A COUNTRY OF COMPLACENCY

Canada's Response To Vietnam Too Little, And Far Too Late

It's hard to say which of the two establishment groups in this country
turned in a more shameful performance over the execution of a Canadian
citizen in Vietnam: the federal government or the national media.

We'll call it a tie for last place.

First place, at least in this area, goes to Keith Sutfin, who put
principles before profit and has refused to do further business with Vietnam.

Nguyen Thi Hiep, 43, and her mother, Tran Thi Cam, were found guilty in
1997 of drug smuggling after 5.4 kilograms of heroin was found hidden in
art panels they tried to take aboard a flight bound for Toronto from Hanoi.

Hiep was blindfolded, gagged, tied to a post and shot to death last week
even as authorities were reviewing fresh evidence that she may have been duped.

Sutfin, marketing manager for New Age Shelters - a company that makes
fibreglass-domed houses for third world countries - responded with a
personal boycott of his product to a country that could perpetrate such a
despicable act.

He makes two valid points.

First, the media in the U.S. would have created a monumental clamour back
at the time of the arrest of mother and daughter back in 1997. Second, if
Nguyen had been an American, that country's government would have stepped
in and stepped down hard on the Vietnamese government long before such a
murderous act could have taken place.

A Canadian citizen is murdered by a foreign government and it goes almost
unnoticed, even in Canada. The best Prime Minister Jean Chretien can do , a
week after Nguyen's death, is to tell the Vietnamese government how mad
Canada is about it.

Chretien said it was "unacceptable" a word of such threat that the
Vietnamese assassins will be no doubt be paralysed with fear over the rebuke.

Too little, too late.