Vietnam am 29.12.2024: Da leben
viele Russen, aber ohne Rente, sondern in Armut -
50% kehren nach Russland zurück: Das Leid der jungen Russen im vietnamesischen
Ferienparadies
(Red.) Der Schweizer Felix Abt – er lebt
zurzeit in Vietnam – staunt immer wieder, wie
westliche Medien in ihren Berichten über Russland
und über die Russen das Bild verzerren. Hier seine
Analyse, wie ein NZZ-Bericht aus Vietnam große
Lücken hat – und wie er so typisch für die
westlichen Mainstreammedien ist. (cm)
So schreibt die NZZ in ihrem jüngsten Bericht
aus Vietnam im Titel: „Der
vietnamesische Ferienort Nha Trang zieht Familien
an, die ihr Leben nicht für Putins Krieg hingeben
wollen“.
Der Artikel über junge russische Dissidenten
schließt mit einem Zitat der russischen Sängerin
Turi, die in dem beliebten vietnamesischen Küstenort
Nha Trag lebt, den die Medien auch schon als
Strandhauptstadt Vietnams bezeichnet haben: „Wir
alle wollen ein normales Leben führen.“ Für
viele Russen, die keine Bar oder Bäckerei betreiben,
die man an einer Hand abzählen kann oder die online
arbeiten, wie z. B. Programmierer, stellt dies
jedoch eine große Herausforderung dar. Ein junger
russischer Anwalt, mit dem ich ab und zu ein Bier
trinke, hat das Glück, von Nha Trang aus für eine
Moskauer Anwaltskanzlei Rechtsfälle zu
bearbeiten.
Viele der jungen Russen haben kein regelmäßiges
Einkommen und leben am Rande der Armut. Darüber
verliert die NZZ kein Wort. Und im Gegensatz zu
meinen Erfahrungen hat die Reporterin keine
russischen Kinder gesehen, die am Strand ihr
selbstgebasteltes Spielzeug an Touristen verkaufen.
Sie zitiert lediglich eine Handvoll Russen, die sie
in einer von einem Russen geführten Bar in Nha Trang
getroffen hat. Von ihnen schreibt sie:
“Sie wissen nicht, ob sie je heimkehren können,
wenn der Krieg enden wird.“ Ausserdem
spekuliert die Journalistin: „Russland verliert
einen Teil seiner talentiertesten Leute –
vielleicht für immer“. Sie zitiert den
ehemaligen Polizisten Anton, der seine Kinder
gefragt haben soll: „Dort (in Russland) droht
Knast und Krieg, hier (in Nha Trang) hat es Strand
und Sonne. Wo wollt Ihr leben?” Sie
schreibt auch über den russischen Weltenbummler
Anton, der „der russischen Mobilmachung
entflieht“.
Der Artikel lässt einen entscheidenden Punkt aus:
Vor nicht allzu langer Zeit lebte in der Stadt eine
wesentlich größere Zahl junger Russen. Ein großer
Teil von ihnen ist nach Russland zurückgekehrt. Als
ich einen russischen Bekannten, der sich auf die
Rückreise nach Russland vorbereitete, fragte, ob er
Repressalien zu befürchten habe, antwortete er ohne
Umschweife: „Warum? Ich habe nie einen
Marschbefehl erhalten, also bin ich kein Deserteur.“
Berichten zufolge
sind etwa 50 % der Russen, die das Land nach dem
Einmarsch in die Ukraine verlassen haben, nach
Russland zurückgekehrt. Das bedeutet, dass von den
schätzungsweise 900.000 Russen, die ausgewandert
sind, rund 450.000 zurückgekommen sind.
Die in Nha Trang lebenden jungen Russen
befürchteten nach der russischen Invasion in der
Ukraine eine allgemeine Mobilmachung, die jedoch
nicht eintrat. Nach Angaben des Institute
for the Study of War in Washington
rekrutieren die russischen Streitkräfte jeden Monat
30.000 Freiwillige. Das war weit mehr als genug, um
den Bedarf an Soldaten für die Streitkräfte zu
decken.
