Thursday August 16 11:09 AM ET
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - A plan by the U.S. Postal Service to remove the Vietnamese flag from a pamphlet distributed to thousands of American post offices is an insult, Vietnam said Thursday.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said the postal service, as a U.S. government agency, should have resisted pressure from a group of Vietnamese emigres who called the use of the communist symbol ``a disgrace.'' She said that since Vietnam and the United States have diplomatic relations, any attempt to remove the Vietnamese flag from the U.S. postal service's pamphlets would be an insult to the Vietnamese people and violate the growing spirit of friendship and trust between the two countries.
The multilingual pamphlets used a variety of national flags to denote text in English, Italian, Tagalog, Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese and Korean. The brochures, titled ``A World of Services to Meet Your Needs,'' will be removed from 11,900 post offices and new ones will be printed without flags, post office officials said.
The decision to pull the brochures was made after the president of the Vietnamese American Community of Northern California protested to the postmaster general. Postal officials agreed to pull the graphic after meeting with members of the San Jose organization last week.
Many anti-communist Vietnamese refugees fled to California after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, when the communist government in Hanoi defeated the U.S.-backed government in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City. Many refuse to accept the legitimacy of Vietnam's current government.