By Jaime Ortega.
The U.S. president, Barack Obama, received Thursday at the White House his Vietnamese counterpart Truong Tan Sang, in amid intense pressure from Congress, unions and civil rights groups that the president addressed in their meeting after the human rights repression exerted by the Hanoi government.
“We still have differences on this issue,” Obama acknowledged after the meeting, when asked about the status of civil liberties in China. “U.S. defends and has respect for freedom of expression, religion and assembly,” said the U.S. president.
Last month, members of the Department of State said in a hearing before Congress concerns over the number of political prisoners in Vietnamese prisons and increasing restrictions on access to the Internet.
Sang told Obama that his country was willing to sign the United Nations Convention against Torture later this year and invited in 2014 a special envoy to matters such as religion and faith.
Sang’s visit, is the second of a Vietnamese president to ever visit the White House since the two countries normalized relations in 1995-in 2007.
His predecessor, Nguyen Minh Triet, was invited to the U.S. by George W. Bush and shows that Asia has become a priority for the Obama Administration that seeks active to strengthen partnerships with the countries of the region to counter the political, economic and military problems of the area.
Although the concern for human rights has been on the agenda, the meeting between the two leaders had focused almost entirely on economic issues.
Trade between the U.S. and Vietnam reached 25,000 million in 2012, compared with 400 million recorded 10 years earlier. In their meeting, Obama and Sang have discussed the Trans Economic Partnership Agreement (TPP, its acronym in English), an initiative that, if carried out, would become the largest free trade zone in the world.
Vietnam, meanwhile, seeks to strengthen the alliance with his former enemy to safeguard its interests in the South China Sea where it has a conflict with Beijing over the ownership of islands controlled by China after the war that both countries held in 1974.
Hanoi seeks the lifting of the arms embargo established by the U.S. in 1984, an issue that the U.S. Administration is studying but does not expect to be resolved in the short or medium term.
U.S. and Vietnam seek closer trade ties, knowing that the first economic future lies in Asia and is the second of the strategic importance within that relationship. The war has left behind and demonstrations on Wednesday happened during lunch with Sang who was imprisoned at the beginning of the 70s in a jail in South Vietnam, Secretary of State, John Kerry.
“55 years ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans were fighting in the fields and rivers of Vietnam. Today, hundreds of thousands of us visited their markets and historic sites, “said Kerry, lieutenant in charge of a patrol river in Cam Rahn Bay during 1968 and 1969 in China.
However, in the meeting between the two leaders, the specter of war was also present. Obama has gifted a copy of the letter sent to Ho Chi Minh Harold Truman 67 years ago. “Ho always spoke to cooperate with the U.S. and 67 years later we are reaching that goal,” said the president of Vietnam.
But the economic importance of the meeting could not ignore the concern about the growing number of human rights violations perpetrated by the Government of Hanoi and have increased, according to reports from civil rights groups, since Sang came to power in 2011.
Human Rights Watch has reported that in the first five months of 2013 there has been convictions of political crimes with more casualties than throughout last year.
Relatives of 35 prisoners, including human rights activists and bloggers, asked in a letter to Obama to “fight for the people of Vietnam” and Sang has pressed to release political prisoners.
The signers asked to continue with the Hanoi regime adding the same strategy as in Myanmar, subordinating any economic concessions for respect of civil liberties. A lawsuit also was sent to several members of the House of Representatives, Democrats and Republicans representing districts in California with a large colony Vietnamese-who have warned the president that they will oppose the TPP without ensuring that Vietnam respects all human rights.
