Shots of waters around Vietnam

Music

Thompson:  These shores have seen a history of invasion - from the Mongol hordes of Kubla Khan to the  modern armies of France, Japan and the United States.

One by one the foreign forces have been resisted and repelled. But a new more subtle force has arrived in Vietnam. The government and the party must now decide how to face this unarmed but potent foe  - global capitalism.

00'00

Map Vietnam

Music

00'40

Archival Saigon airlift

Thompson:  When the Americans were thrown out of Saigon, few saw it as an actual defeat. For America, it was more of a momentary setback in the march against communism. The Vietnamese had a different perspective.

01'03

Thompson in Cemetery

Super:

Geoff Thompson

Thompson:   For the Vietnamese there was no Vietnam War - they fought in the American war. And they won but suffered enormous losses. More than one million people if you believe America - and up to three million if you believe the Vietnamese.

The United States has spent millions searching for the remains of some 1500 soldiers still classified as missing in action. Vietnam has little to spend finding its own MIAs - estimated at 300,000.

01'26

01'26

Mothers' hostel

Thompson:  This state run hostel in Hanoi cares for  mothers  who lost all their sons to war.

For these people conflict, has been the defining experience of their lives. All of them have suffered.

Vietnamese tradition places great importance on the remains of  family members. To not know where they are  is a double tragedy.

01'57

Bach Thi Nhung in hostel

Bach Thi Nhung:  When I did not know where my son was I just cried all day.

02'20

Thompson:  Bach Thi Nhung is one of the lucky ones. She now knows where her only son is buried. For 17 years, she didn't.

Bach Thi Nhung:  There are so many people unaccounted for .

Peterson

Peterson:  No one's forgotten this. There were immense sacrifices on both sides. And the Vietnamese sacrificed virtually everything except the country, in the process of this conflict.

02'50

Thompson:  Douglas Peterson is the US Ambassador. He too has suffered. The ambassador is one of those who experienced Hanoi as a prisoner of war for six and a half years. But  he doesn't dwell on the past -it's the future that interests him.

03'10

Peterson:  These conflicts have taken their toll. Yet the Vietnamese, for the first time in 4,000 years of their history, can look beyond one generation and assume peace and prosperity. They see that - it's real.

Thompson:  But the party is an anachronism. It's in many ways the past ruling the future.

Peterson:  The party is changed. There is debate within the party about which direction this country should go - major debate.

Woman cooking

Thompson:  That debate is very much on generational lines. For older Vietnamese, the war  and the past can not be ignored.

04'00

This great grandmother remembers the French bombs - for her son it's American napalm.

Thang:  All of our youth was spent fighting the war. It was all we knew - right up until retirement.

Mobile phone shop

Thompson:  During the day, Quynh's husband sells mobile phones   It's a private venture in a communist state and for Thang that means problems. He believes the government is not moving fast enough  toward economic reform.

04'38

Thang

Thang:    We feel there is more room to breathe for private companies but there are still too many taxes and paperwork - too many regulations.  The government hasn't gone far enough.

05'05

Student on street

Thompson:  For many young Vietnamese it's the same story. There is immense nationalism and there is respect for the party - after all the party delivered them from the French and from the Americans.  But now  they also want material wellbeing.

05'30

Le Dang

Super:

Le Dang Doanh

Economist

Le Dang Doanh:  There is a danger because Vietnam has a very low starting point and if Vietnam has a growth rate of 7 or 8 percent Vietnam could keep up,  but if Vietnam grows at only 4 or 5 percent  the gap will be widening and it a real danger.

05'48

Thompson:  Economic adviser and party member Le Dang Doanh acknowledges the difficulty.

Le Dang Doanh:  It's not a problem that the people don't understand it but how to turn from understanding to action. It's a lot of step, of skill, of capacity.

06'10

Thompson to camera

Thompson:  While the party finds the threat of economic competition a challenge, it considers the concept of political competition utterly unacceptable.

Here at communist party headquarters 160 party members are debating the agenda for next year's 9^th party congress - which will decide whether the party's monopoly on power can withstand the new freedoms that more reforms will bring.

