Panel: Vietnam Victim of Own Leaders

A panel of five Vietnam War experts--one of whom was called a "war criminal" by a heckler--last night agreed that even though its civil war is over, Vietnam is worse off now than when American officials pulled out 10 years ago.

"Vietnam's aged leaders, although right for wartime, are unable to run their country in peace." Douglas Pike, a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer who has written four books on the Vietnam War, told the Kennedy School of Government audience of 325. "More people have been killed by the current Communist regime than were killed during the entire Vietnam War," Pike said.

"Vietnam appears to have gone back in time Conditions there are as bad as they were in the darkest hours of the war," said George Esper, an Associated Press reporter who witnessed the Communist take-over of South Vietnam in April, 1975. He was recently allowed to tour that country.

Nothing that "it takes the average state worker in Vietnam one month to earn what an American teen-ager makes in an hour working in a fast-food restaurant." Esper told of a young girl who approached him during his recent Vietnam visit and said. "I want to go to America. I have nothing to eat. There is nothing good here.

All major construction work in Vietnam is done by hand, electricity is rationed, and the country in several billion dollars in debt and cannot feed its 60 million people, Esper said.

Downplaying American Involvement

Although the U.S. dropped more bombs on North Vietnam during the decade of involvement than all combatants did in World War II, the panelists all said the country's current dire straits stem from government mismanagement. The current regime--which is closely allied with the Soviet Union adn Cuba--has devoted much of its resources toward fighting neighboring Kampuchea and securing itself against a possible Chinese invasion.

The forum who asked if any of the good members were against the American involvement in Vietnam. One audience member was ejected after he called Pike a "war criminal." Pike had said that he felt "no guilt" over America's actions in Southern Asia.

There were three other participants in the Institute of Politics-sponsored forum:

* Dau T. Le, a Vietnamese refugee who lived in that country until 1981, said that "there is no modern health care in Vietnam today." Le she said there is no fertilizer and severe water shortages, and told of a village where half the population died in a year because of poor living conditions.

* Dinh-Hoa Nguyen, director of the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University, said Vietnamese culture has been completely replaced with Marxist-Leninist ideology by the current regime. Nguyen said that schoolbooks have been rewritten to promote communist ideology, including a fifth-grade history book that depicts "Americans as cannibalistic." It is the 500,000 Vietnamese refugees living in exile, he said, who are keeping the Vietnamese heritage alive.

* Lyall Breckon, director of the Office of Vietnam, Laos, and Kampuchea Affairs of the Department of State, said th U.S. hopes to see more people be allowed to emigrate legally from Vietnam. He said the U.S. also wants Vietnam to make good on its promise last year to release people from reeducation camps