By DPA,
Hanoi : Vietnamese Monday welcomed last week’s apology by the US officer convicted of leading the notorious My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, but said more senior officers should be held responsible as well.
“Lieutenant William Calley’s apology for his massacre comes too late, but I think it is better late than never,” said Pham Thanh Cong, 52, director of a museum at the site where the massacres took place in 1968.
Cong, who survived the massacre while his parents and three sisters were killed, said he would “welcome (Calley) to visit My Lai”, and that the officer would be received “kindly and decently”.
But Cong said apologies for the massacre should also come from senior officers, including Calley’s direct superior Captain Ernest Medina, who was acquitted in a controversial 1971 court martial.
Calley was the only man convicted for the March 1968 massacre in which US troops killed some 300 to 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly elderly, women and children. Sentenced to life in prison in 1971, his sentence was commuted by then president Richard Nixon, and he was released after four and a half months.
Dung Trung Quoc, head of Vietnam’s national historical association and a member of the National Assembly, said he “truly respect(s)” Calley’s apology, but that Calley’s senior officers and the US government as a whole should take responsibility for the massacre.
In recent years Vietnam has sharply reduced the amount of time in its history curriculum devoted to teaching about the war, and students no longer learn about the My Lai massacre.
Several history teachers contacted by telephone either knew nothing about the massacre, or were vaguely familiar with it.
“I have never read about the My Lai massacre, I’ve only heard of it,” said Dao Thi Hanh, a high school history teacher in Hanoi.
The de-emphasis on the war has coincided with Vietnam’s greatly improved relations with the US, which is now its top export market.
Quoc said he was “very sad” about the failure to teach about the massacre, and that he had objected to the shift in the history curriculum. He said high schools also did not teach students about the occupying Japanese Army’s rice requisitions in 1945, which caused a famine in which millions of Vietnamese died.
“People are becoming very pragmatic now,” Quoc said. “They don’t want to mention these kinds of events for fear it will hinder relations with those countries.”