Vietnam Looks to the West

...No one imagines such capitalist instincts will gradually fade away...

...Might diplomacy replace war if the irresponsible Sihanouk were drawn through negotiations into endorsing the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh...

...Few people count on the government to bring about fundamental improvements in their lives...

...He may even be shown the imprints of GI dogtags...

...Still, it is almost fashionable here now for bureaucrats to show off a new "openness" in interviews with visitors interested in learning about economic reform—or even "restructuring...

...Small and medium-sized private business in Ho Chi Minh City constitute 60 per cent of its gross domestic product...

...Smith accuses the United States of making matters worse by pressuring other Western nations not to provide aid or engage in trade as long as Vietnam keeps troops in Cambodia...

...They know what I have to say is not that bad," he declares flatly in an interview...

...Faithful government workers say the real "elite" consists of Southern businessmen coddled by reform-minded or at least tolerant cadres...

...TheSouthhad the beginnings of a capitalist country when the Americans were here," he notes...

...The people in the small crowd gathered around me as I stand in the middle of Yen Phu shrug when I bring up the subject...

...Take a cyclo to a coffee shop down a maze of side streets, and you encounter Vietnamese there talking almost nostalgically in GI slang...

...The United States,' he says, "is shirking its responsibility...

...The state, he says, " does not have a good system of buying rice and does not encourage people to produce rice...

...Southerners who were caught on the wrong side in the war complain that they aren't eligible for state jobs, and that their children can't get a decent education...

...Quite the contrary, Oanh believes capitalism may well floweragain...

...He shares the official view that the small Cambodian Army built up by Vietnamese advisers and equipped with Soviet arms can hold off the Khmer Rouge on its own...

...First, of course, the country must wipe out a current inflation rate of well over 1,000 per cent a year...

...Oanh hopes that a new investment law will attract foreign businessmen to his country...

...China has no trail like the Ho Chi Minh trail in the Vietnam War, " he says, employing the name first applied by U.S...

...Could the aging gentleman with the club tie be the same individual who, as the deputy premier of the old U.S.-backed regime, used to brief reporters on South Vietnam's potential for "economic take-off in smiling press conferences at Saigon's Caravelle Hotel...

...Vietnam's troops in Cambodia, by its own admission, number only a few thousand less than those of the Soviets in Afghanistan...

...Known to a generation of Americans as "Jack Owen," Oanh now offers the wisdom of his PhD training in economics at Harvard and his capitalist indoctrination in the South to Vietnamese leaders tutored in hard-line radicalism...

...The Khmer Rouge, like the Afghan rebels in Pakistan, operate out of refugee camps right across Cambodia's western border in Thailand...

...The only way to make money these days, she reasons, is "to buy a product at one price and sell it at another...

...Oanh turns neat phrases in explaining Vietnam's attempts to establish an economic model that supposedly borrows neither from its Soviet benefactor nor from its former American enemy...

...And Vietnamese leaders insist that the greatest of these will vanish when the troops come home from Cambodia...

...Officials at the U.S...

...says a shopkeeper in Hanoi who had served the regime...

...Communist Party chief Linh may appear reform-minded, but no one is sure about the real views of Vo Van Kiet, chairman of the State Planning Commission...

...Wherever you go in Saigon you hear tales of individual tragedies...

...connivance in 1970, and Son Sann, a weak middle-roader with few guerrillas of his own...

...He hopes to convince an International Monetary Fund team that Vietnam has enough economic vitality to qualify for major assistance...

...The prosperity of the Mekong Delta buoys the North in time of hardship...

...Such criticism, to be sure, almost never focuses on the costs of the country's presence in Cambodia...

...We try to free the forces of production"— which means giving producers local autonomy and even the right to make personal profits...

...Analysis of cause and effect revolves around drought—two bad harvests in a row—but the inference is clear: Life would be easier if authorities invested more in food for the people, less in feeding an expeditionary force in another country...

...The United States remains the promised land to a people unable to forget the dollars that once flooded the economy...

...Small cargo vessels move the rice from South to North almost in convoys...

...Oanh is preparing his government to apply for Western loans...

...Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Linn, like Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, preaches the need to cut expenses and get on with reforms...

...On a Sunday in Saigon or Hanoi, jean-clad Soviet advisers, engineers and pilots go shopping with their ladies—who wear cavernous dresses and piled-high hairdos that make them appear more obviously Russian than the men...

...They're actually "getting poorer compared to the conditions of the rich people," she says, adding that most of the indigent "are workers, civil servants...

...The Khmer Rouge, liketheMujahideen, rely on outside aid—from China, funneled largely through Thailand...

...How much change has the present economic experimentation really brought about...

