Vietnam Courts Microsoft and Vice Versa

wbren writes "Bill Gates and Vietnam's Prime Minister Phan Van Khai have signed two 'memoranda of understanding' regarding Microsoft's presence in Vietnam, according to this AP story. They met Monday at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters for a closed door meeting and a tour of Microsoft's "home of the future". The agreement reached is expected to strengthen Vietnam's IT industry, as well as provide software training for 50,000 of the country's teachers. Khai's visit also triggered protests in Seattle, reminding everyone of Vietnam's human rights record."

Comments

no sense of irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, Americans compaining about other country's human rights records!

Re:no sense of irony

[jcr]

Americans, like anyone else, are perfectly entitled to criticise any country's human rights record.

People whose rights are violated in the USA, unlike many other countries, have recourse to a free press and the courts; which is more than can be said for the Socialist Worker's Paradise of Vietnam.

-jcr

Re:no sense of irony

[guet]

People whose rights are violated in the USA, unlike many other countries, have recourse to a free press and the courts; which is more than can be said for the Socialist Worker's Paradise of Vietnam.

Actually I'm sorry to say that people just don't have those rights any more in the US. They can be imprisoned without knowing why, their lawer isn't allowed to talk about the charges, they can be deported to third countries for torture or just thrown out of the country (see recent case of an Iranian teenager) or they can be shipped off to someplace like Guantanamo Bay where you have exactly zero rights and are very deliberately dehumanized. Now you can argue about the justification for this if you like, but the US would rank well below Canada and many European countries (just for example) in a scale of civil rights or freedom right now.

Your point about it being quite possible for US citizens to criticise other nations is spot on though, whatever their govt. is doing.

Re:no sense of irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes indeed, prisoners at Abu Grabe, Bagram Airport and Camp X-Ray have easy access to Fox news reporters, what *was* the OP thinking!

Re:no sense of irony

[rsynnott]

MANY European nations? ;) Are you counting Bellorus as European or something?...

Re:no sense of irony

[marsu_k]

Guantanamo Bay is a POW camp, plain and simple.

Really? How is it then that the detainees haven't been granted POW status?

Re:no sense of irony

[rben]

Actually, it isn't ironic at all. I'm one of those Americans who protests human rights abuses of other countries. I also protest the ones committed by my own government. I didn't vote for this administration and I have done what I could to make my voice heard through letters and email to my legislative representatives.

What is ironic, is when President Bush or Ms. Rice makes accusations about human rights abuses, not when U.S. citizens who honestly deplore what our own government has been doing do so.

Re:no sense of irony

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you know the answer, but i will indulge you anyways. They were not granted POW status becauase they were not uniformed combatants. They are terrorists and saboteurs. Guantanamo Bay is just an example of the new and unique 21st century touchy-feely form of warfare. Rather than summarily executing these individuals,as would likely have been done in any pre-Vietnam conflict, we have chosen to be "humane" and "warehouse" them at Gitmo instead. This compromise exposes the United States to apparently never ending criticism from the U.N. worshiping socialist crowd. The very same crowd who failed, for 50 years, to criticize the Soviets for their gulags, still consider communism a "noble experiment" (although they've relabeled it progressivism and conveniently forgotten the fact that it is the social system that led to the murder of ~100 million human beings last century), scream bloody murder when the Koran is "mishandled", yet -under their breath- suggest that the thousands of businessmen and women killed on 9/11 were complicit in "globalization" and cautiously imply that their deaths might be justifiable "on some level."

Re:no sense of irony

[suitepotato]

Not a flame here. I want to know. Show us solid examples of this happening on an every day basis and not of foreign nationals without clearance to be here, people who violated the terms of their visas, etc. Show where a natural born American citizen who has not been engaged in terrorism or linked to it has been sent to Guantanamo.

Pure FUD. If it weren't, you would not have been allowed to make your post and have been arrested and sent off to some mythical gulag by now.

I suggest calming down and getting a grip. BTW, for those of you who are in tinfoil hat FUD land, Microsoft isn't sending people in black helicopters to install Windows on your Linux boxes either.

The volume of dissent and paranoid fear mongering is inversely proportional to the level of civil rights in any given place. IOW, you don't hear this talk in Vietnam, because they'd shoot you in the head and be done with it before you spat out more than a few sentences.

Re:no sense of irony

[jcr]

You want to say: "Don't worry, in theory you still have you rights."

No, I said what I wanted to say. Rights are rights, and their infringment doesn't negate them. The Japanese Americans who were put in concentration camps by Roosevelt's regime were eventually able to obtain redress in court, because their rights still exist.

The important point here, is that governments do not create rights. People create governments to secure our rights. When governments fail in that duty, then it's time to throw them out, and institute a new government in place of the one that failed. (Ex: the American Revolution, the English Civil War, the Armed Struggle against Apartheid, etc.)

