The UN High-Level Meeting on Peace building and Sustaining Peace took place in New York from April 24-25 with the attendance of representatives from 128 member countries and international organisations.

In his opening remarks, UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajčák emphasised the need to scale-up efforts to prevent conflict and renewed the UN’s commitment to conflict prevention. For his part, the UN Secretary General highlighted the need to strengthen partnerships around all efforts, and at every stage, from conflict prevention and resolution to peacekeeping, peace building, and long-term development. The UN chief said that more countries are experiencing violent conflict than at any time for nearly three decades, noting that we need greater unity and courage to lay the foundations of sustainable peace and development. Speaking at the meeting, Ambassador Nguyen Phuong Nga, head of the Vietnamese mission to the UN, affirmed Vietnam’s commitment to global and regional peace and security. She iterated Vietnam’s stance of resolving disputes, including the East Sea dispute, through peaceful means and on the basis of international law. Ambassador Nga also welcomed the UN chief’s reform proposals so that the body can fulfil its peacekeeping missions and help country members to meet their development goals.

At the summit

Ambassador Nguyen Phuong Nga, Head of Vietnam’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, affirmed Vietnam’s commitment to promote peace and security in the region and the world during the UN General Assembly’s High-level Meeting on Peace Building and Sustaining Peace in New York on April 24 and 25.

In her speech, Nga said amidst current complicated and uncertain challenges, the UN needs to take a comprehensive approach and put humans in the central position to prevent and deal with disputes in line with the UN Charter and international law, neither use nor threat to use force, respect political independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of each country.

Vietnam welcomed UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s reform initiatives with a view to fulfilling the UN’s mission in peacekeeping and helping member states achieve development goals, she said.

The ambassador reiterated Vietnam’s consistent policy of peacefully settling disputes, including the East Sea issue, in line with international law, including the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and in respect of legal and diplomatic process towards achieving a Code of Conduct(COC) in the East Sea.

She revealed that Vietnam is accelerating preparations for the launch of a level-2 field hospital in South Sudan.

In his opening remarks, President of the UN General Assembly Miroslav Lajcak called on member states to give priority to preventing conflicts, building and maintaining peace, upholding the UN’s leadership in strengthening global peace and security, promoting sustainable development and ensuring human rights.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres highlighted the need to support member states, especially those hit by conflicts, and called for brainpower, science-technology and budget resources to the UN’s activities to prevent conflicts, maintain peace and deal with immigration and refugee crises.

Participants emphasized the necessity to deal with root causes of conflicts, uphold the role of intermediaries, and encourage the involvement of women and young people.

They agreed to enhance the UN’s leadership role, support the UN Secretary General’s reform initiatives to improve the efficiency of the organisation’s activities, increase collective efforts and partnership, and pool necessary resources for peace maintenance and sustainable development.

As scheduled, the UN General Assembly and Security Council will adopt a resolution on April 26, requesting the UN Secretary General to submit next reports on the implementation of recommendations regarding peace building and maintenance

The Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Seattle, Washington, U.S.

The US government is violating international law with its decision to break into Russia’s locked consulate in Seattle, the Russian embassy in Washington said in a statement.
“What we see now is a gross violation of the Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the Convention on Consular Relations,” commented Nikolay Pukalov, the head of the embassy’s consular department. “The Russian side did not agree on stripping diplomatic status from our property in Seattle and did not give permission to American officials to enter our territory.”

The spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, called the development “a hostile takeover” of the compound by the US.

The diplomatic building was evacuated earlier this week due to an order from Washington, which expelled 60 Russian diplomats and told the embassy to shut down the Seattle consulate in retaliation for the poisoning of a former double agent in Britain.
After the diplomats left on Tuesday, they locked the building. US officials on Wednesday broke into the compound.

Later on Wednesday, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that she believes there was nothing unlawful in the actions of the US authorities that broke into the Russian consulate. There was “no ‘invasion,’” she said in a Twitter post as she called Washington’s move “a firm, lawful response to Russia’s continuing outrageous behavior.”
The closure of Russia's Seattle consulate was the latest in a string of diplomatic mission reductions taken by both sides over the past years. The pretext for this particular expulsion was the British accusation that the Russian government ordered an assassination of a former double agent. London failed to provide any public proof of the allegation and instead launched an international campaign to punish Moscow, finding a most eager participant in Washington.

