Calif. enclave: no visits from Vietnam
GARDEN GROVE - Delegations from communist Vietnam were never welcome in California's "Little Saigon," where a shop owner's display of a Vietnamese flag and a portrait of former leader Ho Chi Minh once enraged many residents.
But officials from Garden Grove and Westminster, the Orange County cities that share the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside the Southeast Asian nation, said Wednesday they want to make the community's hostility into municipal policy.
Members of the city councils from the two cities southeast of Los Angeles presented nearly identical resolutions affirming their opposition to the Vietnamese Communist Party and reminding the U.S. State Department that official visits prompt large protests that require extra police and strain their budgets.
The resolutions, expected to be adopted next month, discourage municipal employees from facilitating government or trade delegations from Hanoi and call for detailed notice, by two weeks in Garden Grove and 10 business days in Westminster, of any planned visit.
The proposals are intended as a cold shoulder from an area that is home to about 90,000 people of Vietnamese descent, including many who escaped Saigon when it was overrun by communist forces on April 30, 1975.
"We are political refugees. We are here because we fled from communism and we do not want to have anything to do with ... representatives or officials from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam," Van Thai Tran, a member of the Garden Grove City Council, said at a news conference.
Garden Grove Mayor Bruce Broadwater said the idea for the resolutions arose last week after the State Department gave 48 hours notice that the vice president of Vietnam's national assembly wanted a motorcade tour of Little Saigon on Saturday morning.
Local officials said they didn't have time to provide adequate security and the State Department canceled the visit, which some here likened to having Cuban leader Fidel Castro visit Miami's Little Havana.
In 1999, a video store owner displayed a Vietnamese flag and a portrait of communist leader Ho Chi Minh, prompting demonstrations that drew some 15,000 people over 53 days and cost Westminster alone about $750,000 in police overtime and other costs.
Both cities would like to discuss possible compensation from the federal government for security costs for any future visits if they can't be stopped, Broadwater said.
The State Department and the Vietnam embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to phone calls Wednesday from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Westminster and Garden Grove officials said their attorneys have decided the resolutions are legal even though they single out Vietnam for special treatment.
Strong praise for the resolutions came from Huyen Nguyen, 76, a Garden Grove resident who fled Vietnam after seven years in a communist prison. "Any visit by the communist government is a provocation to our community," he said. "We suffered too much because of them."
By Ben Fox - The Associated Press - April 28, 2004.
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