-jcr

Future partnership for MS?

[SysKoll]

I suggest MS should look into a alliance with the somewhat misunderstood government of Zimbabwe, which is currently writing a whole new chapter in the human right violation book.

I mean, if you start buttering up the worst tyrants of the planet, you shouldn't stop at puny Vietnam, right?

And again

[FidelCatsro]

MS forces its way into another market with pay-offs completely ignoring the countries Human Rights abuses . You know they could of leveraged their position a little for some good , since they are going to be giving them a lot of software , they could of asked politely that they try to clean up their human rights record a little. You then get a PR coup for MS and the Vietnamese officials and a victory for people.
That's just dreaming though , Admittedly companies have no need to do anything like this , it would be nice if they did though

Heh

[kahei]

Weird, because previously the Vietnamese were known for their choice of light, modifiable systems that proved very effective against monolithic, bloated American engineering.

Now it'll be the other way around -- take that, Charlie!

Horrific

[Anonymous Coward]

As if the US hadn't already done enough terrible things to this country. ;-D

Joke aside, I don't really see the relevance of the story. MS has relationships with many governments, that the Vietnamese governemnt is now also among them doesn't strike me as exceptional.

Finally, I also don't understand what mentioning the human rights situation in Vietnam has to do with this article. Don't get me wrong, pointing this situation out is important, but why in this context?

MS and other big software houses do frequently deal with nations that have a very bad track record when it comes to human rights. (And in case you didn't notice, free software does too. Just think about China using Linux). So I again have to ask: What's the news?

Why can't teachers at MY KIDS school get training?

[museumpeace]

...as well as provide software training for 50,000 of the country's teachers....
The US has more than 3 times the population of Viet Nam. Do we have 50000 teachers who have some IT training?
Just put this story together with yesterday's story about US students turning away from computer related careers. What does Viet Nam's government do to get something out of Microsoft that our own state and national govt won't do?

I think it

[suezz]

speaks volumes when the first time a head of a country comes to the US in over thrity years goes to Microsoft first and then Washington.

Scarry - very scarry.

Oh, great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another article and thread that gives the oh-so-hip Slashdot lemmings a chance to say wacky things about the USA ("Bush is Pol Pot", "Gitmo is Auschwitz").

I'd give a dollar to see a Slashdot post from some college student in his dorm that actually had some sense of REALITY underpinning his assertions.

Nah, that'll never happen. Carry on.

Re:Oh, great.

[deadweight]

They are too stupid to realize that the very fact they can post like that and stay out of some camp is WAY more freedom than anyone in China or Vietnam currently enjoys.

Not bad at all....

[Rule_Of_The_Bone]

...considering the history. Nice to see the healing process between the USA and Vietnam continue. Gives me hope that ole' Bill will be shaking hands with folks in Iraq and Afghanistan 20 years from now (God...please don't take that long!).

Re:Why can't teachers at MY KIDS school get traini

[suezz]

because Vietnam will become the next outsourcing center - now that India is used up and they are demanding more salaries because they are experienced they have to go somewhere else to pay minimum wage for tech support.

So now America is outsourced to India which will be outsourced to Vietnam.

Re:The US/RVN's human rights record in Vietnam

[PaxTech]

Shall we point out some of the lovely things the Viet gov't did to its *own* people?

No, no, you see, when the US oppresses people (by turning the AC down and playing loud rap music) it's the US government's fault, and when governments opposed to the US oppress people (by killing and maiming them) it's also the US government's fault.

Logically this makes sense, but only if you belong to what is known as the "reality based community". Apparently if there was no United States, the world would be a playground of love and understanding and puppy dogs.

Re:Forget

[br00tus]

Some of the nuclear missiles in Cuba at the time were armed and operational, which was not known in the US at the time. If Kennedy had had the "guts" to invade Cuba, the invading force would have probably been greeted with a few tactical nuclear missiles, which no one doubts would have resulted in a full-scale nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

As far as LBJ's "half-assed effort", LBJ never vetoed a military target, ever. LeMay wanted to bomb dikes so as to starve to death millions of civilians (like he did in Korea) and also carpet bomb Hanoi and kill the civilian population there (like he did to Pyongyang, and ever major city in North Korea, and every major city in Japan in the war before that). So if you mean an intentional massacre of civilians on the scale that the US did in Korea or Japan, yes, LBJ vetoed that because the powers-that-be in the US felt it would be politically harmful to US interests outside of Vietnam.

Re:Protesters

[orzetto]

They failed to build their own economy due to the oppressive nature of Communism.

Aside from the fact that freedom has nothing to do with economic development (Stalin, Hitler and Pinochet had all quite good economic results), you have maybe not noticed that the Vietnamese economy is growing faster than the US economy, and not by a small margin (7.7% against 4.4%).
The fact they are still underdeveloped might have some connection with the fact their country was pretty much razed to the ground some years ago.