Baker, Hanoi Official Discuss U.S.-Viet Ties

UNITED NATIONS —  In the highest-level U.S.-Hanoi contact since the Vietnam War ended 15 years ago, Secretary of State James A. Baker III told Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach on Saturday that Washington will consider normal diplomatic relations as soon as peace is restored in neighboring Cambodia and Hanoi accounts for missing American servicemen.

A senior State Department official said the half-hour talk was “a step in the direction” of normalization which would include an exchange of ambassadors and an end to U.S. economic sanctions that have bedeviled Hanoi’s troubled economy.

The official said the conditions that Baker laid down--peace in Cambodia and a satisfactory accounting for the missing in action--are not new. But he added, “I think it was important for the Vietnamese to hear it from the secretary.”

“I think this is a relationship which we and the Vietnamese would like to see move forward,” the official said.

Although the official stressed that formal talks about diplomatic relations have not yet begun, the meeting dramatized the rising pace of Washington-Hanoi contacts since July 17, when Baker ended a ban on official contacts that had persisted since the war. Several lower-level meetings have been held the past two months.

The last time a U.S. secretary of state held a meeting with a high-level official from Hanoi was in 1973, when Henry A. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho completed the Paris talks that led to Washington’s departure from the conflict. The war ended in 1975 when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army and Hanoi took over South Vietnam.

Baker temporarily suspended regulations that prohibit Vietnamese diplomats from traveling more than 25 miles from the U.N. headquarters in New York to permit Thach, who also serves as Vietnam’s deputy premier, to visit Washington to discuss the missing in action with retired Gen. John W. Vessey Jr. and Ann Mills Griffiths, head of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. Vessey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is President Bush’s special representative on POW/MIA matters.

No time for that meeting was announced, but it probably will be held within the next few days. Thach is in the United States to attend the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.

With Thach at his side just before the start of their private meeting, Baker told reporters that the United States welcomes “recent developments respecting the possibility of a solution to the tragic circumstances in Cambodia. I think the Vietnamese government has been taking some action to move that process forward just as the United States government has.”

At the same time, Baker said Thach “knows that the pace and scope of our ability to move toward normalization of (relations with) Vietnam is going to depend upon further progress on the POW/MIA issue.”

While Baker and Thach were talking in Baker’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, a group of Vietnam veterans demonstrated outside, demanding that the two governments acknowledge that some missing Americans are still alive and being held prisoner.

The senior State Department official said the U.S. government “has no evidence” that would indicate that any of the missing Americans are still alive, although “we operate on the assumption that there may be Americans still held captive in Southeast Asia.”

About 1,700 American service personnel are unaccounted for in Vietnam and about 700 others are missing in Laos and Cambodia in the aftermath of the bitter Vietnam War.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said Baker urged Thach “to accelerate Vietnam’s unilateral efforts to resolve the POW/MIA issue, thereby pre-positioning both countries for improved relations once a Cambodian settlement is achieved.”

Under a formula worked out by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, with the support of Vietnam, the Vietnamese-backed government of Cambodia and the three guerrilla factions that have been fighting it for 15 years agreed to create a Cambodian Supreme National Council to govern the country until a new government is selected.

However, the plan is stalled over disagreements among the Cambodian factions about representation on the council.

The senior State Department official said the United States did not hold Vietnam directly accountable for the actions of the Hun Sen government in Cambodia, even though it was installed by invading Vietnamese troops. But he added: “Could the Vietnamese help resolve (the dispute)--certainly.”

Vietnam, which invaded Cambodia in late 1978, has withdrawn most of its 140,000 troops, although Thach confirmed that some advisers to the Cambodian army were left behind.

“We have withdrawn our forces, and we will withdraw all our advisers,” Thach said.

The State Department official said Baker and Thach talked very briefly about the U.S. trade and economic embargo of Vietnam. The official said Baker emphasized that the embargo could be lifted “as the relationship moves forward” but that there would be no change for the time being.