Vietnam lashes out at US human rights bill

 

HANOI, 21.7.2004  (AFP). Vietnam has lashed out at a decision by the US House of Representatives to restrict American aid to the communist nation because of human rights concerns, warning it could damage bilateral relations.

The ruling Communist Party’s Nhan Dan newspaper said the Vietnam Human Rights Act, which passed the House on Monday in a 323-45 vote, ran counter to efforts to fully normalize relations between the two former foes.

“The presentation of this so-called ‘Vietnam Human Rights Act’ at a time when the Vietnam-US ties [are] progressing well and expanding is untimely and detrimental to bilateral relations,” it said in an online editorial.

The legislation bars the US government from increasing nonhumanitarian assistance to Vietnam over this fiscal year’s level of about US$40 million unless Hanoi sets free political and religious prisoners and improves its overall “extremely poor” rights record.

International human rights groups have long charged the communist regime with smothering all dissent and jailing democracy or human rights activists.

Earlier this month two elderly dissidents became the latest in a series of writers and intellectuals to be jailed for criticizing the one-party state.

The bill also authorizes the president to block any nonhumanitarian loans or assistance to Vietnam from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, one of its major donors.

Extremely sensitive to criticism of its human rights record, Vietnam accused the United States of hypocrisy, saying it had no right to interfere given its own behavior during the Vietnam War.

“Their war of aggression in Vietnam was the height of their violations of human rights and national self-determination,” the party mouthpiece said.

Under the legislation, which still has to pass the Senate, individuals and nongovernmental organizations that promote democracy and human rights are to receive $4 million in the 2004 and 2005 fiscal years.

More than 10 million are also being offered over the same period to overcome Vietnam’s jamming of Radio Free Asia, a surrogate Congress-financed radio station that beams US programming to the region.

The House approved a similar bill in 2001, but it died in the Senate after 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry and others blocked it from being brought to vote.

Republican Representative Chris Smith from New Jersey, the driving force behind the attempts to hold Hanoi to account over its rights record, said this latest bill was aimed at forcing Vietnam out of “the dark ages of repression, brutality and abuse.”

“We cannot stand idly by while the human rights situation in Vietnam deteriorates and goes from horrific to even worse,” he added.

In February, the US State Department in its annual human rights report accused the Vietnamese government of committing “serious abuses.”

This followed its December report on religious freedom in which it grouped Vietnam in a worst offenders category of totalitarian and authoritarian states that view religious groups as “enemies of the state.”

Vietnam and the United States established diplomatic relations in 1995, two decades after the US-backed Saigon regime fell to communist forces.

 

 

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