to U.S. soldiers and their lives to the U.S. cause — more than half of adult Montagnard males were killed fighting alongside American soldiers during the conflict.

In the short term, Washington should pressure Hanoi to end it's holiday repression. In the long term, it should do all it can to offer succor and aid to its friends, the Montagnards.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29--In a crackdown on some of its leading critics, the Vietnamese government arrested two well-known dissidents over the weekend, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reports.

Former Army Colonel and military historian Pham Que Duong was taken into custody with his wife and three others at 4 p.m. local time Saturday, Dec. 28, at the Ho Chi Minh City train station. They were preparing to return to Hanoi, according to sources in Vietnam and the United States.

They had been visiting Professor Tran Khue, who has been under house arrest for his pro-democracy activities, the sources told RFA's Vietnamese service. Publisher Ho Thu and two sons of journalist Cung Van were arrested with them.

On Sunday, Khue--a specialist in classical Chinese and Vietnamese--was arrested at his Ho Chi Minh City home, also at approximately 4 p.m., aaccording to the sources, who asked not to be named. Security officers confiscated his computer and two floppy disks.

Duong and Khue have recently emerged as de-facto spokesmen for the dissident movement inside Vietnam, in the North and South of the country, respectively. Another well-known opponent of the Vietnamese government, Hanoi-based Nguyen Thanh Giang, said he viewed the arrests as a warning to critics of the regime.

Vietnamese authorities couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. In Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Dan Que, founder of the Non-Violent Movement for Human Rights in Vietnam, urged governments and human rights organizations to "demand the immediate release of Prof. Tran Khue and Col. and Mrs. Pham Que Dong, and the others arrested over the weekend."

In November, Vietnamese cyber-dissident Le Chi Quang drew a sentence of four years' jail and three years' house arrest for "offenses against the State and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam."

Quang had been accused of breaching anti-government legislation after posting articles on the Internet criticizing border agreements between Vietnam and China in 1999 and 2000. He had also advocated democracy and praised the work of fellow dissidents Nguyen Thanh Giang and Vu Cao Quan. Human rights organizations have long criticized Hanoi for seeking to quash all political dissent and routinely incarcerating government critics.

RFA broadcasts news and information to Asian listeners who lack regular access to full and balanced reporting in their domestic media. Through its broadcasts and call-in programs, RFA aims to fill a critical gap in the lives of people across Asia. Created by Congress in 1994 and incorporated in 1996, RFA currently broadcasts in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, the Wu dialect, Vietnamese, Tibetan (Uke, Amdo, and Kham), and Uyghur. It adheres to the highest standards of journalism and aims to exemplify accuracy, balance, and fairness in its editorial content.

President Nixon ordered a worldwide secret nuclear alert in October 1969, calling his wartime tactic a "madman strategy" aimed at scaring the Soviets into forcing concessions from North Vietnam, declassified documents show.

It didn't work, as Moscow displayed no concern. The reason is unclear. The Soviets may not have cared, may not have been as influential as Nixon believed _ or, like the rest of the world, might not have noticed the alert.

The aim of the alert was kept secret from even the generals who put it into place.

The bluff was part of what Nixon described as a "madman" strategy to his new administration at the outset of 1969: ratcheting up military pressure on the North Vietnamese at unpredictable intervals to pressure them into concessions at peace talks in Paris.

Nixon believed this would accelerate accommodation by the North Vietnamese, forcing them into an agreement that would leave U.S. ally South Vietnam in place.

Among declassified documents published this week by the independent National Security Archive is a memo to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger from his assistant, Gen. Alexander Haig. It described plans to signal "U.S. intent to escalate military operations in Vietnam in the face of continued enemy intransigence in Paris."

Among the "signals" in Haig's March 2 outline: bombing enemy positions in Cambodia. On March 17, Nixon launched a massive secret bombing campaign against communist bases in that country.

Despite such pressures, the Paris talks remained deadlocked, and Nixon began to contemplate the nuclear alert in the summer of 1969.

