Vietnam's new leadership likely to move cautiously after upheaval
HANOI - The ouster of conservative ideologue Le Kha Phieu from Vietnam's top job has removed a key brake on the communist
regime's economic reforms, but his successor Nong Duc Manh is unlikely to rush into any changes, analysts said Monday.
The ruling communist party has always put an enormous accent on continuity and consensus and the new leader is likely to
batten down the hatches after the bitter behind-the-scenes feuding which led to his appointment, they said.
In his acceptance speech on Sunday, the 60-year-old Manh was careful to say nothing that might offend either side of
Vietnam's longstanding divide between conservative ideologues and economic reformers, diplomats noted.
His tirade against corruption and other abuses within the party's ranks, whose eradication he said would be his number one
task, would have sat quite happily in the mouth of his ousted predecessor.
"It was vintage Phieu," one diplomat told AFP.
The ousted conservative made the war on graft a constant refrain although his critics say he paid little more than lip service to
the problem, with a string of widely publicised crackdowns which were perceived as having targetted minor officials while
leaving the big fish untouched.
By contrast the new party chief made scant mention of Vietnam's 15-year-old market reforms, which slowed down sharply
with his predecessor's appointment in the midst of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
He made no reference to the government's International Monetary Fund and World Bank-backed plans to step up the pace of
reforms through the liberalization of trade and the rationalization of the state-owned industrial and banking sectors.
But diplomats noted that the new party chief had never been a champion of economic reform -- his career was built precisely
on offending neither side of Vietnam's political divide.
"We really shouldn't expect too many changes in Vietnamese policy," one Western diplomat said.
"Mr Manh is a lifelong apparatchik whose ideological orthodoxy has never been questioned."
The leading reformer within the regime, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai himself sounded a note of caution Saturday, insisting that
the government would continue to tread carefully with its market reforms for fear of exposing the state-controlled economy to
destabilising shocks.
"You may know that in some countries when they had a crisis in the economy, it caused political instability. Vietnam is trying to
avoid that," he said.
The eminence grise of Vietnam's reformers, former prime minister Vo Van Kiet, echoed his protege's comments. "The
adjustments we have made must be step-by-step," he said.
The caution of the new leadership will be all the greater in the face of persistent rural unrest which was a leading factor in the
ouster of Phieu.
A wave of protests among the mainly Christian ethnic minorities of the central highlands sparked an army crackdown in early
February that constituted the worst violence in years.
The unrest has been all the more shocking for a ruling party which has always justified its tight control as providing a haven of
stability in an increasingly unstable neighbourhood.
"The scale of the unrest has really shaken them. They've bitten the bullet over the party leader, but you really shouldn't expect
too many other changes," another diplomat said.
A Western banker cautioned that it was easy to exaggerate the importance of individual personalities in a country which had
long taken its decisions collectively.
"It's Vietnam's great strength and also its greatest weakness," the banker told AFP.
"One the one hand you know that once they have reached a decision, they will deliver on it regardless of any changes in
personnel.
"On the other hand it can take an ice age to get there because they are always going to move at the pace of the lowest common
denominator."
Agence France Presse - April 23, 2001.
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