Years of animosity over, says Clinton

President Clinton last night concluded a historic three-day visit to Vietnam declaring that the years of animosity between the…

President Clinton last night concluded a historic three-day visit to Vietnam declaring that the years of animosity between the US and Vietnam were over.

Before he left Vietnam, however, the country's communist leadership made it clear that it resented Mr Clinton's "interference" in its internal affairs in publicly advocating American-style freedoms and the acceptance of globalisation in trade.

Mr Clinton, his wife, Hillary, and daughter, Chelsea, left for Washington One after a final day spent in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, which fell in 1975 to victorious communist forces.

The visit capped a process of normalisation of relations that began when Mr Clinton lifted a punishing trade embargo in 1994 and established diplomatic relations a year later. A trade agreement was signed last July.

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Mr Clinton drew crowds of delighted onlookers in Saigon and strolled around shaking hands, in contrast to the last visit by a US president, that of Richard Nixon who arrived in a cordon of military security at the height of the Vietnam War in 1969.

"The years of animosity are past", Mr Clinton said in a farewell speech. "Today we have a shared interest in your well-being and your prosperity . . . We wish to be your partners. We wish you success."

However, asked in an interview on CNN if he had confidence the government would allow greater political, religious and personal freedom, Mr Clinton said: "The truthful answer is that we don't know where it's going. But I think that the trend towards freedom is virtually irreversible . . .

"These folks are too young and too vigorous. You can see in the streets that there's a lot of good will toward America here. There's a lot of interest in our country and how we're dealing with a lot of the challenges of the new century. So I believe that the trend is positive."

Vietnam's most powerful political figure, the Communist Party General Secretary, Mr Le Kha Phieu, expressed his resentment at the content of Mr Clinton's comments on how they should run the Asian country that defeated the US on the battlefield.

"We respect the choice, the lifestyle and political systems of other nations", the official Communist Party daily Nhan Dan (The People) quoted Mr Phieu as saying. "We in turn demand that other nations respect our people's choices.

"The fact that nations have different political systems does not prevent co-operation for mutual development, if they have respect for each other's national independence and sovereignty and do not interfere in each other's internal affairs."

Mr Phieu, regarded as Vietnam's most powerful figure, said he had been informed of Mr Clinton's talks on Friday with President Tran Duc Luong and the Prime Minister, Mr Phan Van Khai, and of his televised speech at Hanoi's National University.

In comments to Mr Clinton at a meeting on Saturday in Hanoi, which a senior US official described as cloaked in "the language of old socialism", Mr Le Kha Phieu reminded the US that Vietnam had fought a long war to end occupation by "imperialists".

"It is true that each country, each nation has its own history, tradition and cultural identity", Mr Phieu said. "This applies both to the United States and Vietnam. Our nation has thousands of years of culture."

He added that the "American War", in which 58,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese died, stemmed from the imperialist designs of the West, something with which Mr Clinton clearly took issue.

"I had a nice little debate with the General Secretary of the Communist Party here about our country and stoutly disputed that we were an imperialist country", Mr Clinton told CNN. "We had never had any imperialist designs here. The conflict here was over what self-determination for the Vietnamese people really meant and what freedom and independence really meant."

Yesterday in Ho Chi Minh City, Mr Clinton visited a container terminal to emphasise the importance of trade links and met Archbishop Pham Minh Man of the Catholic Church to underline his concern for religious freedoms.

Archbishop Man said: "The situation of the Roman Catholic Church in Vietnam has improved to some extent, but it still faces some difficulties and limitations". An estimated 10 per cent of Vietnam's 79 million people are Christian, most of them Catholics.

Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton, also an anti-war activist in the early 1970s, proved as popular as her husband, drawing excited crowds wherever she went on a separate programme meeting women and visiting art galleries.

Before leaving Hanoi on Saturday Mr Clinton attended the ongoing excavation by dozens of Vietnamese peasants of the remains of a US airman shot down on a bombing run during the Vietnam War.