...We often say we are the victims of natural calamities and enemy invasion...

...Kiet served as acting prime minister before Do Muoi, a vice premier responsible for several economic ministries, emerged as prime minister in June...

...Although this is a society that cracks down on any real dissent, you need not worry about the police seizing you in midtransaction...

...Freighters from Singapore and Hong Kong line up in the Saigon River, waiting to unload cargoes of Western products—motorscooters, pharmaceuticals, shaving cream, tea biscuits—onto the black markets of Saigon...

...Each farmer is a small capitalist," Oanh points out...

...Oanh lives in Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon was renamed by the Communists) but regularly flies to Hanoi...

...In both Hanoi and Saigon the impression is, very little...

...With about 4 million people now facing starvation, Vietnamese officials acknowledge the need for "emergency" shipments of food and fertilizer...

...There might be some support from China for the Khmer Rouge," says Man, who edited the paper all through the battle against the Americans, "but do they have enough strength...

...Donald Kirk, a longtime contributor, is a veteran observer of Asian affairs...

...Claiming that "there isn't that much difference between capitalism and socialism," Oanh (who admits regretting that he did not accept a high-paying job with the World Bank or International Monetary Fund many years ago) says his strategy is to "try very hard to make the best of both worlds...

...hind the predilection for getting out of Cambodia lies an almost wistful hope...

...From Vinh and Dong Hoi, the coastal towns hardest hit by the American bombing, on past the old imperial capital of Hue, sceneof someof theworst carnage of the war during the 1968 Tet offensive, villagers complain of one bad crop after another...

...They own tractors and Hondas...

...Another factor may have been Muoi's reputation as a "disciplinarian," perhaps a "hard-liner," the sort to root out corruption and inefficiency...

...To Vietnamese on the rice-paddy level, inured to war, Cambodia appears somehow irrelevant— a distant phenomenon of concern only to officials and soldiers...

...True, headmits, "there's more free enterprise" and "not so many intermediaries" as before the pivotal Sixth Party Congress of 1986, but the bureaucracy stillstandsintheway...

...At the same time they are striving to reassure the world on the issue of Cambodia...

...It is the worst area in Vietnam in climate and weather, too...

...There is a real famine situation," he says...

...In Saigon's central market, a woman selling ducks and chickens complains that "the poor people cannot buy here every day...

...military officers to the road network through eastern Laos and Cambodia used by Hanoi to ship arms to its forces fighting the Americans...

...The situation in Afghanistan is different," avers Man, without specifying why...

...Here in the North all you have is state enterprises, but in the South you have private enterprise," he observes...

...We fully believe we can do that," insists Major General Tran Cong Man, editor-in-chief of Quan Doi Nhan Dan ("People's Army"), the daily paper of the Armed Forces...

...Traditionally the key to both long-term stability and immediate survival...

...His five children "do not get enough to eat," he says, and he has to trek miles into the hills rising to the west in search of firewood to sell on the market in order to make a bare living...

...They have very little money," says one...

...For one who covered the war in the South two decades ago, an invitation to meet Nguyen Xuan Oanh, advertised by a spokesman from the Foreign Press Center as a "Harvard graduate," was almost unsettling...

...Sooner or later the visitor is also likely to hear about missing Americans— GI's working in fields, married to Vietnamese, whatever...

...Go almost anywhere in Vietnam and you're likely to hear a litany of criticism, much of it expressed privately, some of it openly, in the presence of officials...

...Nowhere is the drive for reform more apparent than in efforts to resuscitate agriculture...

...Around the corner, Hondas and radios glisten from the shops—evidence that someone, somewhere, knows how to make a profit the old-fashioned way...

...Shopkeepers complain the Russians don't spend enough...

...Unlikely as such a solution might seem, it could have some appeal for Beiing...

...A few miles south of Hue, Vo Van Giap, a one-time South Vietnamese Armysoldier, pauses at the edge of a rice paddy harvested by a small collective...

...Wecan only get them in exchange for rice.' In his office in Hanoi, behind a desk heaped with papers and poetry books, David Smith, in charge of the United Nations Development Program here, warns visitors of impending disaster...

...When they can't do it they feel sorry for themselves.' It is time, Oanh maintains, for the United States to get over its "Vietnam War syndrome...

...Vietnam's current food crisis is its worst since 1945, when 2 million people starved in the aftermath of the harsh Japanese rule before the end of World War II...

...Dreams of American capitalism staging a comeback here betray disillusionment with the Soviets, whose 10,000 advisers are involved mainly in large projects that seem unlikely to provide quick relief...

...Another shows pictures from the funeral for her teen-aged son, killed by thieves as he was leaving school...

