Top Vietnam communists visit leading dissident in Hanoi hospital
HANOI - Two retired leaders of Vietnam's ruling communist party have visited ailing internal dissident and democracy
activist Lieutenant General Tran Do in his Hanoi hospital, friends said Saturday.
Celebrated wartime strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap and longtime communist party troubleshooter Pham
The Duyet visited the general on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, a friend of Do's family told AFP,
declining to elaborate on what was said during the visits.
Duyet resigned from the party's elite politburo in April but still holds an official position as president of the
Fatherland Front, the obligatory state-sponsored umbrella organization for all non-governmental organizations
here.
Giap, like all Vietnamese army officers, retains his military rank even though he celebrated his 90th birthday
Saturday with congratulations messages from all of Vietnam's top leadership.
Do, who was expelled from the party in January 1999 for his advocacy of democratic reforms, has been in the
capital's Friendship Hospital for nearly two months, hospital officials confirmed last Sunday.
The 77-year-old general is critically ill with gangrene, friends say.
A former head of the ideology and culture department of the party central committee and deputy speaker of the
National Assembly, Do is by far Vietnam's most senior internal dissident.
He was expelled from the party and placed under tight surveillance after he infuriated hardliners by explicitly
calling on the communist authorities to adopt democratic reforms even if it meant abandoning socialism.
"Vietnam can always get rid of the socialist model if it's not bringing happiness and freedom to the people," he
wote in a June 1998 letter widely circulated in intellectual circles.
Democratic reforms remain a taboo issue for the communist authorities here, who argue that it was precisely
such a policy of "peaceful evolution" which led to the collapse of Vietnam's Eastern Bloc allies in the late 1980s
and early 1990s.
Do's admission to hospital came just weeks after his latest run-in with Vietnam's security police, the outlawed
Paris-based Vietnam Committee for Human Rights said last week.
On June 12, officers detained him during a visit to his son in Ho Chi Minh City and confiscated an 83-page
manuscript containing his diaries for November 2000 to May 2001, the committee said.
Police charged that the diaries, which included Do's analysis of the ruling party's five-yearly congress in April,
constituted "documents with subversive content."
Unbowed by his illness, the general has repeatedly written to top Vietnamese leaders from his hospital bed,
demanding the return of his diaries, the committee said.
Agence France Presse - August 25, 2001.
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