Archive for the ‘Vietnam’ Category
Monday, July 19th, 2010
Paige Taylor; 19/7/10 – 6 Items
Patrick McGorry, touched down on Christmas Island yesterday as a guest of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. The leading mental health researcher, Australian of the Year and and outspoken critic of immigration detention centres, (he has described them as factories for mental illness), said he was there to “look and learn”.Professor McGorry will inspect the Indian Ocean island’s three detention facilities, including a former workers’ camp where families with young children are detained – amid increasing focus on incidents of self-harm and conflict among asylum-seekers on the island. Approximately 2500 people are detained on Christmas Island and two boats, carrying suspected asylum-seekers, are on their way there now. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship frequently allows refugee advocates inside its compounds on Christmas Island but it has never opened the gates to such a high-profile mental health expert.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Australia, Human Rights, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, Vietnam
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Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
4/5/10; Matthew Clayfield; The Australian, No Internet Text; (2 Items)
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the infamous Kent State shootings in May1970 (photograph above by John Filo), when the US National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Ohio’s Kent State University during an anti-Vietnam War protest. Four students were killed in the shooting and nine were wounded. To mark the anniversary of the tragedy — still known by some as the May 4 massacre — the University of Sydney’s University Art Gallery is presenting Kent State: Four Decades Later, a provocative exhibition opening next Thursday. The exhibition, curated by Ann Stephen and Luke Parker, features works from that time, including British pop artist Richard Hamilton’s 1970 screen print Kent State, as well as new works by artists from different generations. “The new work reveals how these contemporary artists are engaging new media and new audiences to reflect upon an art of social commitment, just as Hamilton’s historic work did for his generation,” Parker says.
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Tags: Terrorism, USA, Vietnam War
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Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Ben Doherty; 13/1/10
The 4500 ethnic Hmong asylum seekers – including more than 40 probably bound for Australia – who were forcibly deported from Thailand in late December are being held in squalid secret camps in remote parts of Laos, guarded by soldiers. The Herald reached the main entrance of a camp at Paksan, on the Mekong River, where hundreds of Hmong hillt-ribes people stood barefoot in the dirt behind three metres of razor wire as loudspeakers ordered them to move away from the gate. The Hmong have historically suffered persecution, including arbitrary arrest and internment in re-education camps, at the hands of the communist Lao Government, because many of their ethnic minority were secretly recruited by the CIA to fight for the US during the Vietnam War and in the ”secret war” in Laos.
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Tags: Laos, Terrorism, Thailand, USA
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Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Nicole Trian; 27/12/09; The Tiger Man of Vietnam; Frank Walker; (Hachette, $35)
In 1963, two years before the first Australian combat troops arrived in Vietnam, a young Australian soldier was seconded by the CIA to train a guerilla force of indigenous tribesmen to take on the growing threat of the Viet Cong. Barry Petersen was a 28-year-old erstwhile trainee of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, an untraceable body of spooks whose existence the Australian government had long denied. Fears that communism could threaten Australia if its spread were not stemmed in Vietnam were backed by the US government’s Domino noteory, one by one, south-east Asian nations would fall to the red scourge. Amid the political urgency, Petersen was assigned to Vietnam’s remote Central Highlands.
