Asia Society HostsViet Nam's President

 

Recognition of 30th Anniversary of the United States-Vietnam Diplomatic Relations & 1st Anniversary of the United States-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership

On Sunday, Asia Society hosted the official 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations between Vietnam and the United States and the first anniversary of the signing of the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership agreement. Among those who delivered remarks were H.E. To Lam, President of Vietnam and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam; Hon. John Kerry, former U.S. Secretary of State; Dan Sullivan, U.S. Senator (R-AK); Dr. Kyung-wha Kang, Asia Society President and CEO; H.E. Nguyen Quoc Dzung, Ambassador of Vietnam to the U.S.; and H.E. Dang Hoang Giang, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the UN.

“Even the most optimistic observers could not have imagined how Vietnam and the U.S. would transcend the scars of war to build a robust, positive relationship,” said General Secretary Lam. “This result is a testament to the efforts of many individuals, including key figures of leadership and other working quietly behind the scenes.”

Secretary Kerry likewise emphasized how far the bilateral relationship has come since he was deployed to Vietnam in the 1960s.

"Anniversaries have a value, not in and of themselves, but what they can actually produce. Anniversaries can often be action-oriented events, forcing moments of redefining or improving or readjusting a relationship between countries,” said Secretary Kerry. “So as someone who invested many years in finally making peace, I hope you won't mind if I suggest something unconventional for next year. Next year let's mark those two anniversaries not by looking back, but by making sure that we are looking forward. Ending the war and making peace two decades later were never ends in themselves, they were hard fought openings to put the bitterness behind us and to work together as countries.”

In the midst of increased tension with China, Senator Sullivan emphasized the importance of multi-sector cooperation between the United States and Vietnam. “The Indo-Pacific is more important than ever. I think one of the key things we need to be looking at, is when we look at the first anniversary of the comprehensive strategic partnership, looking at the different areas that we can continue to work together. I think these areas are endless. It's of course security, it's economy, high-tech, it's energy,” he said.

The celebration featured several performances from Vietnamese and American singers and musicians, underscoring the evening’s theme of “unity through art.” Among the performers were Vietnamese classical pianist Quynh Nguyen and American saxophonist Henry Threadgill, who, like Secretary Kerry, fought in Vietnam.

Before the celebration, General Secretary Lam joined Dr. Kang, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Krintenbrink, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Mark Knapper, and others for a private roundtable to discuss U.S.-Vietnam relations.

https://asiasociety.org/new-york/recap-un-general-assembly-week-asia-society-lam-s-jaishankar-and-ban-ki-moon

Antiwar Internationalism: Asia

Opposition in Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina

Wednesday October 23 at 8:00 pm ET

Register by clicking here  

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__IzsPuZCTdG_LhDowHDIOQ

During the 1960’s and early 1970’s sustained popular opposition to U.S. intervention in Indochina developed in countries thought of as U.S. allies.   US bases in Australia, Japan and South Korea supported the war effort.  Australia and South Korea sent troops.  In the case of Australia, opposition advanced beyond forms of verbal dissent to include a significant degree of draft resistance.   Three knowledgeable observers of, and participants in, opposition will share their experiences in peace movements that were not well known to US activists.

 

Rowan Cahill is a graduate of the universities of Sydney, New England, and Wollongong. Conscripted for military service in 1965 in the recently introduced selective National Service scheme, he became a Conscientious Objector and prominent in the Australian student, anti-war and New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation began its dossier on him in 1967. He has variously worked as a farmhand; as a teacher in schools, the prison system, universities; as a freelance writer; and for the trade union movement as a publicist, historian, and rank and file activist. He has published widely in mainstream, trade union, social movement, and academic publications. Author of numerous books his most recent, co-authored with Terry Irving, are Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes (UNSW Press, 2010) and The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, 2021). Currently he is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong (New South Wales).    (photo by Monica Donoso)

Blog: http://radicalsydney.blogspot.com.au     https://rowancahill.net/

Associate Professor Bobbie Oliver is an Honorary Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Western Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Although old enough to have been snared in the last few rounds of the notorious birthday ballot had she been male, her peace activism dates from a later period after studying Gandhi's peace movement in India. She taught and researched in Australian labour history and civil liberties at Curtin University from 1997 until 2018, and has published two books and several chapters and articles on the Australian peace movement.  Her most recent publication is Hell No! We Won't Go! Resistance to Conscription in Postwar Australia (Interventions Publishing, Melbourne, 2022). An earlier book, Peacemongers, which tells the history of Australian conscientious objectors to military conscription from 1911 to 1945, is being republished by Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, and should appear in late 2024 or early 2025.

Book Review Editor, Labour History

Vice President, Australian Society for the Study of Labour History

Terry Provance  Moderator After graduating from college in 1969, I became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement first organizing locally in Pittsburgh and then eventually with national groups like Harrisburg Defense Committee for Dan and Phil Berrigan, Pentagon Papers Trial and Medical Aid for Indochina.  I began working with the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia in 1973 to oppose US nuclear weapons until 1983 when I went to graduate school in Berkeley, California.  I received a fellowship and then studied two years in South America and worked with human rights groups in Chile. I returned to Pittsburgh where I pastored a local United Church of Christ congregation for 5 years and then worked in its national office on peace and justice issues for 10 years.  I then worked 12 years with Oikocredit, an international anti-poverty organization, as its Executive Director in the United States.  I retired in 2012.  

Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer based in Washington, DC. He grew up in Japan and South Korea during the Korean and the Vietnam wars and was actively involved in the antiwar movement from the time he was in high school. During the 1970s, he was active in the Indochina Peace Campaign in California. Starting in the 1980s, Shorrock reported extensively on the Japanese and Korean labor and peace movements and broke important stories about the interventionist role of the US military and the CIA in both countries. In 2015 he was given an honorary citizenship by the city of Gwangju for his reporting on the secret background role played by the US government and military in the events surrounding the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising in Korea and the imposition of martial law by the infamous general Chun Doo Hwan. This year, the city’s archives published a three-volume book translating into Korean the 3,000 US documents Shorrock obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to write his stories. Over the past 45 years, he has published in numerous US, Korean, and Japanese publications, including The Progressive, Salon, Hankyoreh, Sisa Journal, Newstapa, and Sekai. He was a correspondent for The Nation magazine from 1983 to 2023 and is the author of SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Shorrock is now working on a book about the tripartite US military alliance with Japan and South Korea and last visited Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea in 2023.

https://timshorrock.com