n851  0548  11 Nov 77
 
BC-Refugees 11-11
Editors:
The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
 
By IAN WARD
London Telegraph
    LAEM SING REFUGEE CAMP -Nearly 1,200 refugees in this
overcrowded coastal camp in eastern Thailand are living
in fear of being forcibly pushed out to sea in the frail
fishing craft in which they originally escaped from Vietnam.
    Anxiety has been growing since late last month when
government authorities at Songkhla camp in southern
Thailand first began refusing landing rights to Vietnamese
''boat people.''
    Several boatloads of Vietnamese which anchored at
Songkhla were ordered back to sea again after being
provided food, fuel and other supplies by the Thais.
    Some of these already have sailed as far as Indonesia,
having been rejected in Malaysia and Singapore.
    Here at Laem Sing, all arrivals since Sept. 14 have been
refused any form of registration and are terrified that
the Thai government will make good its threat to order
them back to sea.
    Despite the tough words of the new Thai Revolutionary
party, which came to power in a bloodless coup last
month, there is no sign that the local authorities actually
are preparing to take any direct action against the
refugee population.
    Indeed, three boatloads of Vietnamese have arrived here in
the last 10 days, swelling the camp numbers by another 107
to a total population of 1,182. While none of these new
arrivals has been formally registered by the camp authorities,
all of them have been allowed to land and are taking shelter
in the makeshift bamboo and tarpaulin huts of the
lower-resident refugees.
    Still the government maintains that it intends halting
the inflow of Indochina refugees and the governor of
Chanthaburi province in which Laem Sing is located indicated
yesterday that a cut-off date was to be established.
    From Nov. 15 onwards, he said, a clear delineation would be
drawn between genuine refugees whose repatriation home
would mean certain death, and those who left for less
pressing reasons and who should more correctly be categorized
as illegal immigrants.
    The governor said those judged illegal immigrants would be
transferred to temporary holding areas and eventually
handed back to Vietnam after government-to-government contact.
    It remained unclear whether the new poilicy of repatriating
refugees applies to Cambodians and Laotians as well.
Observers recall that late in 1975 the Thais attempted to
repatriate 26 Cambodians across the Klong Luek border bridge
at Aranyaprathet. All 26 were gunned down by the Khmer
Rouge a few hundred yards from the bridge.
    It is difficult to determine at this stage just how much
real substance there is to the current Thai threats or
whether they constitute more a political maneuver geared
to jolting apathetic Western nations into action on the
Indochina refugee problem.
    Suddenly the Thais have chosen the Vietnamese - the minority
ethnic grouping within the general refugee population - for
the crackdown. But significantly there are at present fewer
than 1,000 refugees living in either Songkhla or Laem
Sing who have yet to be accepted by a third country.
The majority are merely awaiting processing formalities
for their entry visas.
    In contrast to the 2,300 Vietnamese ''boat people'' there
are 12,000 Cambodians and 74,000 Laotians in the 15 refugee
centers around Thailand. It would appear that the Vietnamese
''boat people'' are the easiest to pressure because of their
ready access to the escape vessels. Moreover their
predicament constitutes a convenient vehicle with which to
arouse sympathy within the international community.
    Although the tough line adopted by the Thai government at
this stage has tended to attract most attention from the
world at large, the truly horrifying aspect of the Indochina
refugee dilemma is that merchant ships are now sailing by
sinking refugee vessels, ignoring pleas for assistance. And
their masters are comforted by the knowledge that they are
obeying company regulations.
    According to refugee officials, the sea captains are
ignoring all the traditional codes of ethics for seafarers.
    Britain has been asked to guarantee that Indochina
refugees rescued by British-registered vessels will be
given free entry into the United Kingdom. But according to
United Nations officials, the British government has so
far shown indifference to the appeal.
    One refugee official yesterday told me of a Norwegian sea
captain who pulled alongside a foundering fishing vessel in
the South China Sea  a few weeks ago and found it packed
with 70 Vietnamese refugees.
    Said the captain: ''When we shone our torches down on
them it looked like an overcorwded cocktail party - except
they were up to their thighs in water.''
rr    (Endit Ward) 11-11
 
 
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a019  2306  16 Apr 78
PM-Foreign Briefs,450
    BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - An elderly woman shot on a sandbar in the
Mekong River by Laotian soldiers as she was trying to escape to
Thailand has been cremated by sympathetic Thai villagers, the Bangkok
World reported.
    The newspaper said a boatload of 10 Laotians crossed the river
before dawn Saturday and landed on the sandbar on the Thai side of the
river near Nong Khai. Laotian soldiers on the other bank spotted the
group and opened fire with machine guns, but only the woman was hit.
    After her body lay on the bar for 13 hours, Thai villagers rowed out
with rubber tires and gasoline and built a funeral pyre.
    ---    
n504  0313  18 Apr 78
 
