~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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Vietnam reported to have detained dissident journalist

PARIS - Authorities in Vietnam have placed a dissident journalist under house arrest in the Central Highlands region, a Paris-based media freedom group said on Wednesday. Reporters Sans Frontiers said Bui Minh Quoc was confined to his home in the southern hill town of Dalat on January 12 after being detained at a train station in a Hanoi suburb on January 8. It said his phone line had been cut off, his house was guarded by police and his family placed under surveillance.

RSF said Quoc had been questioned for three days by police, who had seized from him more than 300 documents regarded as "reactionary" as well as notebooks and film. It said he had met dissidents in Hanoi before his detention. Government officials in Vietnam could not be reached for comment. RSF quoted a Vietnamese journalist taking refuge in France as saying that Quoc's detention was connected to an investigation he had conducted in the Chinese border region. Territorial concessions by Vietnam's communist leaders to giant neighbour China have been criticised in some dissident circles.

Quoc, a member of a group of dissidents in Dalat, is a poet as well as a journalist and was a correspondent for North Vietnamese radio during the Vietnam War. He was put under house arrest from April 1997 until the end of 1999 for his calls for press freedom. The state holds a monopoly of the media in Vietnam and tightly controls reporting on issues such as politics, human rights and religion. RSF said it had protested against Quoc's detention in a letter to Vietnam's Public Security Minister Le Minh Huong.

"RSF considers this measure as equivalent to an imprisonment, since it deprives the dissident of his freedom and right to express himself," RSF said. "Once again, the Vietnamese government is violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights it ratified in September 1982, and whose article 19 guarantees freedom of expression," RSF general secretary Robert Menard said in the statement. RSF called for Quoc's release and of two of his colleagues -- Ha Sy Phu, who was placed under house arrest in March last year, and Nguyen Dinh Huy, who was jailed for 15 years in 1995 for trying to set up an opposition party.

New York-based Human Rights Watch, in an annual report released this month, said Vietnam took "major steps backwards" on rights in 2001, particularly on religious rights.

Reuters - January 24, 2002.


Veteran buddhist dissident dies in Vietnam

PARIS - A veteran Buddist dissident who had been placed under restrictions after a crackdown on his outlawed church died this week in hospital aged 79, a Paris-based support group said. The International Buddhist Information Bureau (IBIB) said Thich Duc Nhuan of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) died on Monday in a Ho Chi Minh City hospital of coronary thrombosis.

The group said Nhuan had been under administrative detention at his pagoda in the city since a government crackdown on his church last June. It said police sealed off his room at the pagoda after his death. The IBIB described Nhuan as an "active proponent of democracy and human rights" who served nine years in jail until 1993 for anti-government activity. Since 1999 he had been a member of the Council of Sages of the UBCV's Institute for the Propagation of the Dharma. The IBIB said Nhuan wrote to the Communist Party leadership in September last year after a Buddhist activist burned himself to death in a protest, warning of serious consequences if the ruling party did not relax repressive policies. The government insists it respects religious rights, but permits activity only by authorised churches.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said in an annual report this month that Vietnam took "major steps backwards" in 2001, particularly on religious rights. Last June, the government reactivated a restriction order against Thich Quang Do, the deputy head of the UBCV, after he vowed to lead a mission to take the church's elderly patriarch Thich Huyen Quang from detention in central Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City for medical treatment.

Reuters - January 23, 2002.