Controversial border agreement at heart of cyber dissident trial
HANOI - A controversial and longtime secret border agreement between Vietnam and China which led to criticism that Hanoi was ceding territory to its neighbour lies behind the trial of a prominent dissident due to start Wednesday.
Journalist and cyber-dissident Nguyen Vu Binh was arrested in September 2002 after posting an article on the Internet entitled: "A reflection on Sino-Vietnamese border agreements".
The agreements, signed in 1999 after six years of negotiations, triggered intense debate among critics of Hanoi's communist regime who accused the government of handing over territory to China.
Bilateral negotiations were complicated by Hanoi's claim that Chinese soldiers had moved a hundred border markers during their brief invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
Published without fanfare on the official website of the party's mouthpiece, the Nhan Dan (The People) in September 2002, the accords are still particularly controversial.
After publicly denouncing the accords, Binh is being tried for "espionage" and faces a minimum sentence of 12 years in prison and a maximum of the death penalty.
Hanoi has always denied making any territorial concessions to China and has attributed criticism to "reactionary forces and political opportunists," but the subject has remained taboo in public discourse.
"No one has actually compared the border before and after the treaty. There is a widespread presumption that Vietnam conceded some amount of land to China. But no one has demonstrated this empirically," said Carl Thayer, an expert on Vietnam at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
The task is made all the more difficult as it is difficult to know on which basis the two countries drew their borders and whether they had to rely on old colonial maps, as it is often the case for such disputes.
Politicians are more worried about the matter than the general population. The treaty stabilised bilateral ties, cross-border trade is now flourishing and the smugglers are getting rich.
But the mere suggestion Vietnam has renounced territory to China is enough to send tremors through the regime in Hanoi. China is Vietnam's major communist ally, but it is also too powerful a neighbour not to be feared after thousands of years of common history marked by wars and invasions.
And land is a sensitive topic in Vietnam. "If Vietnamese communists can be shown to have conceded land to China, their legitimacy would be undercut," said Thayer.
"The issue is doubly sensitive because overseas anti-Communists use the border treaty to demonstrate that the communist regime is illegitimate - it borrowed foreign ideology and it has sold out Vietnam's patrimony to an historical enemy."
Binh is a former journalist who worked for almost 10 years at the state-run Tap Chi Cong San (Journal of Communism) before resigning in January 2001 after applying to form an independent opposition organization called the Liberal Democratic Party.
Subsequently, he wrote articles calling for political reforms and criticising government policy. He was also behind the proposed launch of an independent anti-corruption organization in 2001, which was rejected by the government.
He was questioned several times before his arrest. With his comments on the border agreements, he went too far for the authorities.
Last September, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres, RSF) demanded Vietnam release details of charges against him.
"It is inhuman to keep him in jail without trial," said RSF secretary general, Robert Menard. "It shows the scant respect the Vietnamese authorities have for human rights."
Several other Vietnamese dissidents have been imprisoned for discussing the Sino-Vietnamese border agreement.
On November 8, 2002, Le Chi Quang, a 34-year-old professor was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of house arrest.
He had published an open letter to Jiang Zemin on the Internet, raising concerns about the bilateral border treaty, just before the former Chinese president's last visit to Vietnam.
Agence France Presse - December 30, 2003.
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