BC-India 04-18
Editors:
    The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service. It is
for use only in the United States and Canada.
By BRUCE LOUDON
Daily Telegraph, London
    New Delhi - Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai has dropped a
bombshell by disclosing that the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency's nuclear-powered spying device lost in the
Himalayas was planted there as a result of collusion ''at the
highest political level'' between the American and Indian governments
of the day.
    The aim of the operation, Desai told a stunned LOK Sabha (lower
house of Parliament) in New Delhi yesterday, was to obtain information
about missile developments. Although he did not say so, it is
believed the objective was to track Chinese missiles and nuclear
explosions.
    Desai was making a statement in Parliament about reports in
New York that the CIA had made an abortive and surreptitious
attempt to install plutonium-powered spy pack in collusion with
Indian intelligence officers acting as double agents.
    The prime minister uncovered a web of intrigue that would have done
justice to a James Bond film. In so d
ing he uncovered a startling
degree of co-
ierati
n between the gavmerican and Indian gocernments
at a time when first the late 
KAL Bahadur Shastri and then Mrs,
Indira Gandhi was the prime minister.
    Foreign Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee weighted into the
parliamentary furor after Desai had spoken and declared: ''The
revelations are a bombshell. Mrs. Gandhi has been accusing the
CIA of various things and us (the government) of
joining hands with America.
    ''This shows that she had herself joined hands with America,''
he said to cheers from the benches of the ruling Janata Party.
    In his statement to a hushed house, Desai said that in 1965,
''in the light of the international situation prevailing at the
time,'' the Indian and American governments ''at the highest
level'' decided that what he termed a ''remote-control sensing
device with a nuclear powerpack'' should be installed near the
highest point of the Nanda Devie range in the Himalayas.
    Accordingly, a mountaineering expedition manned only by Indian
Mountaineers went up the Nanda Devi, and was followed by a joint
Indo-American expedition scientifically equipped with the
device. The aim was to install it at a height of 25,000 feet.
    When the expedition was approaching the summit, Desai said, it
was overtaken by a blizzard which made further ascent impossible.
    The expedition was obliged to retreat to a lower camp at 23,000
feet.
    ''In the precipitate descent under very trying and exacting
conditions, they had to leave the powerpack securely cached,'' said
Desai.
    Recovery was impossible during the winter of 1965, he said, and
renewed attempts were made in May 1966, using supersensitive ground
and aerial tracking equipment. But nothing was found and the searchers
concluded that the device was buried deep in the snow after having
been smothered or carried into a neighboring crevice by an avalanche,
he added.
    The search went on until 1968, said Desai, while samples of water from
the Ganges river were kept under observation until 1970 to ascertain
whether any contamination had resulted from loss of the device.
    Desai then startled members of Parliament even further by disclosing
that in 1967, when Mrs. Gandhi was prime minister, a new sprying
device was installed successfully on a neighboring peak. This, said
Desai, was done with the approval ''at the highest political level''
of the government of India at that time.
    This second device, the prime minister said, functioned normally
for a while but was removed in 1968 and the equipment returned to
the United States.
    Desai, who spoke of ''our sacred Ganges river,'' Dealt at some
length with the Scientific aspects of the lost device which, he
said, weighed 33 iounds. He said it was energized by between two and
three pounds  of highly radioactive plutonium-238 metal container
in several leakpti-ht capsules.
    Answering fears that the lost device could still pose a major
hazard to the waters of the Ganges used by millions of Indians
each day and revered throughout India and Bangladesh, Desai said
scientists claimed that its protective systems where such as to
ensure ''maximum possible safety against splintering and consequntial
contamination and environmental hazards.
    ''There is little, if any, possibility of pollution attaining
unsafe limits.''
    Despite this, Desai said, a committee of scientists was being
formed to study and assess the problem and take whatever further
action was considered necessarym
    Desai's statement seemed to deflate an impending storm over the
disclosures first made in the United States. Desai, clearly,
had no interest in stirring up the matter any further, for he was
deputy prime minister under Mrs. Gandhi in 1967.
rl     (ENDIT LOUDON) 04-18
 
 
cd
$505tac z
r i wydczcwyd
 
BC-refugees 04-18
Editors:
    The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
By DENIS WARNER
Daily Telegraph, London
    MERAK, Malaysia - A total of 193 Vietnamese refugees crowded
aboard one boat pulled into Kuala Trengganu, Malaysia, on one
day after a voyage from Vietnam in which all nearly perished.
A second boat arrived the same day with seven refugees.
    The two vessels give only a glimpse of the hardships faced by
the thousands of refugees who seek to escape from the harsh
regime in Vietnam.
    The crowded vessel had begun the journey as two boats, one from
Vung Tau at the mouth of the  Saigon River and one from
Phan Thiet, about 100 miles up the coast. A chance meeting far
at sea saved the lives of all aboard.
    One unseaworthy boat, which had been well supplied with
food and water, was left to sink. The other was out of
food and water but seaworthy.
    The seaworthy craft took aboard all the 55 refugees from the other,
and with the added provisions kept everyone alive.
    A sorrowing woman told me her story yesterday. The boat was
due to leave Vung Tau at 2:30 a.m. on April 2. Two small
boats took the refugees out to the larger vessel while
another small boat with her husband and the husband of another
refugee was to follow with water and food.
    At 3 a.m. when the third small boat had not
arrived, it was decided they could wait no longer or
all would be captured. The boat sailed, leaving the two
men behind. Days later, with the boat out of food
and water, the woman's  four-year-old son died of starvation and
thirst.
    ''i am a nurse,'' she said. ''I tried so hard to make him live.
He died in my arms. The rest also would have died if the limping
unseaworthy boat from Phan Thiet had not appeared the following day.
    The secondsboat, arriving the same day last week, was only
21 feet long and 5 feet wide. It had two outboard motors, 26 gallons
of fuel, a broken compass, a map two inches square, and 7 men,
one young woman and her infant child. They had set off from
Mytho, south of Saigon on March 30.
    On the third day at sea, hostile fishermen seized them and
demanded 200 taels of gold as the price for allowing them to continue.
    When they stripped the boat andsfound no gold, they
threatened to take the refugees back to Vietnam. ''You may take the
boat,'' the refugees told them. ''We will die here.''
    The fishermen let them go. On the fifth day, when t...
(End missing.)
 - - - - - -

n549  0545  18 Apr 78
 
BC-CXINDIA 04-18
In a504, INDIA, 4th graph from 2d line, read it:
Justice to a James Bond film. In so doing, he uncovered a
startling degree of co-operation between the American and Indian
governments at a time when first the late Lal Bahadur Shastri
and then Mrs.
(Pickup x x x Indira Gandhi was etc,)
jj    04-18 (Endit CXINDIA)
 
 
cd
...
(End missing.)
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n637  0521  19 Apr 78
 
BC-Sihanouk 04-19
Editors:
    The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
By IAN WARD
Daily Telegraph, London
    SINGAPORE - Cambodian leaders appear to be leaning on the
pathetic praise of incarcerated former Khmer leader Prince Norodom
Sihanouk as a national morale booster on the third anniversary
celebrations of the country's Communist ''liberation.''
    A letter from the onetime playboy prince, renowned in the
past for his love of French wines, fast cars and exotic women,
was broadcast over radio Phnom Penh in which he now congratulated
the Khmer Communist Party for creating a new society.
    Sihanouk's letter reportedly praised the party for fashioning
''a new democracy and pushing the co-operatives all over the
nation towards a pure Communist regime.''
    Failing in an attempt to steer Cambodia on a neutral
course while the Vietnam war raged during the late 1960s,
Sihanouk was overthrown by the rightists in 1970, was
lured to Peking where he became the figurehead of the revolutionary
movement and was promptly dumped soon after the Communist
took over Phnom Penh in April, 1975.
    A lavish entertainer in the old days at his ornate royal palace,
where he conducted symphony orchestras and his own private dance
band with equal aplomb, Sihanouk is now confined to a tiny home on
the outskirs of Phnom Penh where he is forced to grow vegetables
for food.
    But the fact that the incredibly severe Cambodian regime sees
the need to resuscitate the prince every so often - it is the
third such letter of praise they have made public since 1975 - suggests
that the leaders still consider his words meaningful with the
masses.
    That being the case, the chances of the prince ever being
released from the confines of his heavily guarded Phnom Penh
house are virtually nil.
    Western intelligence agencies have reports that Sihanouk made
several attempts to leave Cambodia shortly after it became
obvious that he was to be shunted aside by the new rulers. His
moves were too late, and since then he has apparently
become resigned to the fate of perpetual prisoner.
    Sihanouk's latest letter refers briefly to the Cambodia-Vietnam
border conflict. ''Under Communist party direction, Cambodia
has been able to defend its independence, sovereignty and
territorial integrity in the courageous struggle aAINST THE
AGGRESSIVE, EXPANSIONIST Vietnamese all along the
national frontier,'' he is alleged to have written in passage
which bears no resemblance to his style of old.
    Referring to both Laos and Vietnam, the prince supposedly noted
that they had been ''unable to resolve their food problems despite
aid from the United Nations and other groups.
    Cambodia on the other hand, he observed, had never asked for
aid from anyone and was self-sufficient.
en    (endit WARD) 4-19
 
