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

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Hanoi's double-cross on democracy

It is being characterized by international rights groups as Vietnam's biggest crackdown on political dissent in more than 20 years. And the intensifying harassment and growing number of detentions are fast sapping the life out of the country's nascent but bold democratic-reform movement that the US tacitly supports.

Last month, Vietnamese police arrested Catholic priest and democracy activist Nguyen Van Ly on charges that he attempted to undermine the government through the establishment of an independent political organization. Ly is a founding member of Bloc 8406, a budding pro-democracy movement launched publicly last April that has called for more democracy and rights. He and two other Bloc 8406 members have been permitted only state-appointed legal counsel and face trial on Friday.

On March 6, police arrested and jailed human-rights lawyers Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Cong Nhan on criminal charges that they had propagandized against the state. The authorities early last month detained Dang Thang Tien, spokesman for the Vietnam Progression Party, one of a handful of small opposition parties that have been established over the past year. On February 3, engineer and democracy activist Bach Ngoc Duong was arrested, beaten and even strangled during interrogations, according to dissident groups. They all face jail sentences of up to 20 years if convicted on anti-state charges.

The hard-knuckled crackdown coincides with Vietnam's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), of which it became an official member on January 11. It's now brutally apparent that the new, younger generation of communist leaders who took power last year from their war-hardened revolutionary predecessors have no intention of coupling their impressive economic-reform drive with complementing political reforms.

Moreover, the mounting crackdown represents a deliberate diplomatic slight to the United States, which was instrumental in brokering Hanoi's highly coveted WTO membership. Washington's support for Hanoi's WTO bid was predicated on the Communist Party substantially improving its human-rights record, which includes the detention in abysmal prison conditions of hundreds of political and religious activists.

During last year's negotiations, the Vietnamese government agreed to release a handful of high-profile political prisoners identified by Washington, but simultaneously detained dozens of other democracy activists, journalists, cyber-dissidents and Christian activists. Nonetheless, US President George W Bush's commercially oriented administration agreed to remove Vietnam from its watch list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC), above the protests of religious-freedom organizations and exiled Vietnamese democracy groups, and successfully lobbied Congress to grant Vietnam Permanent Normal Trade Relations status last December. [1]

With WTO membership and privileged US market access in hand, Vietnam is now openly breaking its end of the diplomatic bargain. Vietnam's pro-democracy organizations represent the most potent threat to the Communist Party's monolithic grip on political power since it unified the country in 1975 after defeating the US-backed government of South Vietnam.

Deputy Public Security Minister Lieutenant-General Nguyen Van Huong this month told a US diplomat in Hanoi that it was "illegal" for Vietnamese people to establish political parties and that certain newly formed political organizations aimed to "overthrow" the government. In justifying the crackdown, he made the legal argument that under the current constitution, Vietnam is a one-party political system.

The Communist Party is clearly concerned that an emerging political consciousness is starting to complicate its foreign-investment-led economic-reform program. A series of strikes where workers demanded better working conditions and higher wages rocked foreign-invested factories across the country early this year. To quell the unrest, the government acquiesced to worker demands to raise the legal minimum wage by 40%, representing the first such rise since 1999.

Threat from afar

Although highly reliant on US private capital and markets for its export-driven economic growth, Hanoi at the same time resents Washington's tacit and selective financial support for the various exiled Vietnamese organizations that operate from the US, including underground groups that are known to provide organizational support to Bloc 8406 and the other in-country democracy groups that Hanoi contends are bent on toppling the state. These groups are often well funded and led by the well-educated offspring of Vietnamese families that were forced to flee the country after the communists took power in 1975.

That bilateral resentment apparently came to the fore on March 8, when more than 20 Vietnamese security police arrested human-rights lawyer Le Quoc Quan, 25, upon his arrival in his home town in Nghe An province after spending a year in Washington in residence at the National Endowment for Democracy on a US Congress-funded fellowship. According to his arrest warrant, he was charged with "participation in activities to overthrow the People's Government" and is being held at Detention Camp B14 in Hanoi.

The intensifying crackdown puts the US in a particularly tricky diplomatic spot. While Bush has pushed for stronger commercial and strategic ties with the communist leadership, prominent US Congress members have simultaneously lent their moral support to democracy organizations active both inside and outside the country. According to dissidents who communicated with Asia Times Online, in-country groups took that US encouragement to heart when they decided last year to take their underground movement public and up the ante on their recruitment activities.

That included Bloc 8406's daring decision last April publicly to promulgate its "Manifesto on Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam", which both called for a political transition to multi-party democracy and cribbed the section from the US 1776 Declaration of Independence that says: "All men are created equal ... with certain inalienable rights, among them the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The document was made public last year simultaneous to the Communist Party's 10th National Congress and has since garnered thousands of Vietnamese signatures across the country - names and addresses that exile-based dissidents fear now feature on government black lists.

The exile-run Vietnam Reform Party, or Viet Dan, has launched a global campaign against the Communist Party's crackdown, entailing an English-language media blitz, high-profile hunger strikes, and peaceful protest rallies organized in a handful of Western cities. Still, only a small number of US politicians and officials have yet to speak out publicly against the crackdown.

Republican Congressman Chris Smith, who in the past has met with Ly, Dai and scores of other Vietnamese dissidents, recently introduced a resolution in Congress that condemns the attacks and calls for the unconditional release of jailed dissidents and warns that ongoing harassment, detentions and arrests will harm the broadening ties with the US. The resolution also aims to put Vietnam back on the US State Department's rights-related CPC list.

In a press conference, Smith referred to the jailed dissidents as the future "Vaclav Havels of Vietnam", a reference to the Czech dissident playwright who became a democratic symbol across former communist-controlled Eastern Europe. Yet so far Smith's remains a lonely voice in the diplomatic wilderness. President Bush has remained conspicuously mum on the crackdown, presumably because it represents such a clear-cut failure of his administration's engagement policy toward Vietnam, which from the start prioritized commercial and security [2] concerns over democracy promotion.

It's not too late for the Bush administration to roll back the various economic incentives it last year extended to Hanoi on the grounds that the communist leadership failed to uphold its end of the bargain. And the imposition of trade and investment sanctions against Vietnam's regime, similar to those the US now maintains against military-run Myanmar, would meaningfully put Washington on the right side of Vietnam's democratic ambitions. Instead, the silence from Washington is as deafening as the solitary-confinement conditions so many of Vietnam's daring democrats now face.

Notes

1. In comparison, the European Union, Vietnam's largest foreign donor, maintained Vietnam on its list of countries of concern in its 2006 human-rights report. The United Kingdom said last September that it would continue to link its aid disbursements to progress on human rights and other democratic measures.
2. The US is currently aiming to forge a new strategic partnership with Vietnam, aimed at counterbalancing China's growing influence in Southeast Asia. If consummated, any strategic pact would likely include the US regaining access to the air and naval facilities at Cam Ranh Bay. It's unclear whether the current harassment of democracy activists constitutes gross human-rights abuses, which under the so-called Leahy Amendment would bar the US from providing financial support to Vietnam's military.

By Shawn W Crispin - Asia Times - March 30, 2007.