New U.S. ambassador reaches out to rural Vietnamese
VINH - As he introduces himself to Vietnamese officials, the new U.S. ambassador keeps hearing the same message: If you want to understand this country, get out of Hanoi.
Earlier this month, Michael W. Marine took that advice to heart. He flew to a remote corner of the country to watch Americans and Vietnamese engaged in the continuing effort to find the remains of U.S. soldiers who died during the Vietnam War.
Marine also met with local officials in central Vietnam, raising issues that promise to be the focus of his tenure here: helping fight HIV/AIDS; promoting bilateral trade and an open business environment; and defending religious freedom and human rights.
Marine, 57, is the third U.S. ambassador to serve in Hanoi since the United States and Vietnam normalized relations in 1995. Marine, who replaces Raymond Burghardt, began his new job two months ago, after serving as the No.2 envoy at the U.S. embassies in China and Kenya.
A career Foreign Service officer who graduated from the University of California-Santa Barbara, Marine has served nearly 30 years in the State Department and prides himself on keeping his political opinions to himself.
He doesn't want to fall into an easy trap: spending too much time in Hanoi, Vietnam's booming capital, a world apart from the much poorer rural provinces, where most of the nation's 80million residents live.
Marine's recent foray to the provinces wasn't glamorous. Nghe An province doesn't boast any five-star hotels, and aside from a massive new monument to the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, whose childhood home is nearby, it doesn't offer much in the way of tourist attractions.
But the unassuming Marine didn't seem to tire of the nuts-and-bolts work of diplomacy: meeting with local officials, talking up common interests and posing for lots of photographs.
The central purpose of his trip was to witness the return of remains believed to belong to a missing American serviceman, an issue that has remained a top priority for the U.S. government since relations were normalized.
Vietnamese officials in Ha Tinh province had placed the remains - a collection of what appeared to be about 10 human bone fragments - in a small wooden box along with pieces of an old, decaying parachute coated with dirt. Wrapped in red cloth, the container sat atop a table adorned with burning incense, candles and fresh yellow flowers.
"This is a very important humanitarian mission we are involved in, and we know we would not be successful without the cooperation of the people of Vietnam," Marine said during a brief ceremony. "I want to express our deep appreciation."
The remains will be sent to a Defense Department forensic laboratory in Honolulu for analysis. With luck, investigators will be able to identify them soon so they can be returned to the serviceman's family in the United States for burial.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the U.S. government decided to undertake a continuous effort to recover the remains of service members missing from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and later the Persian Gulf War. About 1,800 are missing in Southeast Asia.
The enterprise costs about $100million a year. So far, 734 sets of remains have been repatriated from the region. Marine, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps in Japan during the Vietnam War, believes the effort is worth every cent.
"We owe those who go to war a tremendous debt of gratitude," he said. "Fulfilling our obligation to them in this way is something that perhaps no other country would do. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it."
In Nghe An province, Marine visited a remote site where U.S. servicemen and local Vietnamese are searching for the remains of a Navy pilot whose F-8E disappeared in December 1966.
Villagers rocked wire mesh trays hanging from bamboo poles, sifting through clumps of dirt taken from a small crater for bone fragments, teeth, parachute pieces or any other evidence of the crash.
Beyond thanking officials in Nghe An and Ha Tinh for their help, Marine also exhorted them to create an open, fair business environment to attract investment from U.S. firms. And he told them the United States would spend $25million in Vietnam this year as part of President Bush's global effort to combat AIDS.
Bush recently designated Vietnam as one of 15 countries at the focus of those efforts - the first outside Africa. Marine urged local officials to let the U.S. Embassy know how the AIDS money might be used to help people in their provinces.
Marine did not shy away from raising subjects that surely made his hosts squirm, no matter how determined they were to keep smiling.
Politely but insistently, he confronted them about the issue of human and religious rights.
Marine was careful to note that, in their daily lives, Vietnamese citizens enjoy vastly more liberty today than they did when he first visited the country 16 years ago. And he stressed that he hadn't heard specific complaints about violations of religious freedom in Ha Tinh or Nghe An.
But in some areas of Vietnam, he said, there have been reports that local officials have forced villagers to renounce their Protestant faith under threat of physical pain. It is important, Marine said, for Vietnamese leaders across the nation to renounce such violations.
"The question of religious freedom is very important to the American people," Marine said. "These kinds of reports frankly hurt our mutual efforts to build the relationship between our two peoples."
By Ben Stocking - San Jose Mercury News - November 15, 2004.
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