 
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a071  0611  19 Apr 78
PM-Radio-TV, Adv 20, 2 Takes,440-570
$Adv 20
For release PM Thurs April 20
By JAY SHARBUTT
AP Television Writer
    LOS ANGELES (AP) - It begins with what seems a mind-numbing visit to
an engine factory in Hanoi, where workers sing praises of labor in
Vietnam now that the war is over and the Americans gone.
    But stay with ''Vietnam: Thirty Months After the Thirty Years War.''
Airing tonight on public TV in many cities, it's a good, surprisingly
critical study of postwar life in Vietnams north and south.
    It arrives a week after ''Vietnam: Picking up the Pieces,'' made for
public TV by three young U.S. filmmakers alllowed to tour Vietnam in
December and January.
    Their show was interesting, but occasionally naive, understandable
since none of them ever had been in Vietnam before.
    The makers of tonight's program, Swiss newsmen Peter Schellenberg
and Hans-Peter Stalder, are described by Boston's WGBH, which bought
their show, as veteran Southeast Asia correspondents.
    Their experience shows. They delve more deeply into the thoughts of
the ruled and rulers of postwar Vietnam, are less willing to take at
face value what they're shown or told by their hosts.
    A good example comes in the laments of two anonymous officials they
quote about the respective effects of the communist mania for group
discussion and Saigon's still-flourishing black market.
    The first official, in Hanoi, complains: ''We discuss production so
much we forget to produce.''
    Official No. 2, in Saigon, grouses: ''We have lost more cadre to
corruption than we lost on the battlefield to war.''
    The newsmen, who toured Vietnam in November and December, paint
stark, grim scenes of hardship brought on by a lack of food, clothing
and power in a land whose main resource they now say is hope.
    They're at their most effective in looking at life in Saigon, where
remnants of the old ways when Americans were there still exist - from
swarms of motorbikes to a black market now fueled by northerners.
    The newsmen also report Saigon's famed rumor mill also still is
going full bore, citing the biggest rumor that ''the Americans have
landed and are about to occupy Saigon.''
    It's not that the Yanks are liked, only their dollars. And Russian
tourists in Saigon aren't liked at all. They're called ''Americans
without dollars . . . and that makes the judgment final.''
    We get a particularly hard look at the harsh life in new ''economic
zones'' set up outside Saigon, to which 1.5 million Saigonese have
been sent to ease pressure on the overcrowded city.
    Echoes of America's antiwar movement also are heard, this time from
a new source, as the journalists, visiting an army camp, note
attitudes toward Vietnam's border war with Cambodia this way:
    ''Reportedly, it's an unpopular war. And the morale of the
Vietnamese troops is anything but good.''
    MORE
    
ap-ny-04-19 0913EST
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a072  0614  19 Apr 78
PM-Radio-TV, Adv 20, 1st Add 110
$Adv 20
For release PMs Thurs April 20
LOS ANGELES: good.''
    On the political front, they report all units of the South's
Liberation Front - the Viet Cong - now dissolved, raising a question
of whether ''South Vietnam is a country occupied by the north.''
    Officials sharply deny this, they add, ''but the impression isn't
easily dispelled'' and ''not a single member . . . of the front's
provisional government is in'' the government of the south.
    ''The former Viet Cong are disillusioned,'' the Swiss journalists
say, and end their one-hour study with this ironic conclusion:
    ''Now, Vietnam is reunited in name under the communist party. But
for all its strict control, the party's hardest task . . . will be, as
it was for others, to win the hearts and minds of the people.''
    End Adv PMs Thurs April 20
    
ap-ny-04-19 0916EST
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n707  0032  20 Apr 78
 