A memo telegraphed Oct. 19 from Gen. Earle Wheeler, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, to all his commanders in chief ordered a "series of actions during the period 13 October - 25 October to test our military readiness in selected areas worldwide to respond to possible confrontation by the Soviet Union. These actions should be discernible to the Soviets, but not threatening in themselves."

He recommended grounding combat aircraft in selected areas for readiness checks, periods of radio silence and increased surveillance of Soviet ships _ all actions that suggested posturing for a nuclear conflict, and which the Americans believed the Soviets were sure to notice. A later "talking points" document showed Wheeler also ordered heightened combat readiness for ground troops.

The alert spread far beyond the Southeast Asian theater, and included U.S. forces in the Mideast and Europe.

The commanders carrying out the orders did not know the purpose of the exercise. Wheeler told them only that "we have been directed by a higher authority," an apparent reference to Nixon's immediate policy circle.

In an Oct. 17 diary entry, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman wrote: "(Kissinger) has all sorts of signal-type activity going on around the world to try to jar the Soviets and NVN (North Vietnam)."

Keeping the secret to a small circle of advisers prevented leaks as well as widespread panic and protest, anathema to Nixon's plans to tightly control the war maneuvering. But it may have backfired.

According to a report on the nuclear alert in the January 2003 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin betrayed no knowledge _ or concern _ of the nuclear alert in a meeting with a U.S. official a few days after the alert.

The Soviets resented attempts to use means unrelated to the Vietnam conflict to pressure them to rein in the North Vietnamese. Nixon brought Vietnam into arms reduction and Mideast talks as well. Although the Soviets were a major arms supplier to North Vietnam, Hanoi adeptly played the USSR against the Chinese, threatening a move to the other sphere of influence at the first sign of pressure

HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam has jailed eight men from its Central Highlands on charges of sabotaging the government's national unity policy in the region in the aftermath of protests there over land rights and religious freedom.

The sentences, announced in Thursday's edition of the Communist Party daily Nhan Dan (People) and confirmed by a court official, followed the latest in a string of convictions of members of tribal minorities since the unrest in February 2001.

The newspaper said Y Thuon Nie, 30, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and seven other men were jailed for eight years each.

An official from Daklak's provincial People's Court told Reuters the sentences were handed down on Wednesday after a one-day trial and that the eight men were from the Ede tribal group. He did not elaborate.

Vietnam has a total of 54 ethnic groups in its population of 80 million. About four million people from more than 40 of those groups live in the Central Highlands, which includes Vietnam's main coffee-growing area.

The government sent thousands of police and troops to quell the unrest in the region in February 2001, accusing protesters of wanting to set up an independent state.

The Nhan Dan newspaper said Y Thuon Nie and his fellow defendants told the court that after the unrest in Daklak, they met and sent information to "reactionary" people in the United States and encouraged people to flee to Cambodia.

More than 1,000 people from hill tribes, including protestant Christians, fled to Cambodia last year. Most have left for the United States where they have been granted asylum despite Vietnamese demands that they be sent home.

In October, the Daklak People's Court jailed three other men from the Ede group for fomenting unrest.

Earlier in October, a court in the neighbouring province of Gia Lai sentenced a man of the Gia Rai ethnic group to nine years in jail for spreading anti-government propaganda among tribes.

Vietnam has given prison sentences of up to 10 years to eight men from the Montagnard ethnic group who helped others flee a government crackdown last year, state media reported Thursday.

A court in central Daklak province on Wednesday found the men guilty of "organizing illegal migration to Cambodia" and "undermining state and Communist Party policy," the Vietnam News Agency said.

In 2001, thousands of members of the Montagnard minority participated in unprecedented protests in the Central Highland provinces of Daklak and Gia Lai over land confiscation and restrictions of their Protestant religion.

Group leader Y Thuon Nie, 30, was sentenced to 10 years in jail, while the other seven men were given eight years each at the one-day trial Wednesday. The men, all members of the Ede tribe, were also given four years of house arrest after their jail terms.

The remaining men were identified as Y Pum Bya, 38; Y Tien Nie Kdam, 23; Y Boh Lieng, 32; Yaro Nie, 38; Y Lem Bkrong, 41; Y Ju Nie, 39; and Y Nai Mlo, 37.