Laut der englischsprachigen Version von Wikipedia
wendet Russland 6,5 % seines BIP für Militärausgaben
auf. Verglichen mit Algerien (8,2 %) und
Saudi-Arabien (7,1 %) ist diese Zahl bemerkenswert
niedrig. Im Jahr 1944 erreichten die Militärausgaben
schwindelerregende 75 % vom deutschen BIP, was den
endgültigen Übergang zu einer Kriegswirtschaft
verdeutlicht. Dies steht in krassem Gegensatz zu den
Verhältnissen in Russland, obwohl in westlichen
Berichten häufig auf die
angebliche russische Kriegswirtschaft verwiesen
wird.
In diesem Sommer hatte ich die Gelegenheit, Russland
zu besuchen, und war überrascht
von der pulsierenden Wirtschaft – die
Geschäfte sind voll mit Waren und die Restaurants
voller Gäste. Vom Krieg und den Sanktionen war
nichts zu spüren.
Die Reporterin ließ bei ihrem Besuch in Nha Trang
die Chance ungenutzt, die vietnamesischen
Perspektiven vor Ort kennenzulernen. Meine
vietnamesischen Bekannten erwähnten, dass Putin bei
einem seiner jüngsten Besuche die beträchtlichen
Schulden Vietnams gestrichen hat. Mit einem Hauch
von Bitterkeit stellen sie fest: „Die Amerikaner
stehen nach wie vor in unserer Schuld, denn jeden
Tag sterben unschuldige Vietnamesen durch die von
den USA freigesetzten Gifte und Bomben. Jeden Tag
sind Bauern mit den tragischen Folgen nicht
explodierter amerikanischer Bomben konfrontiert
und erleiden Verletzungen oder verlieren sogar ihr
Leben. Gleichzeitig werden zahllose Babys leblos
oder mit schweren Missbildungen aufgrund der
Auswirkungen amerikanischer Gifte geboren, während
Washington schweigt und keine Entschädigung für
diese verheerenden Verluste anbietet.“
Diese Berichterstattung zeigt, wie sehr es sich um
schlampige Recherche und realitätsfernen,
parteiischen Meinungsjournalismus handelt, der für
die westlichen Mainstream-Medien sehr
charakteristisch ist. Wer dafür noch Geld bezahlt,
dem ist nicht mehr zu helfen. Der Übergang zu
alternativen Medien ist längst überfällig.
▪ ▪ ▪
Felix Abt ist Unternehmer, Autor und Reiseblogger und
lebt derzeit in Vietnam.
By Nick
Hilden - As part of the
healing process, American veterans work with their
former enemies to locate the burial sites of their
missing comrades, 50 years after the war.
It is August 2022, and four Americans – all men
in their 70s – disembark at a small airport
outside Quy Nhon, a city of about half a million
located on the south-central coast of Vietnam and
the capital of the Binh Dinh province. With its
lush landscapes and stunning tropical beaches, it
is hard to accept that the region was the setting
of fierce fighting during the Vietnam War, which
ended 50 years ago this coming April.
The Americans exit the airport and are met by
Major Dang Ha Thuy – a uniformed Vietnamese man,
also elderly – who greets them warmly. Half a
century ago, they would have exchanged gunfire;
today, they exchange handshakes and smiles.
They have been drawn together by a shared
mission. Thuy has spent 20 years searching for the
missing remains of his North Vietnamese comrades
lost in battle, and the Americans have come to
help. Not only might these veterans know where
some of the bodies can be found, but they are the
ones who buried them.
The five board a shuttle along with a film crew
from VTV4 – a Vietnamese television network
facilitating and documenting the trip – which
carries them all to Xuan Son Hill, a remote point
in the Kim Son Valley. Fifty years ago, it was the
site of a brutal battle at the United States
Army’s Firebase Bird – and until recently, it was
the location of a mass grave containing the
remains of 60 people.
