Fresh tensions in the Islamic world sparked by the terror attacks on the United States are undermining Vietnam's plans to restore its once large labor exports to the Arab world, officials said Friday, September 28.
"The prospects for sending Vietnamese workers to the Middle East and North Africa, two key markets for our labor exports, have been greatly reduced by the warlike atmosphere in these two regions," said labor ministry official Nguyen Gia Liem.
"We had planned to send 30,000 workers abroad this year but it's now proving a very difficult target to achieve," Liem told AFP, acknowledging that 26,000 was now a more realistic figure.
Before the 1991 Gulf War, some 16,000 Vietnamese worked in the Middle East and North Africa, taking advantage of the communist nations' close ties with radical Arab states from Iraq to Algeria.
But a series of evacuations over the past decade means that fewer than 2,000 Vietnamese laborers now work in the region, mainly in Libya and the United Arab Emirates. Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait prompted a first pullout, followed by another from Algeria in 1995 after a sharp escalation in the civil war there between a military-backed government and Islamic guerrillas.
Reversing the trend formed an important part of Vietnam's plans for a major boost in labor exports to provide work for the million school-leavers who join the job market every year in this country of nearly 80 million people.
Liem said Vietnam was keeping the position of its remaining workers in the region under review but did not foresee any difficulties in bringing them home if US retaliation for the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington sparked fresh insecurity.
"We've got a lot of experience in repatriating our workers from the region. So if US military action makes it necessary, it shouldn't be too difficult for us to bring them home," he said.
Vietnam will not allow its close ties with radical Arab states to get in the way of a landmark trade deal with Israel, even amid the current heightened tensions in the Middle East, officials said in Hanoi Friday, September 28.
"It is our policy to make friends with every country in the world equally," said the head of the trade ministry's southwest Asia and Africa department, Vu Thi Thiem. "If we find benefits with Israel, we can sign a trade agreement. It doesn't depend on relations with other countries."
Thiem said negotiations on a trade deal were now reaching their final stages. "We are agreed about most of the articles." But she declined to say when she expected it to be signed because it was also a matter for the Israeli government.
Israeli officials have long expressed interest in signing a trade deal with Vietnam, as much for political as economic reasons. The communist state was a close Cold War ally of radical Arab states, such as Algeria, Iraq and Libya, and only established diplomatic ties with the Jewish state in 1993.
A trade agreement would put the seal on the normalization of relations, Israeli embassy spokesman Yahel Vilan told AFP earlier this year. Vietnam's trade with Israel continues to pale in significance with the hundreds of millions of dollars it does with Iraq.
After peaking at $38 million in 1999, Vietnam-Israel trade fell to a little over $20 million last year, according to Israeli figures. But the prospects were still considered important enough for a visit here by a high-level Israeli trade delegation in March. ― (AFP, Hanoi)
© Agence France Presse 2001
© 2001 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