The US claimed that the 60 diplomats it expelled were Russian spies and that the consulate in Seattle was heavily used for espionage purposes. Similar justifications were used when Washington ordered the shutdown of Russian missions in San Francisco and New York in September 2017.

China has published a report listing the woes of American democracy, including human rights, interventions and discrimination, in response to a scathing paper published by the US State Department.
The "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2017" report, released by the Information Office of China's State Council on Tuesday, is a response to the US State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The US review, issued on April 20, labeled the governments of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as "morally reprehensible" and "forces of instability" that "violate human rights of those within their borders on a daily basis."

Now China is pointing to America's own poor human rights record, both at home and abroad.
"Looking back on 2017, those with even the slightest sense of justice can see that the United States' own human rights record is, as usual, notorious for its misdeeds, and continues to worsen," the report states, noting that Washington is in no position to play the role of a self-professed "human rights judge."

The report, which draws on official US data, open sources and the US media, accused the US of "serious infringement of citizens' civilian rights," "systematic racial discrimination,""widening rich-poor divide," as well as "continued violations of human rights in other countries" and "severe flaws" in its democracy.

The last point refers to Syria, where the US-led bombing campaign has inflicted "a large number of civilian casualties," it states, citing reports that "at least 12 schools, 15 mosques, 15 bridges," a refugee camp and other civilian infrastructure were shelled by the allies.

The report highlighted a growing disparity between the rich and the poor in the US, where over 40 million are living in poverty, and the issue of racial discrimination that plagues the country's law enforcement and courts.

Citing the US Sentencing Commission, Beijing pointed out that black male offenders should expect 19.1 percent longer sentences than "similarly situated" white Americans. The report also drew attention to the surging gun violence that US authorities have failed to tackle.

Criticizing the direction in which America is heading with the wealthiest minority grabbing all the power, the report argued that the once exemplary American democracy is "drowning in money."

"U.S. money politics keeps fermenting, and the rich guide the direction of politics. The weak face increasingly harsh restrictions on voting, and scandals involving politicians are frequent," it says.
China also took aim at the notorious Guantanamo prison, where detainees can be kept for years without any charges brought against them and can be subjected to torture. While former US President Barack Obama's pledge to shut down the facility never materialized, the current US leader signed an executive order in January to keep it open.

Besides African-Americans, other groups are frequently discriminated against, the report states, including women, children and the disabled. It cites job statistics that say 163,000 retail jobs for women were slashed from October 2016 to October 2017, while 106,000 new jobs were added for men.

Following the release of the US State Department report, China said that it views such "biased" reports as attempts to interfere in Chinese internal affairs that are "doomed to fail."

"China has clearly informed the United States that its attempt to interfere in China's internal affairs and hinder China's development was in vain in the past, and will not succeed in the future," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said on Monday, adding that the Chinese "have the best say" with regards to the human rights in their country.

American soldiers get off helicopters during the operation "Double eagle" against a Vietcong position at Bon Son, south Vietnam, 07 March 1966

My generation endured fear of the draft because disinformation helped drag our country into a terrible war. That conflict was Vietnam, and the agitprop used to conjure consent for military assaults on Syria now gives me deja vu.
Back in 1972, as a 19-year-old Australian male, I was required to register for the ballot to determine conscription for Vietnam, where my country was allied with the US and South Vietnam against the Vietcong and North Vietnam.

I turned 65 in March. And that's a landmark which can inspire a bit of reflection. Anyway, back in that final teenage year, I hadn't registered, and I wasn't going to. However, had Gough Whitlam's Australian Labor Party not won the election that year, I would have been a draft resister – a stance which would have had surely led to consequences.

As someone raised in a conservative Catholic family when the Catholic Church was playing an actively anti-communist role in Australian society, I had been raised to be willing to "fight for freedom" in Vietnam. What didn't gel with me, however, was that I could be compelled to fight for freedom.
So at University, surrounded by pro- and anti-war groups and demonstrations, I researched, as best I could, the causes of the Vietnam War.

