Vietnam veteran raises voice against distortion about human rights

Mr. Andre Sauvageot. Photo: nld.com.vn

PANO - Andre Sauvageot, who has 50 years of experiences in Vietnam, disagreed with strong criticism and distorted information about human rights in Vietnam.

In an interview with the People’s Army Newspaper, he said that human rights is an important issue in the world in general and in Vietnam in particular.

With his experiences in Vietnam, including nine years working for the US forces during the Vietnam War and 10 years working as a representative for a US company in Vietnam (1993 – 2003), he confirmed that the Communist Party of Vietnam’s efforts in improving human rights and other issues are remarkable.

In his view, Vietnam paid attention to improving living standards and incomes of the people, especially of ethnic minorities, ensuring gender equality, and thriving for a democratic, equal and civilized society.

“Vietnam has successfully promoted people’s mastership and freedom of religion,” he stressed.

From these evident and other positive examples, he stood against wrong criticism over human rights in Vietnam.

Sauvageot said that there is an increasing number of US citizens coming to Vietnam to do business or for tourism, including Vietnamese Americans who visit Vietnam or resettle in the country. Therefore, he believed that the majority of US citizens do not believe in distorted words voiced by some extremists about Vietnam.

The Vietnam veteran has many Vietnamese friends and they often chat with each other via social networks.

Sauvageot remembered that when he worked in Hanoi a long time ago, the Lao Dong newspaper reported about a situation of maltreatment at a US company’s factory in Ho Chi Minh City. Accordingly, this company had to change its way of treating workers to maintain its operation in Vietnam.

“The Vietnamese government always attaches importance to protecting human rights, though it wants to get taxes from foreign companies operating in Vietnam,” he said.

The Vietnam veteran argued that, like many other countries in the world, Vietnam needs to maintain security and political stability so that it can ensure people’s freedom rights within its legal framework.

Relating to the U.S government’s recent statement calling Vietnam to “revise vague national security laws that are used to suppress universal rights”, Sauvageot said that the US should be humble when talking about human rights in general and its way of evaluation on security threats in particular.

In the US, many US citizens and foreigners protested against the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to attack suspected terrorists, who are said to have plans to attack the US, because many innocent civilians have been killed.

Sauvageot said that it is complicated for any country to evaluate security threats against it, so this is an internal issue for each country.

In short, he suggested that Vietnam and the US should make efforts to improve their own human rights and should not violently interfere in each other’s internal affairs.