Major Thuy consoles a
tearful Steve Hassett [Screen capture from the
documentary Fragment of Memory]
The battle at
Firebase Bird
By 1966, Vietnam’s civil war had been raging for
more than a decade, and US involvement had grown
from a smattering of military advisers and special
forces to a sprawling army of 400,000. While the
violence would not peak for another two years, the
casualty rate was already rising fast. Hundreds of
US personnel were killed every month, and the
Vietnamese losses were much worse. Before ending
in 1975, about 58,000 Americans, 350,000 Laotians
and Cambodians, and between 1-3 million Vietnamese
were killed in the war.
On Christmas of 1966, a declared truce would
suspend the carnage for 30 hours. For American
soldiers holed up at Firebase Bird – a small
helicopter landing zone and staging base – it was
a much-needed opportunity for rest amid the
“search and destroy” mission that had them
slogging through the jungles of Binh Dinh in
search of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and
guerrilla forces. But when the truce expired in
the early morning hours of December 27, the NVA
attacked.
“We were totally surprised,” reported Spencer
Matteson half a century later in Fragments of Memory,
a 2023 VTV4-produced documentary about the battle
and search for its resulting mass graves. Matteson
only survived the initial onslaught due to a
last-minute bunker switch – the soldier who took his
place was killed instantly by a direct mortar
strike. As the rounds rained down, he said, “It was
the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’ve
never been able to hear right since.”
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It did not take long for the attacking forces to
overwhelm the hill and base, and soon, the American
defenders only had their last remaining heavy gun.
From this, they fired a last-ditch weapon called a
“beehive”, which scattered a barrage of small
projectiles in every direction and finally broke the
attack.
After the firing died down, the smoke cleared and
the sun rose, 27 Americans had been killed and 67
had been wounded. Exact figures for Vietnamese
casualties are less certain, but official records
number the dead at 267.
“The battlefield was covered with dead bodies,”
said a tearful Matteson in the documentary. “It’s
just horrible beyond belief.”
When I later spoke with Matteson, he went into
greater detail about the hours following the battle.
“They dug a big pit with a small bulldozer”, he
explained, “and then we were put on details to drag
the enemy dead over there. I was on one of those
details too. The aftermath of the thing was almost
even worse than the battle itself. When the sun came
up it was like a nightmare. It was like waking up
inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It was really
grim. I remember very clearly. The whole thing was
etched in my mind”.
“Soldiers had dragged a lot of the dead NVA to a
central point in the LZ [landing zone],” recalls
survivor Steve Hassett. “And at that point, I began
taking photographs.” These photos would come into
play some 50 years later.
“It was like your worst nightmare,” said Matteson.
“It didn’t look real, but it was. And for an
18-year-old kid to see stuff like that, it’s not
good psychologically. It’s never left me.”
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Though Matteson and Hassett soon returned home, the
war raged for another six years. After it ended,
life moved on. The jungle reclaimed the site cleared
for Firebase Bird. And the Vietnamese families of
those killed attacking it were left to wonder about
the remains of their lost loved ones.
Decades passed.
Photo taken after the
massacre at US Army Firebase Bird on December 27,
1966. An 18-year-old Steve Hassett shot the scene
with a Kodak Instamatic that he says he barely
knew how to use [Courtesy of Steve Hassett]
A stolen
statue comes full-circle
For Matteson, like so many veterans and civilians
touched by the war, life in its wake was not easy.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) resulted in
alcohol and drug abuse, which in turn ruined his
marriage. Then, in 1991, Matteson got sober and
began attending reunions with other veterans. Around
that time, he found among his things a
long-forgotten memento picked up during the war: a
small Buddhist statue stolen from a pagoda.
“That statue was the start of everything,” Le Hoang
Linh, the filmmaker behind Fragments of Memory, told
Al Jazeera. It set in motion a chain of events that
would eventually reveal a mass grave and bring
together American and Vietnamese collaboration in
the search for more.