BC-Vietnamese 04-20
Editors:
Following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
By DENIS WARNER
Daily Telegraph, London
    PULAU TENGAH ISLAND, Southeastern Malaysia - The
captain of the Vietnamese refugee boat had been captured by a
Cambodian patrol boat and was about to be executed along
with all 48 men, women and children who were with him.
But he managed to untie the ropes that bound him, captured
the Cambodian boat and sailed it to Thailand.
    Of all the stories of high adventure told by the Vietnamese
refugees, none of the many I have heard in the past two
weeks has been as dramatic as this.
    Huynh Van Lo, 43, used to be a driver at Tan Son Nhut
airbase. When the war ended, he threw away his uniform,
returned to his home near the Cambodian border and became a
fisherman. His boat was based at Rach Gia and he fished around
Phu Quoc Island, where the first fighting occurred between
Cambodian and Vietnamese forces in the new Indochina war.
    Escaping was no problem. The boat was moored at an island
well off shore, and it was a simple matter to send the men,
women and children to the island in small groups.
    Because he had no compass and no chart, Lo planned to
travel to Thailand with another boat. The two boats made
their rendezvous safely and set sail for the southwest,
perilously close to the dangerous Cambodian waters.
    The boats sailed at night and on the very first night they
became separated. Lo continued to sail in what he hoped was
the right direction.
    At 2 p.m. the next day, however, when he was close to
Bo Ba, or Woman Island, he saw what appeared to be a big,
new Thai-style fishing boat.
    For prudence sake, Lo did not want to investigate but
immediately turned south. The other boat also turned and
after about an hour and a half was less than a mile astern.
    At this range the Cambodian boat opened fire with a heavy
machine gun. ''I knew my small boat could not escape, so I
had to turn back and wait for it,'' said Lo.
    As the Cambodian boat approached, its crew fired with
AK47s into the sea to intimidate the Vietnamese. They
then came alongside, roped the two boats together and
ordered all the Vietnamese to board the Cambodian boat,
which was about 90 feet long.
    When all the Vietnamese men, women and children were
aboard, the Cambodians separated the women and children at
gunpoint. They then took pieces of rope and tied the men
with their hands behind their backs.
    Lo showed me the deep scars on his arms where the rope
had held him. Because the rope hurt, one of the Vietnamese
asked if he could be made less tight. The Cambodians
replied by making the knots even tighter and by using their
rifle butts to club the Vietnamese.
    The small Vietnamese boat with a Cambodian crew aboard
now separated from the Cambodian patrol boat and headed
back toward the island. The Cambodian boat followed and
in a small bay, about 400 yards from shore, both boats
dropped anchor.
    Here, the Cambodians transferred all the Vietnamese
belongings to the larger boat. Speaking in Cambodian,
which the Vietnamese living on the border understood
very well, the Cambodians agreed that all the Vietnamese,
including the women and children, should be killed.
    The officer in charge agreed but said it would be a
waste of ammunition to shoot them. Some might need two
or three bullets.
    ''The best way,'' said one of the crew, ''is to spear
them in the neck. We can easily cut some spears on the
shore.''
    Again the captain agreed. AFter all the Vietnamese
belongings had been moved to the Cambodian boat,
three men took the Vietnamese boat toward the shore,
leaving only the captain and one other man to guard the
prisoners.
    Lo had been working on the knotted ropes behind his back
to untie them. He succeeded just as the captain, searching
the Vietnamese baggage, discovered some gold and about
$1000 in American bank notes.
    His exclamation caused the guard to relax and Lo
jumped for him. ''I grabbed his gun and knocked him
overboard,'' he said.
    ''The captain grabbed the first available weapon, and
seeing to his dismay that it was an M79 grenade launcher,
ran to the bow.''
    Lo followed him with the AK47.
    ''He didn't kill him with the AK47,'' said one of the
refugees who came on the same boat. ''He got him by the
throat and killed him right away.''
    Lo nodded in agreement.
    By this time the small boat was returning from the
shore with the spears, and Lo after releasing another man
went for the machinegun.
    The Cambodians on the small boat had seen the man overboard
and thinking he was Vietnamese opened fire on him with
AK47s. At 200 yards' range Lo raked them with machinegun
fire. The small boat turned and ran.
    That night, in much more spacious quarters than they had
expected, and much more food and water than they had aboard
their own boat, the Vietnamese refugees continued the
journey that eventually brought them to Malaysia.
rr    (Endit Warner) 04-20
 
 
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a203  0841  22 Apr 78
AM-Washington Briefs,480
    WASHINGTON (AP) - An FBI spokesman says the bureau is beginning an
''administrative inquiry'' of whether FBI officials withheld
information from congressional investigators on the extent to which
agents conducted break-ins in the 1970s.
    Jeff Maynard, the spokesman, said Friday night that the inquiry was
ordered by Attorney General Griffin B. Bell, who directed the bureau
to determine ''the causes of the FBI's failure to discover and report
all instances of surreptitious entry.''
    ---    
    WASHINGTON (AP) - President Carter has condemned Cambodia as ''the
worst violator of human rights in the world today,'' saying thousands
of refugees have ''recounted abuses that include mass killings,
inhuman treatment of the supporters of the previous government . . .
the total suppression of recognized political and religious
freedoms.''
    Carter, in the strongly worded White House statement Friday, said
the United States ''cannot avoid the responsibility to speak out in
condemnation of the Cambodian government. . . . It is the obligation
of every member of the international community to protest the policies
of this or any nation which cruelly and systematically violates the
rights of its people to enjoy life and basic human dignities.''
    ---    
    WASHINGTON (AP) - A Rhode Island senator has introduced a bill to
stop construction of a $122 million office building for the Senate,
saying the giant hole in the ground already dug for its foundation
could be made into an underground parking lot for Capitol visitors
with a park on top.
    ''Rather than spending someone's hard-earned tax dollars to increase
our own comfort, let's try to make that same person's visit to
Washington a bit more enjoyable,'' said Sen. John H. Chafee, R-R.I.,
in introducing the bill Friday. Chaffee said the proposed building
would cost 10 times more than the Louisiana Purchase and was just too
expensive.
    ---    
    WASHINGTON (AP) - Beef supplies in supermarkets should be plentiful
next month, the Agriculture Department says, despite declining
production of beef cattle.
    The department, in its monthly supply report, said producction in
May is expected to be down 2 percent to 4 percent next month from
levels a year ago, but will about equal the 1975-1977 average. The
department also said pork supplies will be only adequate, defined as
''enough to meet needs,'' due partly to a seasonal decline in hog
marketing.
    ---    
    WASHINGTON (AP) - The American Gas Association says the agreement by
congressional conferees Friday on an energy compromise allowing
phased deregulation of natural gas prices was ''a crucial step toward
creating a secure energy future for America.''
    ''While we have not yet seen all of the highly technical provisions
in the final written version, it is apparent that this compromise
significantly improves the essential negative low-growth approach of
(President Carter's) national energy plan submitted a year ago,'' said
association President George H. Lawrence.
    
ap-ny-04-22 1143EST
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n613  0144  26 Apr 78
 
