Madeline Albright's Trip To Vietnam And Cambodia

Madeline Albright's Trip To Vietnam And Cambodia

The U.S. Veteran Dispatch Editorial June/July/August 1997

U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright will visit Vietnam on June 26-28 and Cambodia on June 28-29 en route to witness the British hand over free-wheeling Hong Kong into the iron fist of communist China. The Secretary's trip comes at a critical time in Southeast Asia, as the hope for democracy and freedom in the countries she will be visiting -- and throughout much of the region -- appear to be languishing.

Albright represents an administration whose lust for selling U.S. policy to the highest international or multi-national bidders with scant concern for American national security has benefited the "butchers of Beijing" and the corrupt "war criminal" regime in Hanoi. Those two blood-stained regimes will closely scrutinize Secretary Albright's words to determine whether or not the U.S. government will continue to reward tyranny with increased trade benefits and economic assistance.

A State Department spokesman claimed that Mrs. Albright's itinerary in Vietnam will include discussing a full accounting of U.S. personnel missing since the war, human rights and "the next steps in completing the normalization of our bilateral economic relations." The key to this agenda is whether the administration is willing to precondition a full accounting of prisoners of war and other men last known alive in Vietnam and Laos to incremental steps to increased economic relations.

Will Mrs. Albright place the same strident emphasis on apprehending war criminals in the Vietnamese government who tortured and murdered American prisoners of war? New U.S. Ambassador Pete Peterson, a self-proclaimed healer, told the international press that the torturers were, "men just doing their job."

Will Mrs. Albright include releasing all Vietnamese political dissidents and religious leaders who remain in the gulag? Will she link free and fair internationally supervised elections to continued U.S. taxpayer dollars that fund the multi-million dollar loans and grants through the World Bank, Asia Development Bank and direct U.S. government assistance?

Cambodia is once again on the verge of civil war following the Easter Sunday massacre of non-violent political opponents of the "Khmer Viet Minh" regime in Phnom Penh that is led by Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge officer (Hun Sen was installed by the Vietnamese communists during their 1979-91 occupation of Cambodia).

Due to intimidation and bribery of non-communist parliamentarians by Hun Sen, neither the elected parliament or the co-Prime Ministers' cabinet has met in months. The struggling government, rife with corruption, has become a money-laundering center for regional drug lords.

Recently, Prince Norodom Sirivudh, the exiled Foreign Minister and respected reformer in the Cambodian coalition government was warned by Hun Sen that if he tried to reenter Cambodia that soldiers would shoot any international airliner that carried him out of the sky.

On June 4th in Washington, Prince Sirivuth told U.S. policy makers that in order for national elections scheduled for 1998 to be conducted, the Cambodian parliament must first create election laws.

Will Mrs. Albright "tell it like it is" to Hun Sen and the other unreformed communist thugs who rule by force?

Will she link Cambodia's coveted entry to the World Trade Organization and continued U.S. Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status and any future award of U.S. Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) duty-free trade status to the end of violence and the conduct of free and fair elections on both local and national levels?

The governments of America's allies and adversaries in the region will be closely observing Mrs. Albright's remarks and the administration's actions in response to the growing political violence in Cambodia.

Clinton's administration has lost considerable respect among our allies for coddling Hanoi and bowing to the Chinese communists' economic wishes in the face of their increased oppression of dissidents and religious believers, genocide in Tibet and East Turkmenistan (Xinkiang), and military aggression in the South China Sea.

Almost all of China's "miracle" economic growth is the result of billions of dollars of foreign investment, including countless millions of U.S. tax dollars and an annual 40 million dollar trade surplus with the United States. Deference to China has caused a loss of credibility between U.S. and its Cold War allies such as Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The admission of the violent Chinese-armed Burmese Junta into the Association of Southeast Nations, during a campaign of mass arrests and persecution of pro-democracy activists, is a example of the increased lack of U.S. political respectability in the region.

Even before their takeover of Hong Kong, the Chinese communists have broken their promises to respect Hong Kong's democratic political system. Mrs. Albright will arrive in Hong Kong with her political star already tarnished because of a recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and her best friend in Congress, Senator Jesse Helms.

In her testimony, she said the U.S. is ending trade with two Chinese companies and a third in Hong Kong, that provided Iran with the technology and raw materials for building chemical weapons. When asked how the Clinton administration could be so bullish on renewing Most Favored Nation trading status with China, she flippantly told the Senators that, "there was no evidence that the Chinese government was involved."

If Mrs. Albright truly believes that a totalitarian communist government could be unaware of chemical arms -- including the materials to build entire factories -- being shipped to a world class terrorist nation, then she should do the long suffering peoples of Cambodia, Vietnam and China a favor and retire to the Council of Foreign Relations headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and luncheons at the Russian Tea Room.

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