It was portrayed by Australia's then Liberal Party government (the equivalent of the UK's Tories or the USA's Republicans), and a breakaway right-wing element of the Labor Party, as an epic struggle between Good and Evil, as "Freedom" staring down Communism. The Vietnamese were an extension of Chinese communism, which in turn was an extension of Russian communism.

And if we didn't win this battle, the government line held how communists would invade the next country south, and the next, and ultimately bring godless communism to democratic and Christian Australia's doorstep. The mantra that communism was militarily heading towards Australia from Russia and China via Southeast Asia – propelled presumably by gravity – was part of conservative propaganda. In fact, there was even an unsuccessful referendum to ban the Australian Communist Party in 1951.

Colonists versus colonized
The more I examined the historical record, however, the more the Vietnam conflict appeared to be an anti-colonial war, with Australia fighting on the side of the colonizers. The Vietnamese had been promised independence by the French if they supported the Allies in the battle against Japan in WWII. And they obliged, but the French reneged on the deal. In turn, the Vietnamese defeated them; and after the French had been driven out, the US entered the war on false pretenses.

The alleged incidents used to justify the US' war occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The first was described as an unprovoked attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the US destroyer 'Maddox' operating in international waters. In fact, the 'Maddox' was in Vietnamese waters as part of covert US support for South Vietnamese attacks on North Vietnamese facilities. In the conflict itself, the 'Maddox' fired first on Vietnamese vessels legitimately defending their territory, and it called in airstrikes by US jets as well. The outgunned Vietnamese vessels were heavily damaged, while the total damage the 'Maddox' sustained in the engagement was a single bullet hole.

The second incident did not happen: what was portrayed as an assault by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the 'Maddox' was probably the destroyer mistaking its radar signals, bouncing off its own rudder, for incoming torpedoes.

As trivial and false as these incidents were, President Johnson used them to justify America's war with Vietnam. Johnson's "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution" was passed unanimously in the Congress; in the Senate, there were only two votes against it.

Almost 60,000 Americans and four million Vietnamese died in that war. Let that sink in: over four million people died because of two "acts of aggression" that did not happen.

After the event, NSA historian, Robert J Hanyok wrote that "the overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack had happened. So a conscious effort ensued to demonstrate that an attack occurred."
Disinformation disaster
The North Vietnamese won the war that followed, and their next battle gave the lie to the state-sanctioned propaganda that had encouraged young men like myself at the time to believe they were fighting to defend Australia's freedom from tyranny. Vietnam's next conflict did not spread communism further south, but resisted an invasion from communist China in response to Vietnam's invasion of communist Cambodia (which Vietnam had invaded to overthrow the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which was backed by China). Thus, so much for the lies we were fed about a unified communist movement targeting democratic Australia.

I hoped that one legacy of that pointless, brutal conflict would be that Western countries would never again persuade their peoples to engage in a war based on fabrications and misguided ideology.

Of course, my hope was not fulfilled. One of the many things killed by September 11, 2001 was the American people's skepticism about its governments use of lethal force abroad. And George W Bush's administration capitalized on the situation to use false allegations that Iraq had "Weapons of Mass Destruction" to justify invading the country.

Then there was Libya. Now there is Syria. The justification for war has shifted from fighting communism, or even fighting Islamic fundamentalists, to what terrible people these dictators are, torturing and gassing their own people. But none of them has been responsible for anything like the four million that died thanks to Johnson's unwarranted war, nor up to a million corpses that decorate George W Bush's military chest.

This brings me to the alleged gas attack in Douma. The idea that the Syrian military would use chemical weapons when it was winning a conventional conflict rings serious "Gulf of Tonkin" alarm bells in my war-weary head. No one living outside the Fog of War in Syria can truly know who actually used those weapons – or whether a chemical attack occurred at all (see Robert Fisk's column) – and yet many journalists in the US and UK have egged their leaders on, and ridiculed those who questioned the government line, rather than displaying the skepticism that is the proper role of the Fourth Estate.

Gullibility, it seems, is more patriotic than skepticism. As I stood against the Vietnam War, I'll happily be called unpatriotic over opposing what the USA, UK and France, all allies of my homeland, have done, and may well do, in Syria.

