Interview With Nguyen Bich and Dan Sutherland of Radio Free Asia International - Transcript - Interview

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 27, 2000

November 19, 2000

The President. Hello?

Q. Yes. Good evening, Mr. President.

The President. Yes. Good evening.

President's Visit to Vietnam

Q. You must be very exhausted by now. [Laughter] That is why we are so grateful for you to grant RFA your very first post-Vietnam interview.

My name is Nguyen Bich, or you can call me just Bich for short. And I am the director of the Vietnamese service at Radio Free Asia. And sitting by me in our studio is Dan Sutherland, who is vice president for programming.

So, Mr. President, my first question to you is, how do you feel? Do you feel you have accomplished your goal by this first trip ever made by a President of the United States to a reunified Vietnam?

The President. Yes, I think it was a very successful trip; first, because we were able to see and support the attempts that are being made there to recover the missing in action from the Vietnam conflict and to continue our cooperation with the Vietnamese Government in that regard.

We also gave them several hundred thousand pages of documents to help them identify the--some 300,000 people still missing who are Vietnamese.

Then, I think it was important because we contributed, I believe, to the continuing economic progress of the country which I think will lead to more openness.

And thirdly, I think it was important because I was able to speak on television to the country about the kind of future I hope we will share with Vietnam and the fact that I hope there will be more openness and more freedom in it. And I also had, finally, some very good discussions and some constructive disagreements with the leadership of Vietnam.

President's Impressions of Vietnam

Q. Your speech at Hanoi University certainly was very impressive. And so I think that made a really big impression on the country. As this was your first trip to Vietnam, could you give us a general impression of the country, at least what you saw of it, and of the people? Were they warm and welcoming?

The President. They were very warm and very welcoming and clearly interested in the trip. And the young people with whom I talked were clearly interested in having closer ties with America. So I felt very good about that.

I also was interested in all the changes that are occurring in the northern part of the country. I think there's clearly a lot of new investment going on in Hanoi, a lot of new businesses coming out, a lot of changes there that I think will tend to make the south and the north perhaps less different in terms of the economic lives and maybe the political outlooks of the people at least in the cities. Now, the only village that I went to was the one where the search for the pilot was going on.

Economic Future of Vietnam

Q. People say that, in Vietnam, it is still some distance between the potential and realization. Do you get a feeling that the people are impatient for progress, especially among the young, or do you think, as the Government says, that they are pretty satisfied with the present pace of things?

The President. Well, I would say that they understand that the country is doing better, and they like that. But my impression is that they want to move forward as rapidly as they can. After all, 60 percent of the country now is under 30. And I think they have a keen awareness that they have to make a lot of changes in order to keep creating jobs. I think they need 1.4 million new jobs every year.

On the morning of my last day there, I had an amazing roundtable discussion with a number of young Vietnamese men and women who ranged in age from early twenties to midthirties, and who did everything from working for Cargill, the big international grain company, to running the Vietnam office of Saachi and Saachi, which is a big London advertising agency--excuse me.

Then there was one young man who had a job in the party and others who had other jobs. But what was interesting to me is, they were all thinking about the big questions, you know, how much personal freedom is needed in life, what kinds of decisions should be made by the individual, and what kind of decisions should be made by families or villages or the nation, the Government, and how much of the economy should be private and how much should be public.

The man who runs the city government in Ho Chi Minh City was quite proud of the fact that they had done a remarkable job of creating jobs in the private sector, that he had downsized the government, that poverty had been reduced by 70 percent, and homelessness was reduced by 70 percent. So I think there are a lot of people there who have this feeling that if they go more to a private economy and they have more entrepreneurial spirit, that there will also be more personal freedom associated with it.

First Lady's Discussion of Human Rights

Q. Yes. I understand that the First Lady also had some strong words to recommend human rights at her talk in the morning of Sunday.

The President. Yes. She met with a group of women there. It was something she tries to do in every country in the world she visits. She's been speaking about that, especially as human rights affect women and young girls, ever since she went to the Beijing Women's Conference several years ago.