According to Matteson, he had pilfered the statue
not long before the battle at Bird.
“We were on what they call a ‘search-and-destroy’
mission in what they called a ‘pacified’ area,'” he
told Al Jazeera, “which meant anything in there was
the enemy, so it was a free-fire zone and you could
shoot at anything that moved.”
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Over the course of the mission, his unit came
across a vacant Buddhist pagoda, which they
proceeded to ransack. Matteson took the statue and
carried it in his backpack through the remainder of
his tour, even though it was made of heavy metal and
only added to his burden. At the time, he thought it
was a little Buddha, but he later learned it was in
fact a Bodhisattva – an enlightened being who
rejects paradise in favour of helping those
suffering here on Earth.
When Matteson rediscovered the statue more than 20
years later, it brought forth contradictory feelings
of guilt and calm. To sit before it gave him a sense
of peace, though he harangued himself for its theft.
“I was always interested in Buddhism, even when I
was young and in the army. It was all kind of
mysterious to me back then,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But then I got back and I got out of the army and I
had a bad case of PTSD, and the longer I kept that
thing, the more I thought what I did was really not
right. I basically stole it, and if I ever got a
chance, I swore that I would go back and try to
return it.”
So in 2014, that is what he did — or at least
tried. When Matteson arrived at the pagoda and
explained his situation to one of its monks, he
received an unexpected response.
“The monk kind of sat there looking at it and
mulling it over in his mind for a minute or two,”
said Matteson. “Then he said that because the pagoda
had been destroyed twice since I was there, he
thought it was my karma to keep the thing, because
if I hadn’t taken it, it would have been destroyed
along with the building when it was bombed out. So I
carried this thing halfway around the world, and I
ended up carrying it all the way back too. I still
have it.”
The statue that Matteson
took from a vacant Buddhist pagoda before the
battle at Bird and tried to return on a trip back
to Vietnam [Courtesy of Spencer Matteson]
Connecting the dots
Matteson had blogged online about his experiences
in Vietnam for several years leading up to the
visit, but what had been an occasional post now grew
to a steady stream. Then, in 2016, he finally opened
up about “the battle that changed me forever” in a
blog post titled “Bad Night at LZ
Bird”, which goes into gory detail.
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“It was kind of part of the healing process,” he
told Al Jazeera.
Unbeknown to Matteson, he was not the only one
preoccupied with the ghosts of Xuan Son Hill. On the
other side of the world, excavation teams in Vietnam
had been searching for the remains of Vietnamese
soldiers for years, to no avail.
“Right now, there are about 200,000 Vietnamese
soldiers missing in action whose remains have not
been found,” Linh explained. “The pain in Vietnamese
families lingers on. Since the war ended less than
50 years ago, the pain is always there.”
In 2018, engineer and excavator Nguyen Xuan Thang
chanced upon Matteson’s post describing the battle,
which contained photos of the massacre taken by
Steve Hassett.
“It was a Kodak Instamatic and I barely knew how to
use it,” Hassett told Al Jazeera. Even so, the
photos he captured with it proved instrumental to
locating long-hidden graves.
Thang forwarded the post to Major Thuy, who had not
participated in the battle but served nearby during
the war and was now looking for the remains of
comrades lost at Xuan Son. Thuy leveraged clues from
the story and photos to narrow the focus of the
search. By comparing the photos against the
now-overgrown landscape of Xuan Son Hill, he was
able to get a more general sense of where to look,
but successive excavations proved fruitless as the
search area was still impossibly vast. Thuy needed
more information.
That is when they connected with Bob March, 77, an
American veteran who produced YouTube videos about
the Vietnam War. While he had not participated in
the battle at Firebase Bird, he agreed to gather
testimonies from soldiers who had.
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“He was the one who weaved everything together,”
said Linh.
Through these combined efforts, it was concluded
that there must have been two mass graves associated
with the battle, and the search was further focused.