An employee of a bank counts US dollar notes at a branch in Hanoi, Vietnam

The country stands among top destinations of remittance outflows from the U.S.
Vietnamese workers living abroad sent home $13.8 billion last year, keeping the country among the 10 biggest remittance beneficiaries, the World Bank said in a new report.

That’s equivalent to 6.7 percent Vietnam’s gross domestic product in 2017, showing that remittances continue to be an important income source for the country.

India took the top spot in 2017, getting $69 billion, followed by China with $63.9 billion and the Philippines with $32.8 billion

Together, the top 10 account for more than half of the total $466 billion sent to low- and middle-income countries in 2017, an increase of 8.5 percent over 2016, the WB said in a report released Monday.
If flows to high-income countries are also taken into account, global remittances grew 7 percent to $613 billion in 2017.
According to the United Nations, in 2017, the global stock of international migrants, including refugees, was an estimated $258 million while new data from several countries as well as data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the WB, put this estimate at $266 million.

The largest outflows of remittances last year were from the U.S., at $67 billion, and Saudi Arabia, at $38 billion.

The top destinations for remittances from the U.S., which has led the world in remittance outflows for 35 years, are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and Vietnam, even though experts warned last year that Vietnam could be losing out given U.S. President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policy and the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes at the time.

Remittances to developing countries are expected to continue to increase this year by 4.1 percent to reach $485 billion while global remittances are predicted to grow 4.6 percent to $642 billion, according to the WB.

For Vietnam, over the past 25 years, the flow of overseas funds has increased around 100-fold, from $140 million in 1993 to approximately $13.4 billion in 2016, according to data released in May last year by the bank.

Data from the Pew Research Center said Vietnam got $11.8 billion in 2016, with the U.S. being the biggest source, accounting for more than half of the total sum, followed by Australia, Canada, Germany and France.

Official government data showed the number of Vietnamese workers that went to work abroad hit nearly 135,000 in 2017, up 6.7 percent against 2016, marking the fourth year in a row that the figure exceeded 100,000.

Navy personnel of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy take part in a military display in the South China Sea April 12, 2018

Canada urges all parties to the disputed waters to uphold their rights of freedom of navigation and aviation.
The Senate of Canada has approved a motion which condemns China for its “aggressive and expansive behavior” in the South China Sea, known in Vietnam as the East Sea.

The proposal describes China’s activities in the sea area as “escalating and hostile behavior” and urges all parties to the dispute to uphold their rights of freedom of navigation and aviation in accordance with international law and the United Nations Convention of the Sea, The Globe and Mail reported on Tuesday.

This is considered a rare move for Canada, said the report, saying the measure comes at a time when Canada is seeking to open formal trade negotiations with China, currently the world’s second-biggest economy.

“By passing this motion, the Senate is stating its concern on China’s escalating and hostile behavior in the South China Sea, and urging the government of Canada to take a principled position on one of the biggest geopolitical conflicts of our time,” The Globe and Mail quoted conservative senator Thanh Hai Ngo, who sponsored the motion, as saying.

The Chinese Embassy then issued a statement to disapprove the Canadian vote and criticized Ngo for trying to “cast shadows” over bilateral relations.

In 2016, the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration stated that China has no legal basis to claim sovereignty over territory based on a vaguely defined “nine-dash-line” in the waters and the Canadian government supported the court’s decision.

China claims 90 percent of the potentially energy-rich maritime territory and has been building on and militarizing rocky outcrops and reefs in its waters.

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also lay claim to parts of it, through which about $5 trillion of trade passes each year. Vietnam is the country most openly at odds with China over the issue, Reuters said earlier this month.

