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Vietnam: ‘MIA Hunters'

The suspicion that there are still US soldiers missing in action in Indochina continues lo cloud relations between Vietnam and the United States. Philip Smucker of IPS reports, from Bangkok.
IT Is still the monsoon season In South-east Asia so there must be another official search for US soldiers "missing in action" (MIA's) going on somewhere In the region's steamy Jungles.
So goes the Jaded reasoning of old Asia hands In Bangkok where "MIA hunters" prowl the red light district, living off the reward money offered by US fhmllles of the missing, and in Dong Khoi street in Ho Chi Minh City where one can meet a hawker selling "US bones" and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.
Since late July, joint US and Vietnamese teams have been combing the Vietnamese countryside to find out the fate of some 2,273 US servicemen who never went home after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
No MIA ha* been found as a result of these investigations but the suspicion that there arc still prisoners of war (I’OW’s) in Vietnam — egged on by reports of live sightings — ensures that the MIA issue will continue to plague relations between Vietnam and the United States.
"The whole US Vietnam policy is held hostage by the MIA issue." said one Bangkok-based senior diplomat.
Critics of the US Vietnam policy say that the MIA issue' is clouding real rapprochement between old enemies who stopped shooting at each other 18 years ago.
They say the US government shows selfish interest tn pursuing the MIA issue while overlooking’ the concerns of the Vietnamese government which says it has over 300,000 soldiers missing in action and thousands more left maimed and handicapped without proper medical care from the "American war".
After wailing for 18 years, Ihe US government is back in Vietnam but it is ncl doing business or offering humanitarian help to one of the world’s most impoverished nations, said a diplomat.
In keeping with its priorities, Washington's first move towards "normalisation" has been to set 8p a US POW office in Hanoi. And Vietnam has pledged to help in this MIA search in hopes of ending a US-led embargo that has kept it on the fringes of the Asian
economic revolution.
Some observers say the US lobby for the MIA issue and against the lifting of the decades-old economic embargo Is driven by people who ■'•c vehemently opposed lo t'-c communist government "i Hanoi.
There are plenty of pcoolc out there who want to spend the rest of their lives bringing down the Vietnamese govern-menl," said Raymond Eaton, chairman of the Indochina markets committee of ihe American Chamber of ■Commerce Ln Thailand.
Eaton in spearheading a drive lo end the embargo against Vietnam.
But the US MIA issue appears mainly lo be kept alive by politicians in Washington who are lobbied constantly by families of Ihe missing.
In a recent letter to the National League of Families of US Prisoners and Missing in
of a cruel hoax. After 15 years of sifting through reports and photographs, US officials have found no evidence of surviving MIA's.
Recently, a photo purporl-edly showing three US airmen being held prisoner in Indochina refocused th^ US
public's attention on the Imuc. Vietnam denounced the photo as a fraud, saying it was part of a conspiracy to sour US-Victnam relations.
US investigators said Ihe photo may have been taken from a Soviet magazine Just like other known fakes produced by hucksters and con men.
Most leads come from refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian and Tnal-Laotian borders, where refugees anxious for asylum in the United Slates arc interviewed daily. The photo of the three airmen apparently came from an aid
worker in the Site 2 refugee camp.
US refugee officials say that from the point of view of a refugee, pointing to some kind of hope for a living MIA must be a good way to win favour with the US government.
Reward money running into the millions of dollars has only stoked Ilie flames of deception.
There is also an element of competition to this search. As US Stale Department spokes-, man Pete Williams told journalists tn Washington recently, finding a living MIA would be the discovery of a lifetime, "the pot of gold at’ the end of the rainbow ... an enormous career maker for someone in the defence intelligence. agency".
Action of South-east Asia, US President George Bush said the MIA issue was a lop national priority.
. "If any Americans are still being held captive, decisive action will be taken to bring them home," Bush said.
Since the Vietnam War ended, MIA hunters, and often desperate lot of politicians, family members, Journalists and mercenaries, have been searching the far corners of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam for any clues to The fate of missing US servicemen.
Most have discovered that they have become the victims