Vietnam dissidents report crackdown during APEC summit
HANOI - As Vietnam hosted its largest ever diplomatic gathering, dissidents said security forces had locked down the communist nation's pro-democracy movement with intimidation and violence.
The one-party regime running what is being hailed as Asia's next tiger economy has welcomed US
President George W. Bush and leaders from China, Russia, Japan and across the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (
APEC) group.
But while the world has praised Vietnam's recent economic progress, human rights advocates and Vietnamese exile groups have condemned the Hanoi leadership for being stuck in the Dark Ages when it comes to civil liberties.
"I was beaten several times by the police on Friday," said prominent dissident Pham Hong Son, a medical doctor freed in August after more than four years in jail on espionage charges for his pro-democracy Internet writings.
He told AFP that security forces, who had stepped up surveillance around his Hanoi home in the lead-up to the summit, bundled him into a police van, took him to a station and assaulted him, before releasing him late in the evening.
"Mentally I am fine but physically I am not. My arms, my neck and my shoulders are very sore," he said, speaking by telephone.
"I will continue to do what I want to do and what I have done so far," he vowed. "I am ready to keep fighting for democracy in Vietnam."
Son is one of several dissidents who have been harassed by a regime eager to keep them silent while some 10,000 APEC delegates and journalists are in town, say Vietnamese exile groups in the United States, France and Australia.
Vietnam's security forces, both uniformed and in plain clothes, have surrounded dissidents' homes and put up signs that say "No Foreigners" and "No Pictures," said Paris-based Action for Democracy in Vietnam.
"We are living in an unbearable atmosphere," Son's wife, Vu Thuy Ha, said Friday. "I am being followed. People are being stopped from visiting, including family members."
Activists have also reported arrests this month in Ho Chi Minh City of members of the banned United Workers-Farmers Organization, and the committal of farmers' rights activist and lawyer Bui Thi Kim Thanh to a mental asylum.
Ahead of the Bush visit, the regime has moved to ease international concerns about human rights at a time when Washington is moving to fully normalise trade ties with Vietnam, which joins the World Trade Organisation this year.
Vietnam last week freed Vietnamese-American dissident Thuong Nguyen "Cuc" Foshee who had been held with six other activists for more than a year, accused of terrorism for trying to broadcast anti-regime radio messages in the country.
Washington announced Monday it had taken Vietnam off its blacklist of the world's worst offenders in repressing religious freedom.
But rights groups such as London-based Amnesty International say hundreds more prisoners of conscience remain in Vietnam's jails -- a charge the regime denies, saying all the inmates are criminals.
The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Friday said many of Vietnam's dissidents had been harassed for expressing their political views online or in underground newspapers.
"If the leaders attending the APEC summit, particularly
George Bush, do not express themselves clearly on the serious failings in Vietnam in respecting freedom of expression, it would be an historic error," said RSF.
"The economic development of Vietnam cannot be at the price of forgetting the still precarious state of press freedom."
Human Rights Watch also urged APEC leaders to pressure Vietnam to liberalise political and social life, not just its economy.
"Vietnam's economic progress has rightfully earned the praise of donors," the New York-based group said in a statement this week.
"But APEC delegates shouldn't assume that those gains have translated into greater respect for human rights... Vietnams track record on basic human rights remains abysmal."
By Frank Zeller - Agence France Presse - November 18, 2006.
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