~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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A scandal in Vietnam as party meets

HANOI - The ruling Vietnamese Communist Party is preparing for its crucial five-yearly party congress starting Tuesday amid a corruption scandal that has already claimed several government officials. Fighting corruption is critical to defending the party's legitimacy, top party officials have conceded, as public anger has grown over revelations that Vietnamese Transport Ministry cadres embezzled millions of dollars.

"The congress is going to be overshadowed by the issue of corruption," said Martin Gainsborough, a Vietnam specialist at Bristol University in Britain. "We have a situation that demands a clear and convincing response from the top." The weeklong Soviet-style congress will follow long-established rules that stress stability and continuity in one of the five remaining Communist countries in the world. Red banners over the streets of Hanoi welcome nearly 1,200 party delegates to the event that will set the political and economic course of the nation of 83 million people until 2010.

Delegates representing 3.1 million party members will recommit to Marxism-Leninism, Ho Chi Minh Thought and the 20-year-old Doi Moi, or renewal, program toward a "market economy with socialist orientation." "There will be no major change in policy," said Phan Dien, permanent secretary of the party's central committee. He said, however, that "the upcoming central committee and politburo will be subject to a lot of changes" when party members choose the new 160-member committee and the elite politburo with at least 15 members.

The Vietnamese prime minister, Phan Van Khai, and president, Tran Duc Luong, may leave the politburo, meaning they would retire from their government posts in 2007, analysts say, and there is speculation on whether General Secretary Nong Duc Manh will stay in the most powerful post in Vietnam. The Transport Ministry scandal has complicated any predictions for the outcome of the congress. Transport Minister Dao Dinh Binh resigned early this month and his deputy was jailed over revelations that officials in the ministry's Project Management Unit 18 had taken funds earmarked for highways and other infrastructure. The scandal emerged in January with the arrest of the unit's chief, Bui Tien Dung, for betting $7 million, much of it from Japan and the World Bank, on European soccer matches. The state- controlled press has been allowed to report aggressively that officials took kickbacks, bought luxury homes and sought to pay off the police and officials for protection.

"There is now a serious crisis of trust among our people and in our party," a former interior minister, General Mai Chi Tho, was quoted as telling the Tien Phong newspaper. General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led Vietnamese forces to victory against French and U.S. troops, said in the Tuoi Tre daily that "the party has become a shield for corrupt officials."

Agence France Presse - April 16, 2006.