BC-Refugees 04-26
Editors:
The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
BY DENIS WARNER
Daily Telegraph, London
PULAU BESAR, MALAYSIA     - With the third anniversary of the
end of the Vietnam war only days off, refugees say that a critical
period has begun for hundreds of thousands of former army
officers in front-line units, senior civil servants and
police and intelligence agents who have not yet been released
from detention in ''re-education'' camps.
    Most of them were taken into custody soon after the
Communist occupation of Saigon.
    The Communist authorities have announced that only those who
''wholeheartedly make efforts in their re-education, achieve
real progress, confess their crimes and score merits
may be considered for a return to their families'' before the
end of their three-year term.
    ''Those who committed many crimes against the people
and dangerous chief evildoers, who incurred many blood
debts with the compatriots, who make no significant
progress and who still show an unchanged stubborn nature
will be brought before the law by the revolutionary administrative
apparatus for appropriate punishment,'' says  a
proclamation brought by new refugees from Vietnam.
    The refugees say they expect that thousands still in prison
will be tried, found guilty, sentenced to death - and pardoned
under a ''leniency'' policy that will allow them to be
worked to death. Many they are sure, will never be released.
    Although the mass move out of the towns into the new economic zones
is under way, the ''re-education'' camps and prisons remain as
full as ever. Groups who were initially spared long term
''re-education'' have since been taken into custody.
    These include 300 writers, who were first imprisoned
at Thu Duc, near Saigon, and have since been moved to
Kontum in the Central Highlands. Kontum is two days drive by
bus from Saigon. Relatives are allowed to visit at long intervals
for 10-minute periods.
    The writers arrested include four of South Vietnam's most
prominent: Doan Quoc Sy, Nguyen Manh Con, the poet Tran Da Tu, and
his wife Nha Ca, who spent 12 months in solitary confinement
before being previously released.
    This news was about the writers brought out by Nguyen Thi Hoa,
60, an author who fled on April 1 when she was told that her
house and other properties she owned were being taken over.
    ''I have just escaped from three years in hell, she said
she is now at work on a book describing the situation.
    When she elected to remain in Vietam after her husband left in
April 1975 she thought, as a vietnamese, she could live and
work with the Communists. But like all
other non-Communist writers, she was not allowed to write.
    An architect, who continued to work with the Communists mostly
on houses and other buildings needing repairs and
sometimes reconstruction in Saigon after the Northern troops
had ripped out doors, and other woodwork, for firewood,
eventually started to build his own escape boat when he was aksed
to build a new prison big enough for 5,000 inmates.
    ''Vietnam has too many prisons,'' he said. ''I could not have
lived with myself if I had contributed in this way
to the police state.''
    One refugee, imprisoned on suspicion of being a CIA agent,
said that under the Thieu government, Chi Hoa, the central
Saigon prison, contained a maximum of 5,000 prisoners.
Now there are 15,000 they are crowed into cells with
insufficient water for bathing. Many of the prisoners are
suffering from skin disease, he said.
    Refugees from Phuoc Tuy province, where the Australian task
force served, are few in number. But others say that the old
Australian headquarters at Nui Dat has been turned into a
''re-education'' camp. Its inmates include many officers and
civil servants who worked alongside the Australians. The
Australian war memorial at Baria was levelled long ago.
    A former corporal, who served with the U.S. MIKE special force,
a fact he managed to concel from the authorities, is one of the
most recent arrivals. He said he lived in constant fear of
discovery.
    ''If the Communists had found out, I would have been in prison
forever,'' he said.
    Instead, he was ''re-educated'' for only five days and then
worked as an electric welder for 102 new piastres a month,
twice the salary paid to an accountant in a bank and not
quite double the 54 piastres a month received by another
refugee, a doctor, after his release from ''re-education'' camp
in the Mekong Delta.
    A new piastre is worth roughly one U.S. dollar.
hb    (Endit Warren) 04-26
 
 
cd
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(End missing.)
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n713  0124  27 Apr 78
 
BC-Border 04-27
Editors:
The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
BY DENIS WARNER
wdaily Telegraph, London
MERAK, MALAYSIA     - A former captain in the South Vietnamese army,
who left Hatien, on the Cambodian border, less than four weeks
ago, says the town was then under constant attack by
artillery, mortars, and 81 m.m. and 122 m.m. rockets.
    Last March 1, Cambodian infantry penetrated Hatien and
captured nearby Thach Dong when the Vietnamese forces were
pushed back.
    The captain, who was released after 18 months in a
concentration camp went back to his family home at
Hatien last October. At the time, he said, the fighting
was only light and sporadic.
    It became much more serious when Vietnamese forces using T54
tanks drove some 30 kilometers into Cambodia. The Cambodians
had marshalled a force that the Vietnamese Communists believed to
number no less than 12 divisions from the South China Sea
to the Laotian border, and counter-attacked.
    By Dec. 2, the Cambodians had penetrated very close to
Hatien, which then came under rocket fire.
    Although the Vietnamese had recently taken some
inter-national journalists to show them the bodies of dead
and wounded Vietnamese as evidence of Cambodian aggression, he said
that the Cambodian penetration was only slight in comparison
with the earlier Vietnamese thrust into Cambodia.
    When the captain fled on March 30, the battle was a seesaw,
with the Cambodian forces still only about half a kilometer
from the town. Cambodian broadcasts in Vietnamese promised
that the Mekong Delta would be overrun by May of this year.
    The captain estimated Vietnamese casualties around Hatien at
1,000 killed.
    ''The new recruits in the Vietnamese army don't take to
fighting very well,'' he said. The Cambodians, on the other
hand, were much better equipped than they had been
three years ago.
    Another refugee on the same boat with the captain came from
Tay Ninh, two hours drive north of Saigon, which at the end of March
was being hit by about 50 to 60 Cambodian rockets a day.
    One side effect of the war between Vietnam and Cambodia
is the facility it has provided for Cambodians to escape first
to Vietnam and then to Thailand and Malaysia.
    They bring with them the confirmation from the eastern
Cambodian provinces of the slaughter that refugees
to Thailand reported much earlier.
    Three brothers who lived in the Mekong river town of Komong
Cham all left the town independently, all survived the
massacre, all met in a new economic zone in
Vietnam and all are now here.
    One brother was in the Cambodian navy. Another was
a boat mechanic. The Third was a fisherman.
    One got to Vietnam in 1975 by rowing a boat to a island off
the south coast. A second crossed the border some months
later. And the third followed in a rowboat a year later.
    Tran Yan Hoi, the boat mechanic, said: ''I saw many
people, hundreds and hundreds of people, killed. Anyone
related to the Lon Nol government, or who had served in the
armed forces were killed. Every day of the month I saw
people killed like this.
    The other told corroborating stories.
hb    (Endit Warner) 04-27
 