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Tags: Australia, USA, Vietnam, War
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Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Aunohita Mojumdar; 3/12/09
For the first time since the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989, and the subsequent fall of the Najibullah government in 1996, Russia says it is ready to play a greater political and economic role in the country it formerly occupied. It has co-operated with Nato and other western deployments, opening up transit routes for international forces and initiating bilateral co-operation with Kabul. Andrey Avetisyan, the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, says Moscow supports the continuing presence of international troops in Afghanistan. However he worries that the international community, especially the US, are committing the same mistakes made during the Soviet occupation. Al Jazeera interviewed the Russian envoy at his country’s new embassy in Kabul.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Terrorism, USA
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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Sermsiri Ingavanija, Coordinator, Ban Landmine Project, JRSAP – JRS- Asia Pacific Issue 75, PO Box 49, Sanampao Post Office, Bangkok 10406, Thailand; 28/11/09
Ms. Wiboonrat Chanchoo is like any other normal person and in a crowd no one would notice anything strange about her. Only a careful look at her left leg would let one know that it is not her natural leg, but a prosthetic leg. “I stepped on a landmine in 1966. My father, brother, sister and I went to cut the bamboo not far from our village. I cut 69 bamboo stalks. I needed one more stalk and then I could go back home. While trying to cut this last bamboo, I stepped on a landmine. Hearing the blast, my brother and sister ran to help me. I shouted to them not to come as there could be more landmines around. I dragged myself about 50 metres to a safe area. I was taken to the hospital for an operation and upon waking up afterwards I found that I had lost my left leg below the knee. At that time I had two children. Soon after the accident my husband divorced me because of the loss of my leg. Since then, I have taken care of my children alone. Because of the loss of my leg my mobility was greatly reduced and life became very difficult because I was so slow. A job that other people could finish in one day might take me eight to ten days to finish.”
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Tags: Arms, Human Rights, Thailand, USA
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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Sanjay Gathia, JRS-AP Regional Information Advocacy Officer; JRS- Asia Pacific Issue 75, PO Box 49, Sanampao Post Office, Bangkok 10406, Thailand; 28/11/09
Bao (name changed) spoke softly. I had to lean forward and strain my ears to listen to him. He was the only one among the group who could understand English easily and spoke it with some fluency. He and ten other men and three women were a group of Montagnards from Vietnam who had arrived by way of Cambodia in Thailand to seek protection. They were caught by police in the border area and then sent to the Bangkok IDC to be processed as cases of illegal entry into Thailand. They were now held in detention for one year already. The term ‘Montagnard’ is a carryover from the French colonial period in Vietnam. It means ‘mountain people’ in French and describes several tribal peoples from the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
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Tags: Cambodia, Human Rights, Thailand, USA, Vietnam
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Saturday, October 10th, 2009
Anne Davies; 10/10/09
Eight US soldiers dead and 30 Afghan police captured. The Taliban raid on an isolated US outpost in Nuristan a week ago seemed to represent all that is wrong with America’s conduct of war in Afghanistan. It could not have come at a worse time for President Barack Obama. Here was an under-resourced US army effort, a wily and brazen Taliban and a local population willing to conceal 300 insurgents until they were ready to charge. The planned closure of the base was delayed because the US army could not provide the transport needed to shift it. All this week The Washington Post unpicked in detail a similar catastrophe that was excruciating to the government.
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Tags: Afghanistan, USA
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
23/9/09; See: http://www.theage.com.au/world/vietnamese-on-trial-for-selling-babies-20090922-g0if.html
A court in northern Vietnam has put 16 people on trial for allegedly selling more than 250 babies for foreign adoption. The head of two social welfare centres in Nam Dinh province, as well as several doctors and nurses at village clinics, went on trial yesterday, said Dang Viet Hung, the chief judge at the court hearing the case. The defendants are charged with ”abuse of power and authority” and could face five to 10 years in prison. The defendants allegedly solicited infants from unwed mothers and desperately poor families, and falsified documents claiming the babies had been abandoned at village
Tags: Children, Trade, Vietnam
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Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
9/9/09
Vietnamese and US officials have met in Hanoi to discuss further funding efforts to help those affected by the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Vietnam also called on the US to increase its monetary contribution at a fourth annual meeting on Tuesday, as well discussing ways to continue joint efforts to clean up areas that American forces contaminated during the war. US troops used the herbicide to destroy dense jungle in an effort to expose enemy forces during the conflict. Vietnam says that one to four million of its residents may have suffered serious health consequences because of the poisonous spray.
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Tags: Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War
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Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
23/8/09
The former US army officer found guilty of mass killings in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam war has finally made a public apology after more than 40 years. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry,” William Calley said. More than 20 soldiers were arrested over the killings and many charged with murder, but only Calley, a former lieutenant, was convicted.The exact toll of the massacre remains disputed but US estimates suggest that between 347 and 504 civilians were massacred on March 16, 1968.
