Cao visits Vietnam, meets with top officials

By Jonathan Tilove
January 13, 2010

Ted Jackson / The Times-Picayune archive'The government did not want to issue a visa because they felt that my visit potentially could be explosive,' U.S. Rep. Anh 'Joseph' Cao said of Vietnamese officials.

Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-New Orleans, who left wartorn Vietnam as a boy and became the first Vietnamese-American to serve in Congress, made an official visit to the country last week.

But in order to get a visa from the Vietnamese government, Cao, an outspoken critic of the Communist regime that imprisoned his father for seven years, had to promise he wouldn't stir up trouble while he was there.

"The government did not want to issue a visa because they felt that my visit potentially could be explosive," Cao said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

"In order to get the visa I had to go quietly into Vietnam and to leave quietly," he said. "We could not do a press conference; we could not do a press release." He also said he had to promise that "we would not visit dissidents and we would not visit human rights advocates."

But Cao said he was able to press his concerns about human rights abuses and the suppression of religious freedom in Vietnam during a series of meetings with top officials, including Vietnam's foreign minister, deputy general for America, standing vice minister for foreign affairs, vice minister who chairs the committee for overseas Vietnamese and director general for Ho Chi Minh City, the city once known as Saigon that Cao left in 1975 as an 8-year-old as it was about to fall to the Communists.

Cao's visit to Vietnam was part of an 11-day trip he made with two other members of the Congressional Asian-Pacific American Caucus, Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., and delegate Eni Faleomavega, D-American Samoa. It included stops in Laos, Cambodia and Japan.

In addition to talking about human rights issues, Cao returned home with a new passion for helping the governments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia remove the vast quantity of unexploded ordnance left over from the Vietnam War that continues to kill and maim people, especially children.

"The United States dropped millions of tons of bombs on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; much of that came in the form of cluster bombs" of which "approximately 30 percent failed to explode," Cao said.

Before his visit, Cao said, "I was not aware of the issue."

Cao said he was also interested in expanding higher education opportunities for Vietnamese students, including increasing the availability of visas to the United States, so that they are better able to fill technology jobs at home being provided by foreign companies, including U.S.-based firms.

With the help of the American Embassy, Cao also was able to meet for 15 minutes with an older sister who still lives in Dong Nai, east of Ho Chi Minh City, though he said she, her three children and her husband now have visas to come to America.

After his brief visit with his sister, Cao said, "Local police came and questioned her husband. They wanted to know why I was there, what was the content of our conversation." When he reported this to Vietnamese officials with whom he was meeting, Cao said he was told there was nothing unusual about the interrogation and "those are normal questions."

Before making the trip, Cao told his parents, who now live in New Orleans, that he was returning to Vietnam.

"They were fearful but I assured them nothing would happen to me," Cao said. He said he had not yet reported back to them about his trip. But in his visit with Vietnamese officials he mentioned his father, a former South Vietnamese military official who now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I told them that my father was put in a re-education camp for seven years and they just nodded," Cao said.

Cao had visited Vietnam twice before since his youth, in 1994 as a Jesuit seminarian and in 2001 with his wife, Kate, who is also a refugee from Vietnam.