FRD Presentation for the 30th Anniversary of Normalizaion

“The Participation of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development (FRD) in the Normalization Process” - Mr. John McAuliff, Executive Director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development (online)

 

 (i) Clarify the key highlights and major features of Vietnam–U.S. people-to-people relations over the past 30 years; identify the differences between Vietnam–U.S. people-to-people relations during the 1995–2025 period and those in the periods before 1975 and from 1975 to 1995.

Steps toward normalization:

1)    1965-1975   A small but influential sector of the antiwar movement became directly involved with Vietnamese from the DRV and the National Liberation Front at meetings in Canada, Bratislava, Paris and Stockholm.    During the war approximately 200 activists and significant cultural figures visited Ha Noi and connected with NLF linked students and Third Force leaders in Saigon.  These relationships led to the creation of the Peoples Peace Treaty in 1971 and a campaign for its adoption throughout the US.  Much of the antiwar movement was cautious about too close an association with the “other side” because it might be considered disloyal.  Broader public opinion was uncomfortable with NLF flags in protests.

1975-1985      A delegation of activists from the Indochina Peace Campaign and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), including myself, arrived in Ha Noi the day the war ended, remaining for two weeks.  Quaker and Mennonite staff posted to Saigon stayed there for some months after liberation.  Most organizations and activists that had been involved in the broad movement against the war greeted April 30^th with feelings of achievement and relief and went on to other concerns like nuclear weapons and Central America. 

 A small group of religious peace organizations such as the Quakers (AFSC), the Mennonite Central Committee, and Church World Service, continued humanitarian assistance that had begun during the war.  They joined with secular peace activists to create the Friendshipment Coalition that sent a boatload of wheat from Houston in April 1978.  In the same year. the US Committee for Scientific Cooperation was launched with more ideological roots.  Vietnam Veterans of America pioneered engagement of former serving military with its first trip in 1981.  Efforts were made during the Carter Administration to support normalization but the only achievement was Viet Nam’s membership in the UN in 1977.  In the first months after the end of the war, US public opinion favored normalization of relations and humanitarian assistance but that sentiment declined dramatically because of the traumatic stories about the boat people, the anti-communist refugee perspective shared in the US, reeducation camps and the war between Viet Nam and the Khmer Rouge.  Popular films conveyed contradictory images of the war and of the US role:  The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Rambo (1982).

1985-1995   Wider sectors of US and Vietnamese society became engaged with each other creating the foundation for normalization.  The US-Indochina Reconciliation Project of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, our organization, began in 1985 organizing twice a year delegations that introduced professors, academic institutions and foundations that followed up their own programs of cooperation.  The delegations were hosted first by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,  then by Vietnam Tourism, and finally by the Viet Nam USA Society.  

FRD coordinated ten conferences between 1989 and 2001 in partnership with the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations that brought US NGOs together with counterparts from Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia leading to many new collaborative programs.  The goal was both to provide assistance and to foster normal relations.  By 1994 210 international NGOs, largely American, had authorized programs in Vietnam registered with PACCOM, sometimes with in-country staff.  Veterans created a variety of binational programs in literature, the arts and humanitarian assistance.    Mainstream US academic institutions established research and training projects.   The business community’s interest and support took institutional form with the launching of the US-Vietnam Trade Council in 1989.  A growing number of US sponsored Vietnamese expert delegations visited the US and regional countries.  

An agreement negotiated by General John Vessey and Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach in August 1987 took reconciliation to a governmental level as each side acknowledged the other’s humanitarian needs; humanitarian assistance was officially encouraged from new American private sources.  US Senators who were veterans played a higher level role, enabling Fulbright scholarships in 1992, overcoming myths of living POWs, and creating the political environment for President Clinton to end the embargo and normalize relations.

 

(ii) Identify the current contextual factors that affect Vietnam–U.S. people-to-people relations, including both favorable conditions and challenges.

The objective interests of the two countries and their economic institutions provide an important motive for people-to-people relations.  The goal of the US to contain China, especially in the East Sea, coincides strategically with Viet Nam’s concern for its independence and sovereignty.  Methods of achieving these ends may have tactical differences, including links to the more volatile China-Philippines conflict.   Family relationships are an enduring bond, regardless of reasons and timing of emigration.  Marriages between Americans and Vietnamese are building new lifelong ties.

The US will have difficulty understanding how Viet Nam can seem to have warm Party to Party and ideological bonds with China at the same time that there is open conflict over territorial control.   Our countries also have very different visions of human rights and democracy.  In the current context, the US sets these differences aside.  However, it is also possible that liberal or conservative self-righteousness and regime change arrogance can reemerge.  The unpredictability of the current US Administration creates additional challenges in both countries.

 

(iii) Determine the partners, content, formats, and measures to promote Vietnam–U.S. people-to-people exchanges in the current period.

 I see four potential areas for VUS/VUFO engagement

1)   1) Continue to work with the diminishing number of Viet Nam war era activists and veterans to connect or reconnect their personal histories with Vietnamese war legacies and current reality.

 2)     Promote your ability to organize “Introduction to Viet Nam” programs to current activist, civil society and student networks in the U.S.  They should be tailored to involve the Americans with Vietnamese counterparts with the goal of creating long term friendship and collaboration.

 3)     Offer to foreign and Vietnamese tour operators and travel agents the opportunity for two hour programs about Viet Nam’s recent history, economy and culture.  They can be offered in Ha Noi, Hue, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City as a one or multi part program.  About an hour should be a well done entertaining presentation and about an hour should be an opportunity for questions.  This should be a paid service.  A second way to do it is to promote open to the public programs with an entry fee.

4)      4) Over the next ten years create sister city partnerships between every Vietnamese province and US state.  These can become vehicles for many levels of long term relationships with visits and social friendships and collaborations professionally, culturally and economically.  High school and college level student exchanges should be facilitated and perhaps even subsidized and involve local hosts in both countries.