 
cd
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a605  1936  27 Apr 78
BC-Refugees, Adv 30-1st Add,380
$adv 30
For release AMs Sun April 30
SONGKLA: Thailand's capital.
    According to reports that could not be officially verified, more
than 690 ''boat people'' recently were on the high seas or seeking
haven in such diverse places as Kenya in East Africa, Australia and
Japan. Some of them were reported picked up by larger vessels in
international waters and taken to far-away ports.
    Some refugee workers claim that as many as half the boats that set
out from Vietnam are lost at sea.
    Although there has been speculation about an organized
''underground'' in Vietnam to funnel out refugees, many boat people
deny this, saying it is every man for himself.
    In one instance it was a chance meeting in June 1977 between
32-year-old Nguyen Lap, a former South Vietnamese army lieutenant, and
an old army buddy that prompted plans to leave.
    Lap said that he ordered a fishing boat from a boat factory, telling
the police he had decided to become a fisherman.
    Five months later, under cover of darkness, Lap and 25 other
refugees slipped out of Saigon and made it to Malaysia, only to be
ordered to leave. They are at the Songkla camp now and Lap hopes to go
to Australia, having been refused permission to go to the United
States.
    Most refugee workers and officials agree that the ''boat people''
are given the most attention because of their daring escapes and
because most meet requirements for refugee status in the United States
and other countries.
    France so far has been the nation most receptive to accepting
Laotian hill tribesmen for resettlement and Thailand is already
considering long-range plans for 100,000 Laotian refugees, many of
whom fought for the old CIA-backed army of Gen. Vang Pao, now a
rancher in Montana.
    Most officials admit that with little or no education and their
primitive way of live, the colorfully dressed, pipe-smoking hill
tribesmen would have a difficult time in industrialized Western
nations and that it is most likely they will either remain in Thailand
or someday be returned to Laos. The refugees invariably claim that if
they return they face certain death.
    The United Nations High Commission for Refugees is urging the
international community to share the burden of the refugees. Over the
desk of a U.N. refugee worker in Bangkok is a sign that says: ''A
bundle of belongings isn't the only thing a refugee brings to his new
country. Einstein was a refugee.''
    END ADV AMS SUN APRIL 30
    
ap-ny-04-27 2238EST
***************

n047  1117  29 Apr 78
 
BC-INDOCHINA 1stadd
BANGKOK: existence.
    The analysts do not necessarily believe all Cambodian charges of
Vietnamese subversion and barbarities nor justify Cambodia's actions.
But they contend that the conflict should be seen in the light of an
historical enmity submerged but not forgotten for a century. Forces
restrained by colonialism and its American aftermath, they believe,
have now been released to take their course in a strictly Asian
context.
    As for Laos, the view of most Indochina watchers is that as a viable
country, it has always been a myth. There are 30,000 to 50,000
Vietnamese troops within its borders and its northern tip is under
Chinese domination.
    The Indochinese contestants are not, of course, acting out their
policies without influence from the Communist world to which they all
belong. China, with apparent reservations, supports Cambodia, while
the Soviet Union has thrown its weight behind Vietnam and Laos.
    In this alignment, too, Indochina watchers believe that an ancient
antagonism, that between China and Vietnam, has played a role in
drawing Vietnam much nearer to Moscow than to Peking.
    Because of Cambodia's alignment with China, Vietnam is thought to be
exercising great restraint in its military reaction to Cambodian
border intrusions that have killed or maimed many civilians and
ruined some towns and villages from the southern end of the border on
the Gulf of Siam to Tay Ninh Province west of Saigon.
    Vietnam is assumed to be unwilling to risk offending China by
pushing its troops to Phnom Penh and overthrowing the regime of Prime
Minister Pol Pot. But recent visitors to Hanoi, journalists and
international officials, have come away with the impression that
Vietnam has made the removal of the prime minister, who is also the
head of the Cambodian Communist Party, its principal objective.
    There are reports here that Vietnam appears to be organizing
thousands of Cambodians, including some from the ethnic Cambodian
minority in Vietnam, some of those Cambodians who fled the Pol Pot
regime and some of those who were taken to Vietnam during the major
military incursion at the end of last year, to form the nucleus of a
pro-Vietnamese Cambodian movement.
    The travelers assume that Vietnam intends to use this movement
either to populate a ''liberated zone'' in the course of a renewed
limited thrust into the neighboring country or as a ''fifth column''
to assist in the overthrow of the regime.
    The non-Communist nations of Southeast Asia, particularly the five
members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - Indonesia,
the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore - watch Indochina
with visible anxiety. While trying to maintain proper relations with
Vietnam and indicating satisfaction with their progress, officials
express concern, always specifying that their names not be printed,
over Hanoi's long-term aims.
    ''Thailand is our barometer,'' a ranking Indonesian security
official said. He added that he hoped the United States would show
its continuing concern for Southeast Asia by not yielding to
Vietnamese demands for extensive economic assistance.
    Thailand is confronted with the dilemma of suffering frequent
incursions from Cambodia, mainly by combined Cambodian and Thai
Communist forces based in Cambodia, while hoping that Cambodia will
remain strong enough to resist Vietnam. No matter how difficult a
neighbor Pol Pot's Cambodia is, in the Thai view, a Cambodia
subservient to Vietnam would be even less desirable.
    Thailand and the rest of the nations in the association view Vietnam
as their principal potential adversary. And, while remaining
concerned over what China's future intentions might hold for them,
they look to Peking for the time being as their principal hope for
restraining the ambitions for regional hegemony that they suspect
Vietnam of harboring.
    
0429 1418pes
***************

a303  1925  29 Apr 78
AM-Refugees,200
    HONG KONG (AP) - The Hong Kong Standard predicted Sunday that more
refugees will try to flee Vietnam by sea as weather improves and
called on the United States to increase its refugee quota.
    The independent newspaper said in an editorial ''The Vietnamese
refugees continue to be a problem which everyone would like to pretend
does not exist . . .
    ''. . .The United States more than any other nation has a greater
responsibility in this issue. It should increase the quota of
Vietnamese refugees it is willing to take and do it immediately
. . .,'' the editorial said.
    The editorial said the refugee exodus involves a majority of people
''fleeing what they feel is political persecution.''
    Thousands of Vietnamese, most of them in small fishing boats, have
fled the nation since the Saigon government fell to the Communists in
1975.
    Many have ended up in Malaysia and some have traveled as far as
Australia seeking refuge. In recent months, refugees have abandoned
their aging boats on the South China Sea and boarded other craft such
as supply ships and tuna boats for trips to friendly nations.
    The United States has accepted thousands of the refugees.
    