06'26

Inside party congress

 Thompson:  Since 1986 the party has had its own version of  Russian Perestroika - they call it Doi Moi - or renovation - but the new  openness it promised  has been slow in coming.

Music

06'58

Thompson and Dhung in car on new road

Thompson:  Every foreign journalist must be accompanied by a government fixer who promotes the party line.

Dhung:  The road was built last year. And some hotel now is under construction.

Thompson:   And this is all government money that's going into this?

Dhung:  Yes, they're government projects.

Thompson: It's Mr Dhung's job to tell us what we can or can't film.

Thompson:  There's a military base over there,  any chance we could do some filming there?

Dhung:  No, we can't.

Thompson:  No?

Dhung:  No.

Thompson:  Why not?

Dhung:  They have guns.

07'34

Road construction

Thompson: Mr Dhung earns less than 4 dollars a day but for his services we must pay the government five hundred dollars a day.

07'55

This clash of communist ideology and market forces surfaces regularly.

Coal mine

When the coal industry slumped last year 50,000 workers from this mine north east of Hanoi were laid off.

But coal mines are traditionally where the leaders of the revolution came from.

Fearing unrest the government re-hired the 50,000 - subsidising the failing industry.

This manager says the situation has now turned around.

08'10

Manager

Manager:  In business it can't always be good times.  The economic instability lasted for only a short while.

Thompson:  There was no unrest he asserts -These workers he claims are not lacking in solidarity.

08'47

Manager:  We believe in our leaders. We stand by each other so we can overcome the difficulties With a job to do, and income, we are very happy.

Workers in fields

Thompson:  Vietnam is still fundamentally an agricultural nation. 75 percent of its people live in non urban regions. In the past  it was relatively easy for the party to control the population. Especially in rural areas - lack of information and lack of education meant little dissent.

09'15

Hanoi

But in the last decade there has been a massive migration from the country to the cities. Figures are notoriously inaccurate, but some claim the populations of Hanoi has doubled in the last ten years.

09'35

Le Dang

Le Dang Doanh:  Of course, the gap in income in urban regions and rural regions is the driving force of this migration, and obviously the government could not control everything.

09'48

Newsstand

Thompson:  One thing the government desperately does want to control is the flow of information.

10'13

The tightly controlled Vietnamese press is little more than a government mouthpiece.

Dissenting voices are actively discouraged - and we are not allowed to hear them.

There are dissident writers, but gaining access to them under the constant watchful eye of our government minder is virtually impossible.

10'15

While we are here a French journalist is expelled from Saigon for contacting dissidents.

In the Vietnamese press there is no mention of why - merely a story of how a French tourist was expelled for having an incorrect visa.

Interview with Professor

Super:

For the official line on  literature, this professor and party member is normally  paraded before the media.

10'50

Prof. Dr. Phan Cu De

Hanoi National University

Professor:  I think today in Vietnam, the writers have their freedom and the critics also have their freedom.

Thompson:   But what freedom do they have if we can't speak to them?

Professor:  Today all the Vietnamese writers they have freedom in their job, writers and also critics like me.

Thompson:  But we can make contact only with the writers the government wants us to.

Professor:  In the period of renovation, that means in 1986 until now, I think all writers they have freedom and also all critic like me, and I'm professor.

11'34

Music

11'50

Woman playing musical instrument/ water puppets

Thompson:  Within this closed and secretive regime, there is ample opportunity for corruption.

The government claims, as part of Doi Moi, the problem is being addressed.

There have been public executions and even the party's deputy  prime minister was sacked earlier this year over corruption issues.

But transparency in administration is new for Vietnam.

Ngo Ba Thanh

Ngo Ba Thanh:  We were in war, so during the war who cares about administration and then in the first place there was no administration. So people would do everything to win the war. So obviously when peace comes we got a lot of problems.

12'28

Thompson:  Ngo Ba Thanh is a high ranking lawyer - and party member. She confirms that the administration is corrupt.

