Vietnam back to old cruel, dirty tricks
By Thomas Plate
It's understandable. Now 85, Robert McNamara, in his new book "Wilson's Ghost,'' is urging that America get involved in foreign crises only under the umbrella of multinational efforts. And you would take that view, too, if you had been the boss of the U.S. Defense Department under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and had led a bullheaded America into its Vietnam nightmare.
But that philosophy — combined with China's avowed policy of noninterference in other states' internal affairs and Europe's predictable greediness to cultivate the 79-million-strong Vietnamese market — means that the Montagnards, one of Southeast Asia's venerable highland tribes, will probably be extinguished from the face of the Earth.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, it appears, is back to its old cruel and dirty tricks. While trying to burnish its image so as to entice foreign investment and trade, it has been hunting down and killing off this small ethnic minority of largely harmless agriculturists but also fierce warriors who sided with America during the Vietnam War.
Says international refugee expert Lionel Rosenblatt, who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Cambodia, where refugees try to flee: ''The Vietnamese really think that the best kind of Montagnard is a dead one.''
Hanoi, it seems, is terrified of these legendary mountain people. Many are Christians in a largely Buddhist land, and Vietnam is insecure in the face of any organized opposition. When the Montagnards do manage to escape police roundups into Cambodia, the Vietnamese cross that border and hunt them down — sometimes with the help of Cambodians, in tragic fact — to either slaughter them there or bring them back for severe and sometimes capital punishment.
Not surprisingly, few if any outsiders are permitted into Vietnam's Central Highlands these days. ''Just when you thought the Vietnamese Communists were mellowing,'' comments a former high State Department official, ''here you have the nasty side of the Vietnamese.''
That Montagnard persecution manifestly violates international accords unsettles neither Hanoi nor Phnom Penh, where pro-Hanoi Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, save when prodded by international organizations or the United States, looks the other way.
The Bush administration's State Department has protested the Montagnard persecution, as has the office of Sen. Jesse Helms, the Southern Republican who, however otherwise bombastic, is right on this anti-Communist issue. And nonpartisan human rights groups, notably the Washington-based advocacy organization Refugees International, are doing heroic work in an effort to stem the mini-genocide.
This current Hanoi government is the hardest to figure in all of Asia — or at least among the few remaining Communist regimes. North Korea, after all, is easy: Pyongyang and its economic system are a complete failure — end of story. Beijing isn't hard to scope out, either — it's simply a lumbering conglomerate of 1.3 billion people trying to feed, placate or intimidate its gargantuan population while quietly upgrading its antiquated system into one that's more compatible with entrepreneurial capitalism.
But Vietnam — now here's a massive contradiction! On one level, change is in the air. Entrepreneurship is flourishing, the people are increasingly capitalistic and outside investment is returning, along with Vietnamese ex-pats from America, homesick for their beautiful country and deep culture.
But then there's that awful government: an old-fashioned Stalinist Communist one, dominated by men long past their intellectual prime. This past year Hanoi had its hands full suppressing large-scale anti-Hanoi riots.
To be sure, America really doesn't know what to do with the contradictions of Vietnam. Under President Clinton, we sought to bury the hatchet of the quarter-century-old Vietnam War by opening up trade and easing economic sanctions with a country that has a population larger than either Great Britain or France.
Perhaps moving away from economic engagement in response to this emerging humanitarian tragedy will not much interest America's European allies, entranced by visions of riches. But if McNamara is right in saying that unilateral moves by the United States are a mistake, who or what, then, will save the Montagnards?
For unless Washington does something — re-tightens sanctions, protests even more loudly, beseeches European and Asian allies, including China, to do the same — the Montagnards will certainly die, one by one, until they are no more.
What century are we living in?
Thomas Plate is a professor at UCLA and a columnist with The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post.
