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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 21, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Vietnam leader addresses supports
By Paddy Colligan and G. Dunkel
New York
On Sept. 8, before an audience of overseas Vietnamese and U.S. friends, President Tran Duc Luong of Vietnam discussed the country's economic, social and political accomplishments over the past decade under the leadership and guidance of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
President Luong was in New York for the United Nations Millennium Summit. He spoke to friends and supporters in a Manhattan hotel ballroom rented for the occasion.
"The gross domestic product of Vietnam doubled from 1991 to 2000. Our average growth rate was 7 percent," Luong said.
The economic crisis in Southeast Asia had a real effect on Vietnam's economy, since most of its markets are in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. But "since our economy has different financial structures," he went on to say, "we did not suffer a crisis." Instead of growing at a 7- to 9-percent rate, Vietnam's economy grew at a rate of 5 to 6 percent.
Vietnam has become a major rice exporter. The rise in national income has meant significant improvements in people's livelihoods.
"Hunger is no longer a problem, though poverty is," Luong said. Thirty percent of Vietnam's people lived below the poverty line in 1970, during the war; 13 percent lived below the poverty line in 1999.
Even though Vietnam is one of the poorest countries in the world, it now has universal primary education and plans to achieve universal secondary education in the decade to come. Some 1 million people a year enter its universities. It has conducted mass campaigns against malaria, tuberculosis and for pediatric vaccinations.
Summing up the aims of Vietnam's economic and social policy, President Luong said that Vietnam intends to modernize the country greatly by 2020.
Effects of war felt for generations
Vietnam joined ASEAN six years ago and has taken an active part in its work with the aim of building friendly, cooperative relations with its neighbors. It also wants good, normal relations with China, Japan and the United States that will benefit all sides.
Luong said there were about 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs in the war and that his country hopes for technical aid that would help to identify their remains and resolve this very intense human issue.
As for Agent Orange, the defoliant widely used by the U.S. forces in Vietnam, its effects on both the land and inhabitants will last for two or three generations. Given the vast and long-lasting suffering caused by the war, Luong said that Vietnam still feels that the United States owes reparations for the damage it did.
After his speech, Merle Rattner, a longtime activist in solidarity with Vietnam, welcomed President Luong to New York. He then took questions from the audience.
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