...American officials in Bangkok have heard most of the stories and seen most of the dogtag imprints, yet both keep circulating among Vietnamese who want to exchange their knowledge for permission to go to the United States...

...If you want to be rich," says a civil servant with a coveted motorcycle, "you must have two jobs...

...Might Sihanouk then convince the Chinese to diminish their support of the Khmer Rouge—and return to Phnom Penh in a coalition acceptable to all sides...

...The fact that I, like other Western visitors, have quick access to General Man reflects Vietnam's eagerness to get across the message that it is willing to go a good deal of the distance toward meeting the American demands for a pullout from Cambodia—but is not about to drop its support for the regime it has propped up in Phnom Penh since Pol Pot's departure...

...You cheap Charlie," a snaggle-toothed woman tells a foreign visitor, grinning over his reluctance to buy a drink for a girl hovering beside him...

...Vietnamese leaders object strenuously to any comparison between their avowed desire to pull their troops out of Cambodia and the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan...

...Wehavejustenough to eat," says Hoang Thi Lam, mother of six children, talking to me in a village named Yen Phu through a young Vietnamese guide supplied by the Foreign Press Center in Hanoi...

...A cyclo driver, who served as an interpreter f or U. S. military units, curses the "goddam Communists" as he talks about his years as an unpaid laborer on a "collective farm" in the Central Highlands...

...Man believes China would find Cambodia a treacherous battleground...

...though not so large and fertile as the Mekong Delta in the South, the region is for now at least far from desperate...

...One of my guides in Hanoi claims she can spot the Southerners in the lines outside Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum from the worldly suits of the men and the bright ao dais and make-up of the women...

...Amerasians, now in their teens or early 20s, wander the streets doing odd jobs, but few of the mspeak English...

...Merchants tell of escapes by boat, of months of imprisonment for those caught attempting to flee, of friends and family lost at sea...

...Kids everywhere shout "lien so"—for Soviet Union—at almost anyone with light skin and round eyes...

...Almost everyone understands "numbah one and numbah 10" —GI phrases for "best" and "worst...

...ECONOMIC STIRRINGS Vietnam Looks to the West By Donald Kirk Hanoi Drive a few miles east of here on the road leading to the port city of Haiphong, and you begin to see why Vietnam's leaders really mean it when they say they must get out of Cambodia...

...At the heart of the new thinking here is the principle that capitalism is perhaps the best way to bring about what could be along transition to true socialism...

...few think to question the wisdom of keeping more than 100,000 troops in jungles hundreds of miles from home...

...to relatives living there...

...They don't like theideaofbeingcollectivized.' Asmany as three-fourths of the farmers in the Mekong Delta still operate as free enterprises, with provincial authorities buying most of the crops they sell beyond their own villages...

...Vietnamese hyperinflation can be gauged by the price of dollars and of goods on the black markets that flourish almost as openly in Hanoi as they do in Saigon (the old name persists in the vernacular...

...Our initial capital comes from shareholders...

...The government provides neither pesticides nor fertilizers free of charge, headds...

...By 1990, Oanh fantasizes, the black market in currency will be almost gone...

...He promised almost at once to keep up the fight against inflation and carry on the withdrawal from Cambodia—not exactly revealing, yet reassuring to those who thought he might come out against economic reform...

...Embassy in Bangkok, meanwhile, argue instead for the "legitimacy" of a Cambodian coalition that includes the once-hated Khmer Rouge along with factions loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the chief of state driven out with U.S...

...Marine and Army units battled the Communists in the area as far north as the bloodied "Demilitarized Zone" that separated North from South Vietnam...

...It's smack in the Red River Plain, the rice-rich delta heartland of the North...

...Nobody in Vietnam relies only on his salary...

...The power play that put the 71 -yearold Muoi at the head of Vietnam's government defies certain analysis...

...Everything is expensive nowadays," hesays...

...They are not li ke the Americans...

...An American walking around old Saigon haunts is likely to have half a dozen letters pushed on him by Vietnamese eager to get them posted in the U.S...

...That near-magical year, when the withdrawal from Cambodia is supposed to be completed as well, is the deadline for the government to get inflation down to a mere 20 per cent, while holding its foreign debt to about $1 billion...

...Many Vietnamese believe that Americans might return in search of a profit once the United States relaxes its restraints...

...They say they don't want to appear " like beggars" and make public appeals, but they openly spread the word among Western embassies and visiting journalists...

...One shopkeeper talks about her husband dying in a re-education camp near the Cambodian border...

...What little the official press and radio carry about Vietnam's military involvement there does not suggest the ebb and flow of a simmering conflict that has been going on for more than nine years, from the day Vietnamese forces swarmed across the border at the end of 1978 and drove the bloody Pol Pot regimeinto the maquis...

