Lifting Vietnam arms ban stirs mixed feelings
Members of Houston community express concern about human rights
Tammy Huynh didn’t recognize her dad when she saw him for the first time after eight years. Like many of her South Vietnamese friends, she’d grown up fatherless while the men served time in communist re-education camps, where many were tortured.
“It was terrible,” said the 42-year-old Houston real estate agent who came to the United States with her family in 1990.
Even for the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who escaped the new Hanoi government, risking their lives on makeshift boats or holing up in refugee camps in the Philippines, their memories of the communist country are traumatic. Fleeing it and starting over with nothing is the defining feature of their lives.
So President Barack Obama’s announcement Monday that Washington would lift a decades-old arms embargo and allow Vietnam to buy lethal military equipment was met with mixed feelings: a grudging recognition that geopolitics in the region had changed but also a re-
sentment that the United States was not doing more to pressure Vietnam into improving its abysmal human rights record.
Faint, however, was the onceubiquitous Cold War-era protest that nothing should be done with communist Hanoi at all, barring a change in its ideology.
“We are truly happy for the Vietnamese people back home, that the two countries have a more open relationship,” Huynh said. “But we’re hoping the U.S. is able to demand the commitment to have more human rights.”
Human rights organizations had asked Obama to require that Hanoi release political prisoners and agree to stop the recent police beatings of protesters, and they condemned the lifting of the weapons ban without such a commitment.
Large community here
In Houston, which has the nation’s largest Vietnamese population outside of Sacramento and Orange County, Calif., prominent real estate developer Stephen Le Sr. said the community urges the freeing of prisoners in exchange for purchasing weapons.
Nearly 111,000 Vietnamese live in the Houston region, two-thirds of whom were born abroad, according to the U.S. Census, and they have been settling here ever since the fall of Saigon in 1975 sparked the largest-ever en masse influx of Asian immigrants.
“That’s what we are asking for,” said Le, who is on the advisory board of the city’s Vietnamese-American Chamber of Commerce. “We want them to be released.”
John Sifton, Asia policy director at Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, said Washington has been telling the Vietnam government for years to make progress on their human rights record if they want closer military and economic ties.
Instead, Obama “just gave Vietnam a reward that they don’t deserve,” Sifton said in a statement.
Giac Dang, a Buddhist monk at the Phap Luan Buddhist Culture Center in southwest Houston, said even as relations keep opening with Washington, Vietnam makes little human rights advancement in return.
“The U.S. government should send a stronger signal to Hanoi,” Dang said. “What we’re seeing with President Obama and the U.S. delegation is too soft.”
Obama on Monday called human rights one of the “areas where our two governments disagree.” He said Washington respects Vietnam’s sovereignty and will not try to “impose” a democratic system on the country, but didn’t address any conditions to lifting the embargo.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, said he would offer legislation this week to impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on Vietnamese who have been involved in human rights abuses.
“We simply can’t give a pass to the Vietnamese regime and a pass to their oppressive government because, frankly, it’s a little inconvenient to bring up during the time we’re talking about trade and better economic relationships,” he said in a statement.
Tensions with China
American officials have sought to characterize ending the embargo as an effort to help Vietnam in its tensions with an increasingly aggressive China over the South China Sea. Analysts think Vietnam could then possibly grant the United States access to a strategic deepwater port.
“The lifting of the embargo is a good thing for Vietnam to be able to defend itself,” said state Rep. Hubert Vo, a Democrat who represents Alief and is the only Vietnamese-American to have served in the Texas Legislature. “But other issues also need to be addressed. It’s one step helping Vietnam stand on its feet and to fight against invaders, but we also need to show them what freedom and democracy is all about.”
Just like for Cubans in Miami, anti-communism sentiment defines Houston’s Vietnamese community, said Mustafa Tameez, a political strategist and chairman of the South Asian Chamber of Commerce.
In a competitive state House race against Vo in 2014, for example, former Houston city councilman Al Hoang sued a local Vietnamese weekly magazine for defaming him as a “spy of the Vietnamese Communist.”
In the lawsuit, he said its editor threatened to “destroy” him if he went on a City Council-related trip to Vietnam. Hoang blamed the magazine’s coverage for his narrow loss in a council race to Richard Nguyen in 2013.
“The Vietnam War was really tough,” said District F Council Member Steve Le, who has no relation to the real estate developer and beat Nguyen last year to hold his council seat. “The generation it affected the most was the ones involved in the war, and they’re also the ones that vote more. When they think you’re a communist, you’re out.”
But Le, who came here when he was 8, said that is changing.
“I see the detriment that communism can bring to a country, and for me that is something I see as fighting hard against,” he said. “But for the younger generation, their livelihood is here. They could care less about what’s happening (in Vietnam.)”
Not concerned
In Hong Kong City Mall on Monday, Kevin Nguyen and his two sisters ate lunch at Phi Coffee & Tea as Vietnamese shoppers bought delicacies from home or sent money back.
Nguyen, a 24-year-old student at Texas Christian University, said he has been here for about a decade and hadn’t heard about the lifting of the embargo.
“I don’t care very much about Vietnamese politics,” he said.
“We live in the U.S. now,” added his older sister, Mi.
Nearby, Andy Hau, an 18-yearold Vietnamese-American who was born in California, said engaging with Hanoi was no big deal.
“Don’t we already deal with communist China?” he asked. “I think it’s kind of good, to build a relationship with them. Maybe it will help trade.”