Then in March 2022, after three days of digging,
local excavation teams unearthed a rubber sandal of
the type used by NVA troops. The more they dug, the
more they found. A purse. A comb. A belt. A pen. And
bones. Here was the first of the graves.
Some of the items found in
the first mass grave dig, including a rubber
sandal and a purse [Courtesy of Le Hoang Linh]
From the families came a great outpouring of grief
and relief. One man remembered saying goodbye to his
older brother who went off to battle, never to
return. Another’s mother had searched for his
brother until the day she died. There was a daughter
who never met her father, connected only now, after
his death – her mother’s final wish before passing
was that her husband’s remains be found. These
stories, captured by Linh’s film crew, expose the
wounds that have yet to heal, even 50 years on.
All told, the remains of roughly 60 Vietnamese
soldiers and volunteers were uncovered and then
properly laid to rest in April 2022 at the Tang Bạt
Ho Town Martyrs’ Cemetery, where a solemn ceremony
was attended by state leaders and thousands of
veterans, locals and the families of the fallen.
The remains of roughly 60
Vietnamese soldiers and volunteers were laid to
rest in April 2022 at the Tang Bạt Ho Town
Martyrs’ Cemetery in a solemn ceremony [Courtesy
of Le Hoang Linh]
The second dig
In August 2022, when Matteson and Hassett, along
with fellow Firebase Bird survivors Ivory Whitaker
and Kin Lo, returned to Vietnam to help search for
the second grave, the meeting with Major Thuy was a
happy one, with handshakes and smiles all around.
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“I want to help the families bring closure to their
lives,” Whitaker explained in Fragments of Memory.
“And that, in turn, will help me in some way –
knowing that we did something good after all of this
bad.”
Major Thuy brought them directly from the airport
to Xuan Son Hill, which, according to Matteson, was
unrecognisable.
“When I was there during the war, it was just a
denuded hilltop. There were a few bushes and such,
but there were almost no trees at all on the actual
firebase,” Matteson told Al Jazeera. “And then when
I went back, the whole thing was a forest of acacia
trees. They grow them for building materials and
fuel.”
Aerial view of Xuan Son
Hill, a remote point in the Kim Son Valley,
Vietnam [Courtesy of Le Hoang Linh]
Hassett had never considered returning to Vietnam
until the opportunity arose. He had previously been
sceptical of the idea of visiting as some kind of
war tourist, but then the US Institute for Peace
(USIP) offered to cosponsor the mission along with
VTV4, covering the travel costs and facilitating the
trip logistics. The USIP later screened the
documentary that emerged from the effort at its
annual War Legacies and Peace Dialogue.
“The opportunity to actually do something concrete
– that’s what appealed to me,” Hassett explained.
He, too, noticed how 50 years had changed Xuan Son
Hill.
“When we left,” he said, “that battle had been
turned into a free-fire zone. All the people had
been forced out and it was basically depopulated.
Nobody was able to go back in until after 1975. It
had been sprayed with Agent Orange.”
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But the people returned and rebuilt.
“It really struck me how much it had recovered,”
said Hassett, adding that he had expected that the
countryside would be “poisoned” and “permanently
devastated”.
Now it was time to get down to the task of finding
the remaining grave, but here the four veterans ran
into the stumbling block that is the human memory.
Half a century is plenty of time for memories to
fade.
“Some of the details they don’t remember very
well,” said March. “It was pouring down rain, but
most of them don’t even realise that it was raining
at all, because they were much more concerned about
things other than the weather.”
But while “most people involved in a major battle
like LZ Bird have pretty vivid memories”, March
explained the difficulty of piecing together events
from multiple perspectives amidst the chaos of
battle.
“It becomes almost like putting together a complex
puzzle,” he said. In preparation for the search,
March – who was unable to join for health reasons
but helped with coordinating the mission from the US
– spoke with as many as 30 veterans about the
battle, sifting through recollections that were then
applied to maps and satellite imagery on the ground
by excavators at Xuan Son Hill. This proved vital to
locating the first grave.
