MAY IT FLY IN SAIGON SOON

A fight for Viet flag: For immigrants, old banner is a rallying point (Yvonne Abraham, Globe Staff, and Donovan Slack, 8/13/2003, Boston Globe)

It is not the first time the Boston City Council has ventured into foreign policy. But this time, someone out there is actually taking notice.

Two weeks ago, the council unanimously passed a resolution to recognize the "Heritage and Freedom Flag" as the official symbol of Boston's Vietnamese-American community. That flag, with its yellow background and three red horizontal stripes, is also the old South Vietnamese flag.

And that has upset officials of the Vietnamese government, which the United States officially recognized, with full diplomatic relations, in 1995.

Officials of the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington came to Boston last week to visit city councilors, to explain that the official Vietnamese flag is the one associated with what used to be called North Vietnam, a yellow star on a field of red. The Vietnamese officials argued that, if any Vietnamese flag is to be recognized at City Hall, it should be that one, because Saigon fell in April 1975 and relations between their nation and the United States have been cordial for years.

Flying the other flag is "disrespectful to the entire nation," said Bach Ngoc Chien, press attache of the Embassy of Vietnam.

"A small minority of Vietnamese-Americans who claim themselves representatives of the Vietnamese-American community living in Boston aim at sowing division, rekindling the past hatred and painful pages of the history between our two nations and among the Vietnamese themselves, running counter to the aspirations and interests of the two peoples," he said. "This could potentially set an undesirable precedent to other ethnic communities in Boston."

Why should anyone respect Vietnam? Rekindle away. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2003 8:42 AM