HANOI Vietnam has hinted it may counter an expected focus on its human rights record during a planned visit by U.S. President Clinton next month with the issue of Vietnam War compensation.
In a weekend article the official Vietnam News Agency said a conference of international lawyers in Havana last week had launched a campaign calling for U.S. compensation to Vietnam for the consequences of the war that ended 25 years ago.
The agency said Hanoi's representative to a five-day Conference of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers gave a detailed assessment of the effects of the defoliant Agent Orange sprayed by the U.S. forces in Vietnam.
It said Luu van Dat, secretary general of the Vietnam Lawyers' Association, urged Washington to help Vietnam overcome the effects of Agent Orange and to compensate affected Vietnamese, just as it had U.S. veterans who suffered exposure.
The article said Vietnamese lawyers also spoke against the use of embargoes as a political weapons a reference to a punishing U.S. trade embargo against Hanoi eventually lifted by Clinton in 1994.
"They reaffirmed that human rights were fundamental to the language of international law and that no force in the world could use human rights as a pretext to violate human rights," the VNA article said.
Diplomats in Hanoi say there have been concerns on the U.S. side Hanoi may counter expected criticism of its rights record during Clinton's visit by raising the thorny issue of war compensation.
Vietnam maintains that agent orange, sprayed over a large area of Vietnam to deny cover to communist guerrilla fighters, has been responsible for countless birth defects, both physical and mental.
But its attempts to win compensation from Washington have stalled, given a lack of conclusive scientific evidence linking the defoliant with generations of ill-health effects.
Even so, U.S. Vietnam veterans are now entitled to more or less automatic compensation for a range of diseases studies have linked to exposure to herbicides.
Earlier this year, the United States proposed join research with Vietnam on the issue, but at the same time made it clear it did not intend to get involved in any cleanup operations.
Hanoi has tended to stress the agent orange issue when questions about its rights record arise from the United States.
Last week, five U.S. senators, including Vietnam veterans John McCain and Charles Robb, urged Clinton to press Hanoi for progress on human rights during his mid-November visit.
Clinton, who will be the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the Vietnam War, has been expected to raise rights, including freedom of religion, during the trip.
(Reuter)