The men were accused of contacting former members of the guerrilla group FULRO who are now living in the United States to "sow disunity" among the hill tribes in the Central Highlands. FULRO fought on the U.S. side in the Vietnam War.

Vietnam has claimed the U.S.-based Montagnard Foundation helped instigate last year's protests.

The eight men, who had been involved in the February protests, were also charged with going into Daklak province villages to "propagandize, cheat, lure and force" ethnic minority people into fleeing Vietnam.

Last year, American officials gave political asylum to about 900 people living in refugee camps in eastern Cambodia and resettled them in the United States.

Earlier this month, Amnesty International accused Vietnam of continuing to block international access to the Central Highlands region, persecuting ethnic villagers, and targeting non-sanctioned Protestant churches affiliated with an independence movement in the region.

HANOI, Vietnam, DEC. 24, 2002 (ZENIT.org).- The Vietnamese government has stepped up its campaign against the Montagnard minority to keep them from celebrating Christmas.

The Montagnards, who live in the southern and central highlands of this communist-led country of 81 million, are mostly Christians.

The U.S.-based Montagnard Foundation (http://www.montagnard-foundation.org) said that the communist authorities announced they would enforce fines of about $10 against any Montagnard caught celebrating Christmas. Officials have also threatened the minority with arrest, imprisonment and even the death penalty, the foundation said.

The group also charged that government forces, since Dec. 15, have arrested anyone they suspect of having supported the Montagnard Foundation.

The authorities contend that those arrested belong to the United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races, a group fighting for independence from Vietnam.

The European Union has urged Vietnam to pay greater respect to human rights, strengthen its democratic credentials and relinquish its stranglehold on the media.

In a statement to mark the opening of the annual two-day Consultative Group meeting of Vietnam's international donors, the EU said such measures were essential to the communist country's economic and social development.

"Sustainable development, good governance and the promotion and protection of human rights are interdependent and interrelated.

"The EU consequently urges the government of Vietnam to strengthen its respect for political and religious freedoms, as well as further strengthen economic and social freedoms."

The regional grouping welcomed the government's commitment to tackle rampant corruption within official ranks but said a free media was vital in ensuring good governance and monitoring human rights abuses.

"Free and independent media also play a central role in identifying shortcomings from the central as well as local governments in the area of individual rights and in connection with irregularities and corruption."

Except for the handful of foreign reporters based in Vietnam operating under strict controls, all domestic media is controlled by the Communist Party for the purpose of "maintaining national unity and political stability".

The EU also urged the government to establish a legal framework to provide a "supportive environment" for local non-governmental organisations and associations, free from the Party's control.

"These could have a strong role in Vietnam's development in providing support for administrative reform and the building of democratic processes."

The EU said it supported the government's measures to reduce poverty but said specific attention should be drawn to ethnic minorities and in particular people living in the Central Highlands.

"The ongoing tension in the region is mainly due to poverty and hardship and related to land access and basic social services."

The Central Highlands tops the list of concerns in Vietnam among international rights activists after security forces forcibly put down demonstrations by thousands of hill tribe villagers in February last year.

The protests were sparked by land grievances and a government crackdown on their Protestant faith. More than 1,000 Montagnards subsequently fled the impoverished, mountainous region to Cambodia.

The EU, whose representatives visited the Central Highlands twice this year, acknowledged that although efforts have been made to reduce poverty among ethnic minorities there, more allocation of resources was needed.

"The EU also wishes to point out that there still appear to be restrictions on religion, land right issues and other social issues unresolved in the Highlands."

Last week a troika of EU ambassadors to Vietnam raised their concerns over persecution of ethnic minorities in the region as well as the imprisonment of religious and political dissidents in an official EU-Vietnam rights meeting.

Human rights groups have long charged Vietnam with smothering all dissent and routinely jailing democracy activists, critics of the regime and church leaders who do not recognise the state's authority over them.

The EU is the largest aid donor to Vietnam, disbursing 300 million euros (dollars) last year.

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