NEW DELHI India: Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach said Friday that talks on U.S soldiers missing in the Vietnam War have been called off for as long as the United States continues its “inhumane attack on Libya.”
Thach in New Delhi to attend a meeting of foreign ministers of the non-aligned nations told a news conference that talks with the United States on returning the bodies of missing American soldiers “are a humanitarian issue.”
The Libyan case of the U.S attacks is an inhumane issue so it will not help the MEA talks when brutal and inhumane acts are committed against a member of the non-aligned movement” he said.
“We are committed to the humane aspect of the MIA issue and we will continue the talks when the barbarous and inhumane attack on Libya is no longer there” Thach said
In Washington State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said the Vietnamese notified US authorities in Bangkok that “the current situation is not favorable for the conduct of a technical meeting at this time. The rescheduling of this meeting will be later agreed upon between the two sides.”
“Kalb said the Vietnamese embassy did not elaborate on what they meant by the “current situation.”
“We very much regret this action on the part of the Vietnamese government” Kalb said “We hope that they will reconsider and that talks will resume soon.”
The United States still lists 2441 Americans as missing in action in Indo China since the Vietnam War.
The United Stated bombed targets in the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi early Tuesday to retaliate for what it said was Libyan complicity in the April 5 bombing of a West Berlin discotheque. An American soldier and a Turkish woman were killed in the blast which injured 230 people including 63 Americans.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 25, 1986
