News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Vietnam Not Doing Enough

Date: August 09, 2000

From REUTERS -

US wants more Vietnamese help on war missing
By David Brunnstrom

"HANOI, Aug 9 (Reuters) - The United States would like Vietnam to do more ``unilateral work'' to account for US servicemen still listed as missing from the Vietnam War, the senior US official for war missing said on Wednesday.

Robert Jones, deputy assistant secretary of state for prisoner of war/missing personnel affairs, said Vietnamese officials had expressed to him their commitment to the task of accounting for US missing.

Asked what the United States wanted to see more of, he replied: ``As we seek ways to be more efficient, we are looking at ways that the Vietnamese can do more unilateral work in terms of recovery operations.''

He said this particularly applied to cases in which soldiers were last known by their comrades to have been alive.

Jones said these were ``cases where during the war Americans were known to be on the ground in close proximity to the enemy, but we don't know what happened to them.''

They also included ``discrepancy cases'' in which individuals were known to have been captured but never returned to the United States.

``We have determined the fate of many of those and we have recovered the remains of several,'' Jones said. ``But there still remains a lot of work to be done in that area.''

He said Washington remained committed to a full accounting for its missing in the war that ended in 1975 and this position would not alter with the upcoming US administration change.

``Though the efforts may change, we will continue to seek missing Americans until all of them are accounted for,'' he said.

A total of 1,514 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam War and Jones' office says it is actively pursuing 916 of these cases.

His trip to Vietnam follows one in March by William Cohen, the first US defense secretary to visit since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Jones said none of the 21,000 ``live sightings'' of missing Americans since 1973 had led to recovery of a live serviceman, but investigation of such reports remained the highest priority for the United States.

He said the United States had so far assisted in the recovery of 2,500 sets of remains of North Vietnamese soldiers killed in the war.

Hanoi estimates its war missing at about 300,000 and has called for more US help to account for them.

Jones said Washington has so far turned over to the Vietnamese five million pages of documents to assist the search and given full access to its archives.

He said the US Marine Corps would turn over a further 400,000 pages of documents in October. "