A War on Poverty
By WILLIAM STEWART HANOI
The scene is far more grim than anything portrayed in the decrepit U.S. veterans hospital in Born on the Fourth of July. In a forgotten corner of Ha Bac province, about 40 miles from Hanoi, 200 Vietnamese army veterans, many paralyzed from the waist down, eke out their lives in a primitive government shelter. Tucked away from the nation's gaze, they are among more than 10,000 severely wounded veterans from the four wars Vietnam has fought since 1945. An additional 300,000 disabled soldiers are scattered throughout Vietnam, doing the best they can without the help of the government. In wheelchairs, the ex- soldiers at Ha Bac move quietly among the low-slung buildings, a poignant and disturbing sight.
Like their American counterparts, the patients at Ha Bac are both proud and reticent, resigned to their wounds, sometimes angry, often confused. Says Vu Trung Hien, 43, paralyzed since 1968 by a shrapnel wound in the back sustained in Phuoc Long province: "I did my duty. But after I was wounded, I wondered if the war was right or wrong. It cost so much. I still wonder." His roommate, Hoang Dinh Trung, 39, was similarly disabled in 1972 in Quang Tri province during a B-52 raid. "I was only 18 when I was mobilized," he says. "Looking back to wartime, it was awful. Really awful. I'm afraid of any more wars." When told that many American veterans share his feelings, he says tentatively, almost shyly, "I'd like them to come see us, to see how we live."
The voices of disabled Vietnamese soldiers are only a small echo of the sometimes hopeful but often disenchanted and uncertain views voiced everywhere in Vietnam. Fifteen years after the fighting ended on April 30, 1975, the country remains impoverished and embittered. While it has been at peace since most Vietnamese troops left Cambodia last September, there is great discontent over living conditions and an annual per capita income of less than $200, far below that of South Vietnam in 1975. Last year 75,000 boat people set sail for the refugee camps of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, attempting to escape not so much an oppressive regime as grinding poverty. Free-market economic reforms begun in 1986 have sparked a revival in the cities, but they have yet to improve living standards in the countryside, where 80% of Vietnam's 65 million people still live.
The moves toward a market economy have been hobbled by Vietnam's economic and diplomatic isolation. Hanoi and Washington have long disagreed on how to restore relations, and the U.S. strengthened a 1975 trade embargo following Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia. Other industrial countries, including Japan, are waiting for a U.S. lead before committing themselves to major trade and investment. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has served notice that it will drastically curtail the aid it has provided in the past, especially fertilizers, structural steel and critical oil supplies.
North and South were formally united in July 1976, but for all practical purposes Vietnam still consists of two countries. According to Nguyen Xuan Oanh, twice acting Prime Minister of South Vietnam and currently an economic adviser to Hanoi, the economic infrastructure in the South remains about 35 years ahead of that in the North, despite great efforts to bridge the gap. The differences are immediately apparent between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which is still called Saigon, even by local officials.
Hanoi, with a population of 3 million, has retained its architectural integrity as a once lovely French colonial capital. The city was scarcely damaged by U.S. bombs. But the roads and bridges are dilapidated and marred with potholes, and haphazardly repaired electrical lines have made firetraps of many public buildings. Although Vietnam has designated 1990 the "Year of Tourism," Hanoi hardly boasts a hotel worthy of the name.
Yet there is a liveliness about the city, an authenticity as a national capital that somehow always eluded Saigon. May 19 marks the 100th birthday of Ho Chi Minh, the man who fought the Japanese, the French, the Americans and his own countrymen to win an independent, unified nation. For the past month, Hanoi has played host to thousands of visitors, foreign and Vietnamese alike, as they paid homage to the frail little man with a will of iron. The pilgrims move slowly past Ho's body lying on a glass-enclosed platform in the neo- Stalinist marble mausoleum, stopping only for a short, formal bow.
Outside, Hanoi's narrow tree-lined streets are filled with bicycles and pedicabs, for private cars are a rarity in the city. In the busy market area, customers crowd into a tiny but popular cafe that serves white coffee with a whipped raw egg to help ward off the pervasive dampness of the rainy season. Around the corner on Hang Gai Street, shoppers wander past privately owned clothing and novelty shops that are little more than window fronts. Nevertheless, they are the busiest stores in Hanoi. One of them is owned by Dao Thi Huan, 71, a retired government worker. For her, life is much better than it was even five years ago, though she feels that living standards are still low. The long war is a receding memory. "In the past I was angry, but not now," she says. "It's over. I gave up my anger." A few doors away sits Ngo Thanh Binh, 26. A university graduate with a degree in economics, Binh has been unable to find a job. To make ends meet, he works in his parents' shop selling jeans. "It's been very difficult for me to get a job as an economist," he says. "I need to know more English because our country is in an opening, developing stage. We need even more openness."
The budding economic energy has spread even further north. Six thousand people a day cross the Chinese border at Dong Dang. Going into China, they take mostly local foodstuffs; returning, they bring Chinese machine tools and kitchenwares carried on their backs, the heavy packages balanced at either end of a bamboo pole. The goods are modern, but silhouetted against the sky, the endless stream of peasants, workers and merchants is a scene from timeless Asia.