...Oanh is also pursuing more modest projects...

...The American Embassy in Bangkok estimates that several million Vietnamese would leave the country immediatelyif they could...

...Theycanwage a guerrilla war, but not a big war...

...Theysaythe Russians who give them about $2 billion a year in aid, mostly military, aren't pressuring them at all to adopt an "Afghan-style" retreat...

...Comparisons, nevertheless, are irresistible...

...One little girl outside the old Eden building, a landmark in downtown Saigon, waves her hand and yells "nyet" in response to an attempt to photograph her...

...Rather, itstresses Hanoi's declared intention of bringing its troops home by 1990—beginning with the return of 50,000 of them this year...

...In the lowlands of central Vietnam, midway between the two deltas, hunger is more than a vague fear—it is a daily reality...

...He carefully distinguishes between reviving the economy in the North and reforming the recalcitrant South, still a free-wheeling melange of profit-seekers and poor peasants...

...ON the streets of Ho Chi Minh City the nation's grim legacy is abundantly evident...

...Food production is not adequate for the population," which is growing by2.5 per cent a year...

...Stroll through the central marketplace in Hanoi, however, andmerchants more attuned to supply and demand tell of widespread food shortages...

...For example," he says, "the government can investigate requests for insecticides, but often they come late and are useless...

...This province suffered the most during the war," says Nguyen Van Dieu, aprovincial official...

...We encourage the state and cooperatives in the North, and in the South we encourage joint ventures and private ownership...

...The rates for dollars are usually somewhat higher in the latter than in the former, but in either city you can use them to pick up lacquerware, brocades or porcelain for laughably little...

...Since that conflict ended there have been "no stumbling blocks" to U.S.-diplomatic relations, he argues, "but there have been pretexts...

...We have started on a series of reforms of business administration and the management of production," he says...

...In any case, by the standards of modern Vietnam, Yen Phu is relatively prosperous...

...For eight years, 1965-73, U.S...

...Confucionist respect for seniority may be the best explanation for why Muoi should have been the choice ahead of the 66year-old Kiet, who seemed in line for the post on a permanent basis...

...Your guide—all visitors must have one, payable in dollars—may even volunteer to change money for you at a rate at least three times higher than the " legal" one...

...Because wages have minimal purchasing power, for instance, it is assumed that corruption is commonplace even among government officials...

...Another villager, Nguyen Quang Bang, complains about rising prices at the end of a long day in a nearby rice paddy...

...But hardly any of it reaches those who need it most...

...Throughitall, the bureaucracy grinds relentlessly on, propping up a new class of middle managers for whom the security of a government or Party post—with guaranteed rice ration—is the due reward for years of wartime service...

...Over cups of tea in the musty reception room of the Army newspaper (the second largest in the country after the civilian Nhan Dan), General Man expressed his confidence in the viability of the existing Cambodian regime...

...In the back alleys of Saigon, veterans of "reeducation camps" mingle with escapees from "new economic zones,' breathing hatred for a system that seems to discriminate as much against them today as it did at the end of the war...

...From Hang Gai or Silk Street in Hanoi to Dong Khoi or Revolution Street (previously Tu Do) in Saigon, almost any shopkeeper will gladly exchange your dollars for brick-size wads of dong notes...

...Economic hardship, significantly, cuts both ways...

...The relationship between Vietnam's military investment in Cambodia and the shortages at home seems to them almost too abstruse to contemplate...

...Loaning money both to Socialist-style collectives and strictly private business schemes—at interest rates of 9 per cent and 9.9 per cent, respectively—the bank in theory sets a nationwide precedent...

...Exactly how the government views what it acknowledges to be the "chaos" of the economy remains a mystery to Hanoi-watchers...

...Gangs of orphans pursue you for "money, money, " grinning amputees extend begging bowls, and healthy war veterans chase you in their cyclos to persuade you to quit walking...

...It's like the commercial banks that existed previously," according to its director Lu Sann Thai...

...We have enough," says Le Quang Leim, selling rice shipped up from the Mekong Delta on a stopgap basis to supplement the shortfalls in the North, but "people elsewhere don't...

...As an example of ho w to build incentive, he has helped establish a showcase Bank for Industry and Trade in entrepreneurial Cholon, the Chinese business district of Saigon...

...Increasingly, the USSR figures in the lexicon too...

...The Russian watchwords, glasnost and perestroïka, are definitely not part of the vocabulary of Vietnamese officials, always anxious not to appear under Soviet influence...

...Only a few hundred trickle out legally every month under an Orderly Departure Program, and Vietnamese officials are said to demand a price for the privilege...

...To residents around Hue the hunger crisis seems a dreadful sequel to the war...