Vietnamese deportee and Amerasian Pham Chi Cuong, 47, who was deported from U.S., eats along a street in Ho Chi Minh City,

Now back in the country they once fled, the men said they received little support and were struggling to find work.
It wasn’t until Pham Chi Cuong saw the plane waiting to deport him from the United States that it sunk in that he was about to be sent back to Vietnam, the country he fled in 1990.
Cuong and at least three other deportees who had lived in America for decades were returned to Vietnam in December 2017 as part of a renewed Trump administration push to deport immigrants convicted of crimes in the United States.
The expulsions were carried out despite a 2008 bilateral agreement that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the United States prior to 1995, many of whom had supported the now defunct U.S.-backed state of South Vietnam, would not be sent back.
Cuong and the other men, who spoke to Reuters this week in Ho Chi Minh City, said they spent the 17-hour flight in enforced silence, their hands and legs in restraints.
Adjusting to life in Vietnam, the men all said, has been difficult. They said they were viewed with suspicion by Vietnamese officials and have had trouble finding work.
“If you ask me ‘do you want to come back to the U.S?’ I’ll give you the answer ‘yes’, but I don’t know how,” said Cuong, who left a wife and children back home in Orlando, Florida.
Another of the men, who asked to be identified only by his last name of Nguyen, told Reuters he was asked by local police officials when he returned to Vietnam if he worked for the CIA.
He said he was deported to Cam Ranh Bay, a place he had fled after the war because of his family’s connections to the losing side. “I ran away from there,” said Nguyen.
“There were a lot of Americans there at the time, and my family worked for them,” he added. “My uncle died in the war. He was a South Vietnamese soldier.”
It is not known how many pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants like Nguyen and Cuong have been deported so far, but the Trump administration is seeking to send back thousands, Washington’s former envoy to Hanoi told Reuters in an interview last week. Vietnam has expressed reluctance to take back pre-1995 immigrants.
Of the 8,600 Vietnamese nationals in the United States that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency says are subject to deportation as of December last year, “7,821 have criminal convictions,” an ICE spokesman said. The agency said it could not say how many of the immigrants slated for deportation arrived before 1995.
The White House has declined to comment on the Vietnamese deportations. But the Trump administration has labeled Vietnam and eight other countries “recalcitrant” for their unwillingness to accept their deported nationals.
Abuse and discrimination
The son of an American serviceman stationed in Saigon during the war, Cuong is “Amerasian,” which he said subjected him to abuse and discrimination in Vietnam after the war.
He didn’t attend school and spent years ostracized and working in rice fields before leaving the country in 1990 on a program that gave Amerasians like him a chance to resettle in the United States.
But despite being born to an American father and raising three American children in Florida, Cuong never became a U.S. citizen.
It hadn’t seemed necessary, he said, since he had come to the country legally and was allowed to work. Then, in 2000, Cuong was convicted of assault and battery and sentenced to 18 months in jail. In 2007, he was given one year probation for driving under the influence.
Both times, Cuong was warned that his crimes made him eligible for deportation under U.S. law, but at the time Vietnam was not accepting deportees back. He was relieved in 2008, when the bilateral agreement on repatriations was signed in which the return of pre-1995 refugees was specifically barred.
After his arrests, Cuong checked in regularly with ICE as he was required to do, and stayed out of trouble.
He held down a steady job as a sushi chef and put his son through three years of college.
But in October, 2017, he was taken into custody by ICE and two months later found himself on a plane back to Vietnam.
‘Utterly shocked’
Another of the deportees, Bui Thanh Hung, is also Amerasian, born in 1973 to a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier who died during the war.
Hung was convicted of domestic violence in 2010, which he says came after he walked in on his wife and another man. He spent six years in prison. Last year, he was released into ICE custody and deported in December.
“Over here, I have no job, no one to support me, no house to live in”, said Hung. He said he was relying on new acquaintances to stay temporarily at their homes.
Many immigration advocates say they assumed the United States would be particularly reluctant to expel Amerasians like Hung and Cuong, because of their American fathers and the discrimination they had faced in post-war Vietnam.
“Those of us in the Southeast Asian community were utterly shocked,” Tin Nguyen, a U.S.-based lawyer, said of the ongoing deportations. Nguyen volunteers with the Southeast Asian Coalition nonprofit and has been working with the deportees.
“It was as if they forgot about the Vietnam War.”
Cuong and Bui were deported with around 30 other deportees from Asian countries on a plane that dropped people off in Myanmar and Cambodia before reaching its final destination, Vietnam.
Now back in the country they once fled, the men said they receive little support from the Vietnamese government and were struggling to find work.
“I got no money,” said Cuong. “My wife, sometimes she gives me a couple hundred dollars, but nobody helps me, nothing.”