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"Free trade should go hand in hand with free culture and free politics to develop a prosperous, free, humane and equitable Vietnam --the Vietnam Future."

A New Phase: The US-Vietnam Trade Agreement
By: Dr. Doan Viet Hoat
August 4, 2000

WASHINGTON DC - After 4 years of discussion, the United States and Vietnam have signed the Trade Agreement on July 13, 2000. This is an important step for Vietnam to integrate into the international community. This also provides more opportunities for the US Congress, Administration and the American public to help the Vietnamese people in their efforts to liberalize all aspects of social life in Vietnam, in light of HR Resolution 295.
The US-VN Trade Agreement opens a new phase of development for Vietnam. However, to activate the Agreement effectively, Vietnam is in need of a politically free and independent legal system, and a just and sustained set of legal stipulations, in accordance with international laws and legal practices. And essential economic and financial reforms are also needed to enable the Vietnamese economy to develop to its full potential and speed. More important, market economy requires a civil society, with openness and transparency, a social environment conducive to the development of the people's abundant and diversified capacities, and to their access to global trends and progress. In the absence of suitable legal, cultural and political environment and conditions, free trade alone will only bring benefits to the governors and privileged persons, and not justice and welfare to the people. Free trade should go hand in hand with free culture and free politics to develop a prosperous, free, humane and equitable Vietnam --the Vietnam Future.
Vietnam Future is the dream of all Vietnamese people. To build up Vietnam Future is the responsibility of all Vietnamese people, regardless of their differences in localities, religions, and political beliefs, inside and outside the country. The US-VN Trade Agreement opens a new period, with new opportunities, to the process of liberalization of Vietnam. This is the period of integrating the vitality of the Vietnamese overseas into the daily activities of the people inside the country to help bring back to the people their rights of initiative, first in economy, and then in cultural and political areas. Together with the present struggle for human rights and democracy, the opening of Vietnamese market to the free economic and trade activities of private and international sectors will speed up the development of a democratic and prosperous Vietnam.
To facilitate this process, the American government and international community must ensure that market economy, with open, free, and equal competition, should be applied not only to international and American businessmen, but also to Vietnamese private entrepreneurs, both inside the country and from overseas. Vietnamese overseas' goods and cultural and intellectual products should be allowed to be imported and traded freely inside Vietnam.
To the Vietnamese communist leaders, the Trade Agreement will provide an opportunity to challenge their will, ability and role in responding to the aspiration of the Vietnamese people for freedom and happiness. I call upon them to carry out basic changes in cultural and political areas, together with economic changes, in order to open the ways for a new Vietnam integrating completely into the global trends: a Vietnam with market economy, free cultural activities and democratic political system. Only such an overall solution can bring Vietnam speedily out of decades of poverty and under-development, and out of the danger of social unrest and violence.
Journalist and educator Dr. Doan Viet Hoat (thuctran@aol.com) spent 19 years in prison for criticizing Vietnam’s human rights record and for publishing the independent magazine Freedom Forum. He is a past recipient of the World Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. He was released from prison in 1998 and now lives in the United States.
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