ap-ny-04-29 2228EST
***************

n014  0702  03 May 78
 
BC-REFUGEES 2takes
By ANDREW H. MALCOLM
c. 1978 N.Y.Times News Service
    TOKYO - Japanese authorities have held four Laotian refugees behind
bars for a year to a year and a half without filing charges against
them or giving them any legal recourse.
    The men, who fear returning to their homeland, now under Communist
control, are not accused of any crime but have been imprisoned behind
a barbed-wire fence and are under constant television surveillance by
armed immigration officials at the Yokohama Detention Center.
    When a reportr attempted Monday to visit the men, who are officially
considered ''illegal aliens.'' permission was denied to ''protect the
men's privacy.'' But immigration authorities began hurried attempts
to place the men in private refugee centers, which handle a growing
number of ''boat people,'' the Indochinese refugees found adrift at
sea.
    Although at odds over the treatment of these men, refugee workers
and officials here agree that the four cases underline the
little-known legalistic and bureaucratic morass that has enveloped
hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Indochinese refugees overseas
who do not qualify for the special attention now being given to the
boat people by many countries, primarily the United States.
    There are about 150 boat people in Japan now, but five times that
many other Indochinese refugees are estimated to be marooned here in
a legal vacuum so far ignored by any government. Primarily, these are
college students, many now graduated. As the non-Communist
governments of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos fell, the students and
other nationals became stateless.
    They cannot return to their homelands free of fear or suspicion.
They generally cannot go to other nations unless they have relatives
there. And legal barriers here prevent them from establishing a
normal life. For instance, they cannot marry in Japan without a
passport from their new Communist government.
    The four Laotians are Thao Sangsith Savath, 29 years old; Thao
Aroune, 19; Nai Pane, 20, and Vanna Bouathoug Outhi, exact age
unknown. Japanese officials forbade interviews and refused to discuss
details or dates.
    However, some facts about the men were gathered from friends and
from pleas for help written to relatives and to American officials.
    Some details are sketchy, but Thao Sangsith Savath and his cousin,
Thao Aroune, say they originally fled from Laos to Taiwan, where they
applied for American visas. They were told this would take six
months. They heard unofficially that France would admit them and,
under pressure to leave Taiwan, purchased one-way plane tickets to
Paris.
    French authorities, however, refused to admit them without
round-trip tickets and forced Korean Air Lines to fly them out of the
country. Upon landing in Tokyo in April 1976, Thao Sangsith Savath
says, airline officials told them to ''get lost.''
    (MORE)
    
0503 1003aed
***************

n618  0310  10 May 78
 
BC-Vietnam 05-10
Editors:
The following is from the London Telegraph Foreign Service.
It is for use only in the United States and Canada.
BY IAN WARD
Daily Telegraph, London
SINGAPORE     - Latest statistics for refugees fleeing from
Vietnam indicate the flow now is the heaviest since the
immediate period after the fall of Saigon to Communism
in April 1975.
    According to United Nations High Commission for Refugees
officials in Singapore, more than 3,000 ''boat people''
landed in Singapore, Malaysia,  Hong Kong and Indonesia
during the month of April. Another 784 refugees sailed to
points on the coast of Thailand.
    Western refugee officials and diplomats predicted early
this year that the end of the north-east monsoon across the
South China Sea in March would bring the beginnings
of a new influx of families escaping from Vietnam in
all manner of small craft.
    With continued calm weather forecast for at least another
two months, it is felt the peak of the latest wave
of refugees is yet to come.
    Adding to the pressure is the current widespread government
crackdown - in particular throughout the southern region
of Vietnam - against both the middle-class and
the Chinese merchant class.
    Currency raids, black market raids, unannounced auditing
checks and the like are being used now in regular
rotation. Observers read the techniques being employed
as a well-orchestrated program by the Hanoi rulers to break
down that segment of society owing any of its wealth to the
former anti-Communist regime under Nguyen Van Thieu,
who now resides in Britain.
    When similar but less stringent measures were employed
in late 1976 a rash of suicides was reported throughout
the once bustling Vietnamese urban business community.
Almost simultaneously the numbers of refugees fleeing
the country jumped appreciably.
    It is felt that the present measures will trigger
even more startling acts of desperation in the days
and weeks ahead.
hb    (Endit Ward) 05-10
 
 
cd
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(End missing.)
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n624  0310  10 May 78
 
BC-Bully 2takes 05-10
Editors: Context: A commentary
on current affairs. The following is from the London Telegraph
Foreign Service. It is for use only in the United States and
Canada.
By ROBERT MOSS
Daily Telegraph, London
    London - I had the pleasure, not long ago, of hearing a U.S.
State Department man detending the Carter Administration's concept
of human rights at a seminar held - of all places - in Moscow,
Idaho.
    His name was Robert Maxim, and he is the senior career officer
in the Human Rights Bureau, whose chief and deputy chief. Patricia
Derian and Mark Schneider (formerly on Sen. Edward Kennedy's staff)
are both political animals. Maxim asked for his present job,
and has obviously set out full of good intentions.
    By the end of his half-hour presentation, Maxim had rattled
off a good deal of rhetoric about how the United States should
crusade for human rights, but he mentioned only two countries
where the human rights situation troubled him. The first was
South Vietnam, under former management; the other was Chile.
    His name put me in mind of that old verse about a situation
in which the British are heavily outnumbered in a colonial revolt:
    This may be so, but we have got
    The maxim gun, and they have not.
    However, the point about any weapon - Ideological or otherwise - is that
it is effective only if it is pointing in the right direction.
This Maxim gun had somehow got skewed around and was firing
erratically on its allies. I resolved to find out more.
    Although Maxim made out that President Carter's human rights policy
was the ''height of realism'' and deserved to be given the same
priority as national security, it is an open secret that many
Static Department professionals are appalled by the way that the
human rights slogan has been used to justify selective attacks
on anti-Communist allies, while the Communist powers - which
commit the worst abuses of individual freedom - go unpenitent and
unscathed.
    One such professional is Terence Todman, until recently assistant
secretary for inter-Americn affairs.
    Todman, who happens to be black, got fed up with the constant
pressure he cam under from Left-wing lobbies, inside and outside
the State Department, to insult and ''destabilize'' right-wing
military regimes in Latin America while seeking closer relations
in Cuba. He began to say so in public.
    On Feb. 9, for example, he was supposed to testify before a
subcommittee of the House of Representatives chaired by Michael
Harrington, a left-wing Democrat, on the state of affairs in Nicaragua.
    When Harrington and his staff got a look at Todman's prepared text,
they were horrified. Instead of calling for the overnight overhtrow
of the Somoza regime, Todman carefully noted that there had been
some ''marked progress'' on human rights in Nicaragua, which regularly
voted with the United States in the United Nations, that U.S. aid
was honestly spent, andthat some repression was inevitable given
a continuing Cuban-backed terror campaign.
    Todman was clearly not going to play Uncle Tom to the ultra
-liberals who are trying to shap American foreign policy. He
had to go. ''We got him,'' was the diplomatic way that Maxim
put it after the Idaho seminar. ''You got him?'' I exclaimed.
''Do you mean you have a hit-list?'' He did not seem displeased
by the thought.
    He went on to explain that Todman's department had been full of
''clientists'' - Foggy Bottom Newsneak for people who understand
the problems of the countries to which they are assigned.
    Now, with the transfer of Todman as ambassador to Madrid, Inter
-American Affairs had been successfully ''cleaned out.'' But
there were lots of ''clientists'' in the European bureaus, too,
Maxim observed, and they were next on the list.
    This Mafia talk brought it home to me that the Human Rights
Bureau seems to be functioning as a sort of political commissariat
inside the State Department, meddling in all sorts of areas to which
its vague brief can be held to allow it a visa.
    Just what are Maxim and his colleggues supposed to be upholding
under the slogan of human rights? There is not much enlightenment
to be found in Carter's public statements on the theme.
    In Warsaw just after Christmas, for example, he was heard to state
that ''I think our concept of human rights is preserved in Poland''
and on that occasion, the slip could not be blamed on the translator.
rl     (MORE) 05-10
 