Ngo Ba Thanh:  It is a well known fact and all our efforts are concentrating on that - the government in the first place.

12'50

Thompson:   What is it doing?

Ngo Ba Thanh:  Well, it seems to me that efforts are doing and we also pass a law on anti corruption - much noise but I think there is not much - not many results.

Cargo vessels on water

Thompson:  It's the corruption and inflexibility of the party administration that has stopped Vietnam from baring its teeth as an Asian Tiger.

When the US lifted trade sanctions in 1994, investment rushed in - and then it promptly rushed out.

Last year the Vietnamese government  suddenly scuttled the signing of  a planned bilateral trade agreement with the United States.

The confidence and promise that was seen in the early nineties  has evaporated.

13'30

Peterson

Super:

Douglas Peterson

U.S. Ambassador

Peterson:    Well, I think that the Vietnamese felt it was moving too quickly - they became alarmed after the Asian financial crisis hit the region and they were not necessarily negatively impacted initially by that, but they saw the practices that were ongoing in some of the other countries that they were embarking on and they decided to pull back to sort of test the waters to see what was going to happen.

14'05

Football team training/Steve

Thompson:    Whether the back down was planned or unintentional is unsure - what is sure is that many investors have lost faith.

 Even the Saigon Saints - an expat Aussie Rules team is feeling the pinch of the investment exodus.

14'35

Super:

Steve Skinner

Lawyer

Steve:  The pool of players to choose from has fallen quite severely as foreign investment has slowed. There have been less people entering the country and people have been leaving - so our number to choose from has declined.

14'50

Thompson:  New Yorker Devin Standard is the marketing director of Colgate Palmolive in Vietnam.

Standard

Standard:  Vietnam is a very complex and challenging place to work, so it's no easy money here.

Thompson:  He sees the difficulties for foreign business as  bureaucratic bungling, legal  confusion and corruption.

15'18

Standard:  Fortunately we haven't run into any challenges in that arena, but quite a few of my friends working in different firms have had to be creative and delicate in dealing with it.

Thompson:   So how do they do that

Standard:  In creative and delicate fashions.

Small boat on water at night

Music

15'50

Thompson:  The lure of foreign investment has been insufficient to change the party's ways, but one force purely by numbers may be sufficient to bring the party monolith crashing down to earth in the twenty first century.

And that is the country's youth.

More than half of the population is under twenty five.

Male and female students

Student:  I do not like politics because it is so, sometimes for me, politics is cruel and is unfair because it stands on the side of the strong ones. They protect their rights and things like that but they do not protect us, the country, that need more help.

16'26

Thompson:  Increasingly the messages the young hear and the attitudes they emulate are taken from the west.

16'50

Student:  Because before we close our door we didn't know what was outside our country, but now we know, so we know what is the goal is for us to aim for.

Thompson:  But not all outside influences are good. Rates of drug addiction, prostitution and HIV infection are all soaring.  And as youth is more exposed to the west, some  behaviour unusual in Vietnam is becoming more common.

17'17

Student demonstrations

The young are now expressing their frustration in civil disturbances. It is not so much opposition to  communism but an attraction to consumerism - and all that goes with it --  that is the driving force.

17'34

Le Dang Doanh

Le Dang Doanh:  If the party reform, and could develop the economy, could provide the welfare for everybody, the people will support the party. But  to get instability I don't think so - if the party doesn't reform, doesn't stop corruption this creates a problem - if the party do it well and link with the people and improve the living conditions, the people will support the party.

17'48

Street scene

Music

18'17

Thompson:  But increasingly support will depend on the party satisfying the burgeoning taste for material wealth. And in this stalled economy real employment opportunities are few.

Music

Thompson:  The  dilemma facing  Vietnamese communism is that which faced Mikhail Gorbachev - refuse reform and be left behind or open up and invite unstoppable demands for political change.

END

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VIETNAM

Reporter

GEOFF THOMPSON

Camera

GEOFFREY LYE

Sound

SCOTT TAYLOR

Editor

GARTH THOMAS

Producer

ANDREW CLARK

©  Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2000