Overcoming War Legacies: The Road to Reconciliation and Future Cooperation Between the U.S. and Vietnam

Good morning everyone. Thank you Ambassador Taylor for that kind introduction, and thank you all very much for having me here today.

Thank you, too, to the United States Institute of Peace and Nancy Lindborg for hosting this important event -- the ability to bring together this exceptional group of participants is a testament to your convening influence and the value we all see in events like today’s where we can share experiences and learn from each other.

Thank you, too, to Vice Minister Nguyễn Chí Vịnh and to Senator Leahy for your engagement on this important bilateral relationship. Finally, thanks to my great team from USAID that focuses on hard issues and on advancing our engagement with Vietnam.

We are here today celebrating the strong relationship between the United States and Vietnam, due largely to two tracks of engagement that transpired concurrently. As the United States sought the return of our MIAs, the Vietnamese sought help with their war-wounded, and that is where USAID’s humanitarian work played a major role.

At USAID our job is to walk alongside our partner countries and join with them on their journey to self-reliance -- to work toward the day when foreign assistance is no longer necessary. I am so proud of the work that USAID has accomplished with our Vietnamese partners over the past 30 or so years, which has contributed significantly to Vietnam’s strong position today.

Our predecessor agencies first came to Vietnam in the early 1950s, and we returned, as the United States Agency for International Development, in 1989, to engage in humanitarian actions that would lay the foundation for our current partnership and closer cooperation.

In 1988, President Reagan commissioned a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, to develop a "roadmap to normalization" of relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. Over the course of the next two years, five missions were made to Hanoi, after which General Vessey's team identified the highest priority of each government, and submitted a series of recommendations to the president.

The US priority was a full accounting of POW/MIAs, and a process including on-the-ground searches began in 1991, which led to the uncovering of the remains of about 900 American military personnel over the next two decades.

In conjunction with those efforts, and thanks to historic legislation spearheaded by Senator Leahy, in 1991 USAID also began a program designed to address the priorities of the Government of Vietnam. The first was the needs of Vietnam’s war-wounded -- primarily the estimated 250,000 amputees who had minimal if any access to appropriate prosthetic or rehabilitation services.

In those early years, USAID's assistance supported the local production and fitting of prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs. The program was designed in cooperation with the Vietnamese government, and drew upon the services and experience of American NGOs to develop local Vietnamese government and non-governmental capacities.

USAID provided high-quality prosthetic and rehabilitation training for local staff, the procurement of materials and equipment, and construction of facilities.

Consistent with good development policy and practice, USAID also asked the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics to provide oversight for technical assistance work that was supported under the Leahy War Victims Fund.

After the program began, a dictum was added to the USAID-supported program guidance, which was "Nothing About Us Without Us." So we also added a comprehensive program element to build an "inclusive" social infrastructure in Vietnam, developed along the lines of our Americans with Disabilities Act, to guide all governmental policies and budgets.

A lot of barriers had to be broken, a lot of history set aside in the interest of moving forward. But ultimately USAID’s attention to these strategic issues allowed us to develop the necessary trust and confidence of our Vietnamese counterparts for the program to grow and mature.

These humanitarian contributions to the Vietnamese people, in parallel with Vietnam's help in recovering our MIAs, demonstrates how such a mutually beneficial approach has contributed to a sustainable and effective bilateral relationship that lasts to this day.

USAID continues to support Vietnamese partners in serving the disabled, like the Disability Research and Development Center, the Action to the Community Development Center and VietHealth.

I am enormously proud of USAID’s contribution to this entire, historic process of healing and reconciliation.

Since the official normalization of the U.S.‑Vietnam relationship in 1995, USAID’s programming has grown steadily, while Vietnam has made an extraordinary leap -- in the span of not much more than a generation -- from poverty to a rapidly growing economy.

Today we partner with the Vietnamese government and other local organizations in dozens of ways to promote growth, trade, and private industry, while raising standards of living.

We’re fostering investments in the energy sector, including in renewable energy. We’ve helped with legal case reviews to combat wildlife trafficking, worked to modernize labor unions, and launched a micro-credit project for small, women-led businesses in the Mekong Delta.

Vietnam is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and conserving its natural resource base is vital to the country's long-term growth and sustainability. So we’re partnering with provincial governments and communities to reduce deforestation and restore degraded landscapes in places like Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue provinces.

We’re also working together to build world-class institutions of higher education. Just this past September, Fulbright University Vietnam, with support from USAID, welcomed its first undergraduate class.

Other collaborations with engineering, technical, and medical colleges support Vietnam’s efforts to develop a 21st Century higher education system, and produce graduates with the skills that employers need to compete in an increasingly global marketplace.

The world is eager to do business in and with Vietnam, so USAID has also helped with its government’s rewrite of more than 180 commercial laws and regulations to improve business competitiveness.

Laying the groundwork for these efforts 15 years ago, USAID programming helped support the Government of Vietnam in implementing a Bilateral Trade Agreement, which in turn aided the reforms required for accession to the World Trade Organization back in 2007.

That was a major turning point in Vietnam’s economic growth -- as it has been for so many other countries.

And of course, there’s our partnership to clean up another legacy of the war.

In 2012, USAID and Vietnamese partners like Vinausen, Song Da Central, LILAMA EMC, and BK ECC -- along with U.S. contractors such as CDM -- embarked together on the monumental task of cleaning up soil and sediment at Danang Airport that was contaminated by Agent Orange.

This required processing enough dirt to fill 56 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And by processing, I mean they had to cook most of it in batches, above 600 degrees, in a two-story oven the size of a football field, that was the proprietary technology of a Massachusetts-based small business called TerraTherm.

Just getting the oven that hot took several months. And some of the batches had to be heated for as long as two weeks to break down the dioxin. But with skill and determination, I am proud to say, this historic remediation was completed last November.

Today Danang is a cleaner and safer city, and the airport sits on nearly 75 acres of cleaned land.

I’m even prouder to announce that we have officially launched the design phase of the clean-up of Bien Hoa, the largest remaining dioxin hotspot in the country.

This month, USAID selected Trigon Associates, a women-owned small business based in New Orleans, Louisiana to provide the masterplan for the project, along with engineering design and construction management services throughout the clean-up.

We expect shovels in the ground later this year, during the dry season.

This is a big portfolio, but USAID is only one component of the efforts by the United States to support a strong, prosperous, and independent Vietnam, one that contributes to international security and respects human rights and the rule of law.

We’re a part of the U.S. Government’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, which envisions an entire region that is free, open, secure and prosperous. And the U.S.-Vietnam development partnership is absolutely central to that goal. Our bilateral relationship is one of the strongest bulwarks for peace and security in the area.

And our partnerships -- and the friendships we have made -- are among USAID’s greatest success stories.

We are continuing to work together to promote inclusive growth and to further open Vietnam to global trade on a level playing field… including with American businesses. Legal reform, increased transparency, streamlined customs… all of these efforts will help to integrate small- and medium-sized Vietnamese companies into global value chains, increasing their economic self-reliance.

In all of this work, USAID is committed as a development agency not only to partner with Vietnam today, but also to ensure that the Vietnamese people have the tools necessary to address ongoing and future challenges in a sustainable way.

Our contributions over the past 30 years have been instrumental in building the strong relationship that we enjoy today, and laying the foundation for even closer partnership moving forward in broader regional issues like trade and security.

We’re proud to be part of Vietnam’s development journey, and look forward to a bright future ahead.

Thank you again for the opportunity to be here today. The progress we’ve made is truly a cause for celebration, and I am honored to be a part of it.