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Flag Called a “Disgrace”

Postal service
to pull Vietnamese communist symbol from pamphlet

By Associated Press

The U.S. Postal Service says it will pull brochures displaying the Vietnamese flag from thousands of post offices nationwide after a San Jose group called the use of the communist symbol “a disgrace.”

Post office officials in Washington D.C. said last Friday the multilingual pamphlets used a variety of national flags to denote text in English, Italian, Tagalog, Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese and Korean. The brochures will be removed from 11,900 post offices and new ones will be issued without flags.

The pamphlets, “A World of Services to Meet Your Needs,” were distributed to promote services offered by the postal service.

In a July 23 letter to the postmaster general, Hung Quoc Pham, president of the Vietnamese American Community of Northern California, called the flag “a disgrace” and wrote “by doing this, it is similar to raising a Nazi flag to the Jews.”

After meeting with members of the San Jose organization last week, postal officials agreed to pull the graphic and ”acknowledged their concerns, apologized to them and let them know we were in complete understanding of the issue,” said Augustine Ruiz, spokesman for the postal service in San Jose.

The issue was raised by Thiem Chanh Le, who came to San Jose following 11 years in a communist re-education camp in Vietnam. He said he got a copy of the brochure at the Alum Rock post office several weeks ago while mailing a letter to Congress about human rights violations in Vietnam.

“I was very angry to see this brochure,” said Le, 56. He served in the South Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War before the North Vietnamese took over the country in 1975. Many refugees eventually fled to San Jose, which has a Vietnamese population of nearly 79,000.

Le took the pamphlet to the cultural organization which then enlisted support from other groups and politicians.

“I thought it was the biggest marketing blunder ever,” said San Jose Councilman Chuck Reed. “If you’re trying to get Vietnamese American customers to use your service, you don’t use a communist flag.”

Members of the organization said they pointed out that the postal service’s competition, United Parcel Service, uses the South Vietnamese flag on its calendar.

“The Vietnamese refugees living in the United States came here seeking freedom from the communists. They violated our human rights, they oppressed us. So when we see the communist flag, we naturally get upset,” said Ky Ngo, spokesman for San Jose organization.