But now that the Americans were onsite, memories
clashed. Information did not align, and though the
septuagenarian veterans spent day after day scouring
the forest in the tropical heat, the second grave
remained – and still remains – elusive.
Bob March [Screen capture
from the documentary Fragment of Memory]
The search continues
The excavations at Xuan Son Hill were not the first
efforts to locate the country’s long-hidden mass
graves, but they were the first to bring together
Vietnamese and American veterans. Since then, Linh,
March, Thang and a growing number of American,
Vietnamese and even Australian colleagues, have
expanded their search across more old battlefields
throughout Vietnam. So far, they have located the
remains of some 600 people spanning eight mass
graves.
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While these results are to be celebrated, said
Linh, there is still much work to be done.
“Because in Vietnamese belief, one cannot rest in
peace without being properly buried,” he explained.
“Mothers, wives, sisters and relatives are longing
to find their loved ones’ remains until their last
breath,” lest the souls of the dead wander
endlessly. “There are millions of people living in
pain for years to look for 200,000 missing in
action. And we have to do it now before it’s too
late.”
Kin Lo, Ivory Whitaker and
Steve Hassett visit a Vietnamese
family [Screen capture from the documentary
Fragment of Memory]
Why too late? Because finding mass graves depends
largely on the memories of those who dug them. And
not only are memories fading fast after 50 years and
counting, but there are fewer and fewer living
veterans able to provide them.
According to March, who is responsible for
connecting with American veterans and gathering
their testimonies, while their team has identified
the sites of some 100 potential mass graves, the
biggest challenge to pinpointing them involves the
diminishing number of soldiers available to provide
data.
“I hope to see the word get out and more veterans
get involved and come forward to be witnesses,” said
March. “I’m hoping that continues for as long as it
can. There is an upper limit. Ten years from now,
it’s going to be very difficult to find many Vietnam
veterans.”
While the USIP has provided some support for the
search, March said there are a number of ways the US
government could bolster the mission.
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He explained that it is expensive and
time-consuming to visit the National Archives for
the aerial photographs and other material they rely
on, and that some form of research assistance would
help. At the same time, he wondered if a branch
could be created within the USIP or the US Defense
POW/MIA Accounting Agency – which is already
responsible for finding the remains of American
soldiers still missing in Vietnam – that could be
tasked with locating mass graves buried by US
soldiers in Vietnam and other war zones.
Finally, he laments that the government does not
make it easier for veterans to communicate with one
another.
When March does connect with a veteran for
information, he said, while some are neutral or
reluctant to dredge up old memories, “They’re almost
universally positive. They all understand that the
war is over and it’s been over for nearly 50 years.
They’re of the mind that if they can do any good to
help out the existing civilians that are over there
now, that’s what they are perfectly willing to do.”
While it can be difficult to draw forth such
distant, painful memories, March has found that most
veterans are willing to speak with him frankly –
because he understands what they went through.
“I was an infantry guy on the ground, a grunt as
they say,” March explained. “And they knew that I
had shared experiences – bad ones, too.”
Matteson said: “I understand the ones that don’t
want to get involved, and I would never try to push
them into something they don’t want to do. But for
the ones that are still suffering from PTSD, I would
definitely recommend it as a way to cope.”
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For the Vietnamese, reminders of the war remain an
everyday part of life, even half a century on.
“This deep pain has passed down through
generations. Almost everyone around me carries it,”
explained Linh. “I have seen people digging through
layers of earth in tears, searching for remains, and
it pains me deeply.”
He hopes to establish an information hub for mass
graves where American veterans can document their
memories before it is too late. While he and his
colleagues are aided in the search by a growing
number of technological tools, firsthand soldier
accounts are still essential to their success.
“I wish people were more aware of it,” Hassett
said. “Just the chance to go back and do something.
I wouldn’t call it closure … my daughter called it
‘closing the circle’. That’s a good description.”
