Posts Tagged ‘Vietnam’
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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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
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam | No Comments »
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
Posted in Asia, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
20/10/09; (4 Items)
Australia has reached an agreement with Indonesia to have 78 Tamil asylum seekers land at an Indonesian port. A vessel carrying the 78 Sri Lankan nationals was intercepted by an Australian naval ship after it sent out distress signals while in Indonesian territory. Whether Australia or Indonesia should take responsibility for the asylum seekers has been the subject of intense political debate. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reached agreement during talks in Jakarta tonight, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told the ABC’s Lateline program.
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Tags: Australia, Indonesia, Migrants & Refugees, Sri Lanka, Vietnam
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Refugee & Migrant, Workers | No Comments »
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
Posted in Aid / Trade, Health & Children, Human Rights, Vietnam | No Comments »
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
Posted in Arms, Health & Children, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Patrick Walters; 31/8/9
The remains of the last two missing Australian servicemen from the Vietnam war are due to return to Australia today, nearly 39 years after their RAAF Canberra bomber crashed in remote jungle near the Laotian border. The families and RAAF 2 Squadron comrades of Flying Officer Michael Herbert and Pilot Officer Robert Carver attended a special farewell ceremony at Noi Bai airfield near Hanoi yesterday. Air force chief Mark Binskin, accompanied by parliamentary secretary for defence support Mike Kelly, paid their respects to the duo as their caskets were loaded onto an RAAF Hercules for the flight home. The Hercules will arrive at the Richmond RAAF base this morning, where the caskets will be received with full military honours by current and former members of 2 Squadron.
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Tags: Australia, Vietnam, War
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA | No Comments »
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
Posted in Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
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
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
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
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | 1 Comment »
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
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam, War | No Comments »
Monday, May 11th, 2009
Cameron Stewart; 11/5/09; (2 Items)
An internal Australian army report cites atrocities by US troops at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 as a fast-track way to lose a war. It uses the American scandals to stress the strategic importance of Australian troops adhering to high ethical and moral conduct in war zones. A draft copy of the report, Army’s Future Land Operating Concept, due to be finalised in September and obtained by The Australian, contains a section titled “ethics and morality”. “The ethical and moral conduct of our soldiers will be a force multiplier,” the report states. “If we cede the high moral ground or are perceived to do so then the opposite effect will occur. In this regard the actions of a few can have strategic ramifications – My Lai in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib in Iraq both serve as examples.”
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Tags: Australia, Iraq, Terrorism, Torture, USA, Vietnam
Posted in Asia, Australia, Human Rights, Terrorism, USA, Vietnam | No Comments »
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
Amanda Hodge; 9/5/09; (5 Items)
Habiba Hosseini has been a refugee for all but six of her 32 years. Her parents fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with their young children in the early 1980s for Iran, where they lived an uneasy existence as refugees in a hostile host country. Now the single mother of two is again seeking refuge, this time in Australia – an ocean away from the incessant violence and upheaval of her South Asian home. Habiba says she is desperate to get her daughters out of Pakistan, where they face constant harassment and fear of reprisals from the husband she ran from, and back into school in a country where they can live freely. But she has neither the money nor the will to imperil her children’s lives further by attempting the illegal boat passage taken by an increasing number of her compatriots.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Indonesia; Burma, Migrants & Refugees, Vietnam
Posted in Afghanistan, Australia, Burma, Human Rights, Indonesia, Refugee & Migrant, Terrorism, USA | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 6th, 2009
Ian Cuthbertson; 6/4/09
The explosive title of a new exhibition at Sydney’s Casula Powerhouse signals its vibrancy. Nam Bang! considers the aftershocks of the Vietnam conflict through contemporary art: painting, sculpture and photography, through to complex multimedia installations. It broadly examines the complexity of Australia’s involvement in Vietnam, with a focus on the second generation of those affected, especially the children of veterans. It also looks at the impact on communities that continues to this day. Curator Boitran Huynh-Beattie, who spent two years researching and preparing the project, says the exhibition is a “wake-up call” to the ongoing consequences of the war. “It talks about the collision between the power and the people,” she says.
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Tags: Art, Australia, USA, Vietnam
Posted in Australia, Human Rights, USA, Vietnam, War | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 20th, 2009
Sarah Nichols; 20/2/09
It was another humid day at the orphanage when we noticed a van pull up outside. We were playing with the children in the cement playground, an enclosed area protecting us from the sun. Through the dimness into the bright light of the entrance we saw that a group of Americans had arrived to collect their adoptive Vietnamese babies. The potential parents emerged, some holding video cameras, laughing and talking nervously. Six babies whom we, as volunteers, had been playing with, feeding and generally ‘watching over’ were leaving. And 20 minutes later, after a rushed ceremony and a few brief conversations, they were taken away to their new lives.
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Tags: Adoption, Vietnam
Posted in Asia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Vietnam | No Comments »
