Righteous Protests

RELATIVELY few Americans spend their time thinking about the plight of the millions of people living under Vietnamese Communism. The visit of Vietnamese prime minister Phan Van Khai to the United States last month provided an opportunity to change that. Khai’s trip-the first official visit by a Vietnamese leader since the end of the Vietnam War-was welcomed by some as a chance for the U.S. to “bury the ghost of a past conflict” (the words of the Houston Chronicle’s editorialists) and to show, as Sen. John McCain put it, “that enemies can become partners and partners friends.” To thousands of Vietnamese Americans across the country, however, it was instead an occasion to point out the extent to which the Hanoi government abuses its citizens, and to call on the Bush administration to use its leverage to push for change.

Take Nina Nguyen, who flew from her home in Hawaii to the capital to participate in two demonstrations while the prime minister was in town. The director of a television station for Vietnamese Americans that promotes religious and civil liberty in Vietnam, Nguyen fled the Communists in 1975 (she was evacuated by American airlift). “I don’t fight for me, because I have freedom in America,” she says. “I fight for 80 million people living in Vietnam. The Vietnamese Communists are terrorists. They used force to overcome the Republic of Vietnam-they took away the traditional country we learned from our history.”

RZ

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Rachel Zabarkes Friedman

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RELATIVELY few Americans spend their time thinking about the plight of the millions of people living under Vietnamese Communism. The visit of Vietnamese prime minister Phan Van Khai to the United States last month provided an opportunity to change that. Khai’s trip-the first official visit by a Vietnamese leader since the end of the Vietnam War-was welcomed by some as a chance for the U.S. to “bury the ghost of a past conflict” (the words of the Houston Chronicle’s editorialists) and to show, as Sen. John McCain put it, “that enemies can become partners and partners friends.” To thousands of Vietnamese Americans across the country, however, it was instead an occasion to point out the extent to which the Hanoi government abuses its citizens, and to call on the Bush administration to use its leverage to push for change.

Take Nina Nguyen, who flew from her home in Hawaii to the capital to participate in two demonstrations while the prime minister was in town. The director of a television station for Vietnamese Americans that promotes religious and civil liberty in Vietnam, Nguyen fled the Communists in 1975 (she was evacuated by American airlift). “I don’t fight for me, because I have freedom in America,” she says. “I fight for 80 million people living in Vietnam. The Vietnamese Communists are terrorists. They used force to overcome the Republic of Vietnam-they took away the traditional country we learned from our history.”