Hanoi orders expat haunt closed in vice crackdown
HANOI - Hanoi city authorities have ordered the
temporary
closure of one of the capital's
best known expat haunts following a month-long crackdown on drugs
and
prostitution, officials said
Tuesday.
The city's culture and information department ordered the
Apocalypse Now
bar closed at the end of June
as part of its efforts to "clean up cultural and social activities
in
the city," its chief inspector Tran Tung told
AFP.
Two other nightclubs more popular with Vietnamese -- the Fashion
Cafe
and the Magnetic - were also
ordered to shut their doors, Tung said without specifying for how
long.
Inspections carried out by his staff and police had uncovered
violations
of the government's regulations for
bars and nightclubs, he said without elaborating on why the three
had
been singled out.
The government ordered the crackdown early last month amid an
outcry in
the official media about the
scale of prostitution and drug-dealing in the nightspots of
Vietnam's
big cities.
Tung vowed that his department would carry out further inspections
to
enforce the closure orders, although
they appeared to be having little impact Tuesday.
Staff at Apocalypse Now insisted they expected to open their doors
as
usual on Tuesday evening,
although they acknowledged they would be closing at midnight,
rather
than dawn as usual, in deference to
the government clampdown.
The communist authorities announced last month that a long flouted
midnight curfew on nightspots would
now be rigorously enforced.
In Ho Chi Minh City, officials said they had yet to order any
nightclubs
closed following a similar crackdown
there, although several of the worst-offenders had chosen to close
"for
refurbishment" rather than risk
action by the authorities.
Dubbed "legendary" by the backpacker's bible, the Lonely Planet,
the
Apocalypse Now and its sister-bar
in Ho Chi Minh City are the best known of the nighclubs and girlie
bars
which sprung up in Vietnam's big
cities following the relaxation of the late 1980s and 1990s.
But as the rival Rough Guide warns its readers, in common with many
Vietnamese nightspots, both bars
shelter "up-front prostitution" which a string of much-publicised
crackdowns by the communist authorities
have so far done little to eradicate.
Vietnam acknowledges that the country's sex industry employs more
than
56,000 people, but independent
estimates put the real number at 10 times that figure, more than
during
the maximum deployment of
foreign troops at the height of the Vietnam War.
Agence France Presse - July 10, 2001.
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