Đây là bài trên Financial Times hôm 31-5 mà các báo nhắc đến.
The launch of a new US-backed university during President Barack Obama’s
visit to Vietnam last week was meant to symbolise reconciliation and the potential for the two nations to deepen their
relationship.
But there has been a backlash against the decision to hand the chairmanship of Fulbright University Vietnam to a former US senator accused of involvement in a massacre during the Vietnam war.
Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator and governor of Nebraska, has expressed remorse about the 1969 raid on a Communist-controlled village in which his elite Navy Seal platoon killed at least 13 unarmed women and children. The attack was made public in 2001 following an investigation by
CBS News and the
New York Times.
However, his selection as chairman of the trustees of FUV, Vietnam’s first private not-for-profit university, has stirred up painful feelings about a conflict that killed more than 1m Vietnamese, many of them civilians.
“I know that Mr Kerrey wants to heal the pains of the war, both his and the Vietnamese people’s,” said Thai Bao Anh, a Vietnamese lawyer. “However, I wonder if he has ever asked himself [whether] his appointment, in fact, is opening an old wound in Vietnamese people’s minds.”
Mr Thai, who won a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to the US in 2003, said that while he fully supported FUV’s mission to improve the quality of education in Vietnam, he could not forgive Mr Kerrey.
“I have no right to do it because it is the rights of the dead victims and their still living family members,” he said.
While most of Vietnam’s
state-controlled media painted the university as a symbol of deepening US-Vietnam co-operation, Zing, a popular online news outlet, prompted a more critical reaction after it published a story looking into the massacre.
It said on its Facebook page that the choice of Mr Kerrey to head the FUV was “difficult to understand” because of his role in the 1969 massacre.
In comments posted below the article, Vietnamese were divided.
“The appointment of a person who has committed crimes against our compatriots to lead a prestigious American university in Vietnam is like once again sticking the criminal knife into the Vietnamese people’s scar,” said Dinh Thi Thu Ha.
But Lieu Ngo, another commenter, argued that the “generation who faced Bob Kerrey on the battlefield” did not want to live with hatred.
“Let’s support Bob Kerrey to help his Fulbright university project in Vietnam succeed,” he said.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American author of
The Sympathizer , a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the war, said he was surprised by the selection of such a “problematic” figure to chair the university.
“It’s pretty hard to overlook his history and the indisputable event that took place,” he said. “They could easily have found other, more appropriate figures to lead this institution.”
Mr Kerrey, who worked alongside fellow veterans-turned-politicians John Kerry and John McCain to promote the normalisation of ties with Vietnam in the 1990s, told the Financial Times he understood the criticism by Vietnamese and would “gladly step down” if his participation put the success of FUV at risk.
“
I have faced my past squarely and honestly,” said Mr Kerrey, who lost part of his right leg during the war. “I did something terrible and will live with it all my life. But I do not live in the past. I live in the present and am trying to do what I can to help Vietnam build a better future.”
Ben Wilkinson of the Boston-based Trust for University Innovation in Vietnam, which is backing FUV, stood by Mr Kerrey, saying his experience in higher education and in the reconciliation between Vietnam and the US made him “very well qualified” to lead the university.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5f7054a2-26f3-11e6-8b18-91555f2f4fde.html
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