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more extreme. The last view on leaving Bangkok airport is of a manicured golf course, with Japanese businessmen teeing off under multi-coloured parasols held by nubile Thai caddies. As the aircraft breaks cloud over Hanoi, the first view is of a landscape of bomb craters, by courtesy of the US Air Force, and thirty MIG 21s parked menacingly in blast pens at the far side of the airfield, flanked by anti-aircraft gun emplacements. We descended from the aircraft for an impromptu press conference at the foot of the steps with the persistent Hong Kong press. Since the tarmac was of local construction, this meant standing in a small lake.
5.
The drive into Hanoi is through a landscape of 1940/50 vintage. Peasants bent double in the rice paddies, conical hats, bicycles and, now a rare sight in the West, people walking in their hundreds in the absence of public transport. The atmosphere is third-world, one of decay and delapidation. Architecturally, Hanoi itself remains a French colonial town. But it wears its age like a raddled whore, still shapely from a distance, scary close up.
6.
As a general proposition, it seems to me that Vietnam's drama was to achieve nominal independence and national reunification at a time when neither greatly mattered any more. Ho Chi Minh's anti-colonial and anti-imperialist fanaticism came to fruition when the world had moved on to greater inter-dependence, more liberal economics and, latterly, the manifest failure of communism and socialism as a recipe for development and prosperity. (Vide Deng Den Xiao Ping's recent remark to George Shultz that Cambodia redividus must practise capitalism, not socialism.) The Vietnamese are discovering that the Holy Grail of socialist re-unification, for which so much Vietnamese, as well as caucasian, blood was spilt, is made of base metal. The inheritance is bitter. Small wonder that so many are still trying to get out, thirteen years after the war ended and after 1 million have already left.
Repatriating Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong
7.
Details of the first round of negotiations are recorded elsewhere. Suffice it to say that all the Vietnamese Ministers and officials I talked to readily agreed that Vietnam's willingness to negotiate on this issue was part of a wider strategy of seeking better relations with the rest of the world, especially South-East Asia and the "big neighbour". It is therefore of a piece with their declared intention to withdraw all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia by the end of 1990, or earlier, in the event of a political settlement. As the Vice Minister for External
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CONFIDENTIAL