A thousand miles to the south, Ho Chi Minh City basks in the hot sun at the end of the dry season. But the difference is more than a matter of weather. Roads are in better repair, and the streets are clogged with motor-scooter and automobile traffic. New hotels and fresh paint are everywhere as the city asserts its claim to be the home of Vietnam's indomitable entrepreneurial spirit.
Anchored in the Saigon River is the Saigon Floating Hotel, offering single rooms at $150 a night and a BLT sandwich -- "Ho Chi Minh-style" -- for $8.50. It is crowded with Hong Kong, Singaporean and European businessmen. On Dong Khoi Street, the Continental Palace Hotel has undergone a complete renovation. The famous "Continental shelf," once an open-air terrace where American journalists and government officials camped out, is now enclosed and air-conditioned. The Rex, formerly a U.S. Army billet, has reopened as a luxury hotel, and the Majestic, facing the Saigon River, has been spruced up. The hotels take only hard currency.
In the past year the city has encouraged the opening of "mini-hotels" for Vietnamese visitors. The managers are often enterprising city employees eager to make more money. Says Nguyen Cong Ai, vice chairman of the local People's Committee: "Our private economy is much stronger now. We are learning the lessons of the market. We want to cooperate with foreign cities, to be an open door for Vietnam." Metropolitan Saigon has a population of 3.9 million. The port itself and textile and garment manufacturing are the city's biggest industries.
The revival is attributable almost entirely to Vietnam's own perestroika, or doi moi, a program of radical economic "renovation" begun in 1986. Says Le Dang Doanh, a senior government economist and a principal architect of the program: "Vietnam does not consider Marxism to be holy dogma. We need to be creative." Only a few years ago, the state accounted for close to half of national income. Now it generates only 28% of national income, Doanh notes, while private enterprise makes up 40% and the remainder is a mixture of public and private ventures. The reforms include the abolition of subsidized prices and the reorganization and separation of commercial banks from government banks. The state has also adopted a favorable foreign-investment law and changed investment policy to assign top priority to food production.
Although all land is owned by the state, a revised contract system between farmers and government cooperatives gives individual farmers control of the land and production for 15 to 30 years. Farmers grow what they want and sell at the market price. Largely as a result, Vietnam has become the world's third biggest rice exporter, after Thailand and the U.S. The turnaround is remarkable, given the near famine conditions that existed in the spring of 1988 in parts of central and northern Vietnam. A further indication of improved conditions in the North is the sharp reduction in the numbers of boat people arriving in Hong Kong, down from almost 1,800 in March 1989 to 730 in the same month this year.
Meanwhile, the annual inflation rate has been cut from 700% in 1988 to 50%. The goal, says former Prime Minister Oanh, is to bring it down to about 12% to 15% by year's end. This has been done through tough austerity measures, part of a stabilization plan carried out in cooperation with the International Monetary Fund. The dong, Vietnam's currency, has stabilized at a black-market rate of about 5,000 to the dollar, not far from the official rate of 4,500. Still, in the past two years foreigners have invested only $850 million in Vietnam, most of that in off-shore oil exploration.
Given these problems and challenges, it is not surprising that the Vietnamese leadership has been alarmed by the startling and rapid changes in Eastern Europe. But political reforms were emphatically rejected earlier this month in a closed session of the 8th plenum of Vietnam's Communist Party. While the plenum promised to revitalize the party's frayed relations with the people, it also fired an outspoken liberal member of the Politburo, Tran Xuan Bach. That leaves only one liberal in the 13-member ruling body, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach.
To make up for losses in Soviet aid, China has reportedly offered to provide Vietnam with $2 billion in assistance. In return, Beijing is said to have demanded assurances that the Vietnamese will launch no Gorbachev-style political reforms.
Vietnam has seen no major public demonstrations for greater democracy, though there has been a lively debate in some of the state-controlled press and among academicians and trade unions. In part this may be because Hanoi has ruled with a lighter touch than Beijing. Says Tran Phuoc Duong, the American- educated rector of Can Tho University, deep in the Mekong Delta: "Something has happened. There has been a lot of internal relaxation. The pace of change has taken people by surprise."
Tran Bach Dang, a political adviser to General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh, told a group of foreign reporters that if pluralism were allowed tomorrow, there would be 200 political parties the next day. Notes a senior government official: "Factionalism has been the bane of our national existence. We are still two countries, though I fought to make it one."
The weight of Vietnamese history indicates that the official is right. Nevertheless, there is more to celebrate in Vietnam than the 100th birthday of Ho Chi Minh. Vietnamese in the North and South alike are beginning to hope their country can transcend its old divisions and enter a new age of prosperity. In Hanoi, Nguyen Van Su, 75, sits in front of his sewing machine in his own little shop. Says he: "I remember when Ho Chi Minh declared independence. We all liked it. Now the government is calling for reform. I like that too. It's the direction the whole world is moving in, isn't it?"