Free rein for Vietnam's smugglers

MOC BAI - It is no-man's land, but everyone is looking for a slice of the action.
Piles of goods are covered in plastic sheets, people play bingo under tarpaulins, porters with their motorcycles and bicycles come and go, and customs officers stand idle.
This is Moc Bai, a bustling smugglers market between border posts dividing Vietnam and Cambodia in Tay Ninh province on the main route from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh.

Each morning goods, mainly clothing and counterfeit brands such as Fila, Nike and Adidas, leave Vietnam legally to enter Cambodia illegally, while in the afternoon the flow is reversed and cigarettes and alcohol flood into Vietnam.

RAMPANT SMUGGLING, BUT NO ARRESTS

Captain Dang Van Ngot, head of the anti-smuggling customs unit at the Moc Bai border post, said big smugglers remained underground while porters were poor farmers earning a pittance.
He has 29 customs officers to cover 32 km (20 miles) of national boundary, but can also count on assistance from border guards and other units.

``The situation is rather complicated in this area. The size and scope of smuggling is not big but there are many small cases,'' Ngot told Reuters.
``The people involved in smuggling are mainly farmers living in the area and in between crops they come to make money as porters for the big smuggling gangs,'' he added.

He said small scale smugglers were not ignored and that attempts were made to control the problem.
Yet he admitted that over the past year there had been no arrests for smuggling-related crimes at Moc Bai.
Back at the smugglers market a new load of fake sports goods has arrived. A group of Khmer and Vietnamese roll over the huge bales of clothing and footwear, split them open and pile packages onto low-powered Honda motorbikes.
Fully laden, the porters splutter off across fields, skirting the grandiose Cambodian border post.
On either side of no-man's land, a steady stream of bicycles moves in each direction as people ferry goods back and forth away from, but not out of sight of, customs and border guards from the two countries.

TIP OF THE ICEBERG

At Ho Chi Minh City People's Court, 80 km (50 miles) to the southeast, 74 people dressed in black-and-white striped prison garb appear in the country's biggest smuggling trial.
Some defendants face execution by firing squad in the Tan Truong Sanh case, which has captured national attention in a country where annual per capita income is just $300.
In 18 months, investigators tracked down the illegal import between 1994 and August 1997 of at least 903 containers stuffed with electronic consumer goods, cars and other luxury items worth more than $71.3 million.
The trial began on March 25 and is expected to last five weeks.

Prosecutors allege the scale of the smuggling operation was such as to undermine the entire economy of southern Vietnam. More worryingly, over half those accused of involvement were customs officers, police or other state officials.
Sources close to the smuggling ring say investigators failed to uncover the full story, and that many others remained free to ply their business hand-in-hand with corrupt officials.

BLAME THE MARKET ECONOMY

Nguyen Minh Lap, deputy chief of the Tay Ninh province anti-smuggling steering committee, said the situation on the border was unstable and that controls and cooperation between Cambodian and Vietnamese authorities were lacking.

``Smugglers use motorbikes and high speed boats, so therefore it is difficult for Vietnamese anti-smuggling forces to control the situation,'' he said.
Lap said that during the past year 10,000 smuggling cases had been uncovered in Tay Ninh. Sales of confiscated goods had contributed 16 billion dong ($1.15 million) to the state budget.
Nationwide, 1,100 billion dong has been recovered in the past year from smuggling and trade fraud, he added.
``But the results show we can control just 30 percent of total smuggling activities throughout the country,'' Lap said.
Smuggling rings are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but the authorities are determined to defeat them, he said.

``The multi-sector market economy gave birth to smuggling and smuggling became a companion for the market economy so...we have to use many economic and long-term measures to succeed,'' he said, citing a plan to develop an open economic zone at Moc Bai.
But with state officials earning low salaries, quick money will always be attractive, Lap added.
``Wherever smuggling exists there will be corruption. If we can get good results in anti-smuggling it will lead to a reduction in corruption, and vice versa,'' he said.

``If we can significantly improve the province's economy then we can significantly reduce smuggling, but I don't say we can stop it.''

Reuters - April 16, 1999.