 
cd
...
(End missing.)
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n625  0311  10 May 78
 
BC-Bully 1stadd 05-10
Robert Moss x x x on the translator.
    Yet Poland is a Communist dictatorship under the heel of
the Soviet Union. Communism, by denying the value of the individual
erects a system incompatible with human rights. A recent editorial
in the East German party magazine ''Horizon,'' was honest enough to
say so: ''There will be no freedom of rights for the enemies of
socialism.''
    The fact that the delegates of more than 70 countries paid lipserve
to human rights in their opening addresses at the U.N. General
Assembly this year has been cited as evidence that, whatever the
confusion in its own collective thought, the Carter Administration
has started something. This is hardly a convincing argument,
since many of those delegates represent tyrannies.
    The fact that the Soviet Union and Uganda both have scals on the
U.N. Human Commisson for Human Rights, a body that has yet to
decide if and when to condemn the political genocide in Cambodia
(where up to 1.5 million people are estimated to have been killed
as a result of the Communist takeover makes a mockery of the U.N's
professed concern for human rights.
    The Carter Administration, like anyone else who espouses the
cause of freedom, has a duty to be consistent. The most brutal,
and the most enduring, dictatorships of our times are the Communist
tyrannies. They also present an immediate threat to human rights
in non-Communist countries particularly those that the Russians
and the Cubans are currently trying to drag their sphere of influence.
    This suggests to me that Western governments have a duty - if
they honestly propose to champion human rights - to begin by asking:
Where do most people suffer? If there are 40,000 political prisoners
in Castro's jails, (the estimate given by Frank Emmick, an American
who was recently released after being held for 14 years) why
is more official concern expressed in Washington about the state
of affairs in Chile, where the military junta has released many
of its prisoners, than in Cuba, where the trend, if anything,
is for the worse?
    I do not offer this as an excuse, for ignoring repression under
governments that happen to be friendly to the West. But human
rights compaigners who want to focus on Argentina or South
Africa or South Korea or Iran without tackling the abuse of freedom
in Communist countries should really come clean.
    Tyranny, alas, has been the most common form of government for
most people in the world throughout all of history. If the shrinking
club of the liberal democracies (which are less liberal day
by day) wishes to berate everyone who does not do things its
way, it will find itself cultivating bad relations with more than
two-thirds of U.N. members.
    It is in this understanding that some of the more intelligent
- and to my mind, the most dangerous - human rights campaigners
in Washington are talking about ''targeting.''
    They want to bring pressure to bear where it can be seen to be
effective. They are not interested, therefore in worrying about
Cambodia, which they believe to be beyond the reach of Western
lever, or even the Soviet bloc.
    No, they want to ''target'' countries they can push around, like
Chile or South Korea.
    I think of this attitude as the schoolroom bully approach.
rl     (ENDIT MOSS) 05-10
 
 
cd
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(End missing.)
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n999  0320  10 May 78
...uu
f815taa z
a k
bc-evansnovak-2takes 5-11
ryrzqtwyd
bc-evansnovak-2takes 5-11   The following Evans-Novak column
is copyrighted and for use only by newspapers that have arranged
for its publication with Field Newspaper Syndicate. Any other
use is irohibited.
Release THURSDAY, MAY 11
(Transmitted 5-10)
Inside Report: Pat Derian's Clout
    WASHINGTON -- The State Department's Office of Human Rights
has now reached such policymaking eminence that a protest from
its boss, Pat Derian, raised the possibility of postponing Vice
President Walter Mondale's visit to Manila 
ast week.
    Actually, Assistant Secretary of State Derian fought hard not
just to postpone Mondale's trip, because it came so close to
the much-criticized presidential election there, but to cancel
it altogether.
    ''We wanted to postpone it to July,'' a top aide in Miss
Derian's office told us. ''Pat kept asking, why in God's name
does he have to go to the Philippines anyway?''
    In the end, Mondale went as scheduled but first received a
one-hour briefing from Miss Derian on how to handle the
delicate human rights question raised by allegations of
massive electoral fraud by President Ferdinand Marcos.
    The expanding policymaking eminence of Miss Derian's Human
Rights Office is raising some prominent eyebrows on grounds
that human rights activists are jeopardizing other U.S. foreign
policy objectives, particularly among conservative and
right-wing governments with intimate ties to the U.S.
    Linked to this concern about ever wider ramifications of
President Carter's justly praised human rights initiative is
the switch from loud to quiet administration handling of
non-human rights in the Soviet Union and ther Communist
states.
    A case in point was Secretary of State Vance's recent
mission to Moscow on strategic arms limitation (SALT) talks.
Vance spokesman Hodding Carter was permitted to inform the
press that Vance privately complained about Russia's African
adventures in his talks with Soviet leaders. But Carter was
not authorized to tell the press that Vance also privately
brought up human rights with Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.
    President Carter's human rights operatives are embarrassed
by this dramatic change to an iceberg policy on Soviet non-human
rights after the gaudy publicity Mr. Carter deliberately
invoked early in his administration by inviting Soviet
dissidents into the White House. They are claiming now ttat
they can achieve more by concealed pressure, a claim that so
far defies objective testing.
fns   (more) 5-10
 
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