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Tags: Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War
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Saturday, July 25th, 2009
Phillip Adams; 25/7/09
The guilts that ate away at Robert McNamara in later life seem to have crept into the crypt. We conducted a thorough search of the rat- and bat-filled gloom of the ABC archives, that last resting place of deceased programs, to discover that something has been eating away at the two interviews I’d taped in recent years with McNamara – the former US defence secretary and architect of the Vietnam War, who died this month at 93. We wanted to replay them, but nary a trace. Not that McNamara would have minded their exhumation. US culture has a long tradition of breast-baring and beating, with US Christians preferring the public seeking of forgiveness to the privacy of the confessional. This can be seen in the televised pleadings of fornicating evangelists or adulterous governors – and in any episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show. Thus therapy becomes theatrical. And once McNamara started his self-flagellation it resembled the S&M whippings of an Opus Deist. He laid on the lash over the Vietnam War, admitting it had been misconceived, as was the Domino Theory he’d used to justify it. Yet I didn’t feel the depth of his regrets began to match the statistics. And McNamara lived his public and business lives statistically, from the Ford Motor Company to the World Bank via the Kennedy and Johnson White House. He loved statistics to death.
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Tags: Australia, USA, Vietnam, War
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Sunday, July 19th, 2009
Pauline Manley; Bondi Junction; 19/7/09
The horror! Australian soldiers drag corpses through a village as traumatised children look on (“Phantom force secrets”, The Sun-Herald, July 12). So we are the good guys, are we? The whistleblower, Don Tate, wants the truth to come out, not to serve justice but to ensure his mates get pensions. Against a majestic vista, head held high, medals shiny on his chest, he matter-of-factly states that “there are no bodies left to find”. That is because the bodies not attached to bumper bars were blown up. Recently, Mark Latham was universally castigated for daring to insult the armed forces. I’m with you, Mark. On Anzac Day I remember the conscientious objectors: those people who will not kill without absolute need. The Vietnam War was a travesty and yet we marched into Iraq. Some of those stories have already emerged: torture, sexual humiliation, wanton destruction of resources, reckless mutilation of children. This is not OK. It is not sufficient to say you were following orders. To stop war, people need to stop joining the military, stop invading sovereign states and stop making excuses. I do not want to pay your mates’ pensions, Mr Tate.
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Tags: Australia, Vietnam, War
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Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Gordon Robison; 14/7/09
America is an unusually forgiving society. Philandering TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart was welcomed back by his flock. After his time in prison, junk bond king Michael Milken remade himself, becoming a respected philanthropist. Former president Richard Nixon built an entire political career on tripping himself up, then working his way back. Another former president Bill Clinton, needless to say, is in a class by himself. Americans have a long history of not forgetting people’s misdeeds, but still allowing the fallen a second chance provided they are willing to work hard enough to earn it. And then there is Robert McNamara.
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Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Bob Herbert; 12/7/09
Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93. Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still-festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong”.
I remember getting my draft notice in the mid-1960s. I probably expected the other recruits would be a tough bunch, that they would all look like John Wayne. On the first day of basic training I was part of a motley gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys I’d gone to high school with.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam
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Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
David Ignatius; 8/7/09;
I grew up in the shadow of Robert McNamara, almost literally. My father, Paul Ignatius, joined his team at the Pentagon in 1961 and remained with him through the Vietnam years as a close aide and, afterwards, as a friend. So for me, McNamara’s death evokes a whole world of relationships and dreams and reversals that characterised the Washington of the 1960s. I have a photograph that captures what 1961 felt like, if you were an 11-year-old watching the McNamara era dawn at the Pentagon. It shows my dad’s swearing-in for his first job at the Pentagon as assistant-secretary of the army, and my mother and me looking up at him with measureless pride and confidence. The McNamara family must have many similar photographs of those early days of “the best and the brightest”, before the phrase had developed a knife edge.
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Tags: Australia, Refugees & Migrants, Robert Macnamara, Vietnam
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