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Christopher opens new chapter in Vietnam-US ties

HANOI: After years of anguish, a U.S. secretary of state returned to Vietnam on Saturday to inaugurate diplomatic relations, formally writing a new chapter in the history of two once-bitter enemies.

"A generation ago, the trauma of war bound together the history of our nations for all time," Warren Christopher said on landing at Noi Bai Airport outside Hanoi, a city the Americans once bombed.

"Let us now lay our past of conflict to rest and dedicate ourselves to productive cooperation," he said.

"I have come to Vietnam, on behalf of the United States, to begin a new chapter in the history we share...I am here to lay the basis for a better future, even as we continue to account for the past," he added.

True to that commitment, Christopher went out of his way to begin his visit by honouring the sacrifice of more than 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War, a conflict whose legacy has been as much of a shadow on the American pysche as the gray clouds that hung over the airport arrival.

The first U.S. secretary of state to visit Vietnam in 25 years, he participated in a ceremony in which the remains of four Americans believed to have died in the war were readied for transport to a U.S. military laboratory in Hawaii that will begin the painstaking process of identification.

With slow and deliberate movements, U.S. Army and Air Force personnel placed four brown wooden boxes in four aluminum caskets and carried them onto a C-141 military transport plane for the flight home.

This ceremony has been conducted dozens of times in the last two years as the U.S. effort to obtain an accounting of all the American servicemen still missing from the Vietnam War gained momentum.

But never has a U.S. secretary of state been in attendance and never before have the flags been draped over the caskets, a sign of now fully normalised relations with communist Vietnam.

Christopher stressed the U.S. view that "no issue has been more important in our relations with Vietnam than achieving the fullest possible accounting of our prisoners of war and missing in action" and served notice that "this issue will remain the number one priority on our agenda".

Most Americans appear to support the U.S. decision to finally normalise ties with Vietnam, which President Bill Clinton announced last month.

But thousands of veterans and families of soldiers still not accounted for are angry, convinced that Hanoi has not done enough to provide information on more than 2,200 Americans still listed as missing in action.

Tens of thousands of Vietnamese died in the war and the fate of many of them remains unknown. The United States began training the South Vietnamese army in 1955, withdrew its forces in 1973 and evacuated its embassy with the fall of Saigon to communist troops in 1975.

In easing restrictions on international lending to Vietnam in 1993, lifting the trade embargo in 1994 and now establishing full diplomatic ties, Clinton was following through on a process set in motion by his predecessor, George Bush.

But Clinton's personal history of avoiding service in Vietnam and protesting against the war, which many of his generation also did, had complicated his decision.

Christopher later on Saturday was to exchange with his Vietamese counterpart letters formally carrying out Clinton's directive establishing diplomatic relations.

Turning the page on the war legacy was one major aim of his visit, however.

Although they lost a military war in Vietnam, the United States now hopes that despite a late entry they will not lose a new struggle taking place here -- for the profits to be made in one of Asia's new emerging markets.

Christopher spoke of this in his arrival statement, noting Vietnam was "poised to join the mainstream of the growing economies of East Asia".-Reuter