Những Tin Tức Không Vừa Lòng Đảng và Nhà Nước (CT30)

Activists reportedly hushed for APEC

Human rights advocates say police have monitored and attacked dissidents who might try to contact any of the 10,000 delegates and journalists visiting the country

AFP, HANOI - Sunday, Nov 19, 2006, Page 5

As Vietnam hosted its largest ever diplomatic gathering yesterday, 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 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 said 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 with reporters 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,” he added.

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 US, 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 the Paris-based Action for Democracy in Vietnam.

“We are living in an unbearable atmosphere,” Son's wife, Vu Thuy Ha, said on 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 for treatment.

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 normalize trade ties with Vietnam, which is joining the WTO this year.

Vietnam last week freed Thuong Nguyen Foshee, a dissident with US citizenship who had been held along with six other activists for more than a year, charged with terrorist activities for attempting to broadcast anti-governmental radio messages in the country.

Washington announced on Monday it had taken Vietnam off its blacklist of the world's worst offenders in repressing religious freedom.

But rights groups such as Amnesty International say hundreds of prisoners of conscience remain in Vietnam's jails -- a charge the regime denies, saying all the inmates are criminals.

The media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Friday 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.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) also urged the leaders attending the APEC summit to pressure Vietnam to liberalize limitations on political and social life, and not just to focus on its economic growth.

“Vietnam's economic progress has rightfully earned the praise of donors,” HRW said in a statement this week.

“But APEC delegates shouldn't assume that those gains have translated into greater respect for human rights ... Vietnam's track record on basic human rights remains abysmal,” it added.

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What the Scribes Didn't Write about VN

World News * Hanoi, Nov 20:

Most of the 2,000-plus international journalists who were here to cover the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit probably missed the real story of Vietnam: a nation going through an internal crisis.

While Vietnam is being lauded as an emerging economic tiger of Asia, behind that image is an array of chronic social and environmental problems seemingly impossible to resolve, according to New America Media.

Since the war ended in 1975, the country's population has more than doubled from 35 million to 84 million. Nearly two out of three Vietnamese are too young to have any direct memory of the Vietnam War. What they do have is a new longing for the west and its stuff.

Materialism is the new ideology. These days everyone needs a cell phone, a motorcycle, and if they can afford it, a flat screen TV and a laptop. Many would do anything to own new toys.

When Vietnam emerged from the Cold War, the forces of globalisation quickly swept through. The result is a country whose Confucian practices - modesty, frugality, respect - have been thrown out of the window, especially in urban areas.

Part of the cultural revolution taking place is a sexual one. Once known for its modesty and traditional practices, the abortion rate is around 1.5 million a year with many unwanted teenage pregnancies.

Statistics estimate that in only four years, a million people will be infected with HIV. Prostitution is rampant, with some NGOs estimating that there are more than 300,000 sex workers in the country. Many women are being trafficked overseas.

Vietnam accounts for 10 percent of women and children trafficking worldwide. According to UNICEF and Vietnam's Ministry of Justice as well as other groups, as many as 400,000 Vietnamese women and children have been trafficked overseas. It is a conservative estimate and doesn't account for mail-order brides - women sent to Taiwan and Korea to work in brothels.

According to the 'Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000: Trafficking in Persons Report' released last year by the US State Department, Vietnam was classified as a 'tier two' country, meaning that the government 'does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking'.

For some, most worrying is the ongoing environmental degradation. In Vietnam, the word 'moi-truong' - environment - is still not a familiar one, let alone the term 'sustainable development'. While foreign journalists love to cover the old Agent Orange story, the real environment disaster for the country is how population pressure is causing the depletion of forests and pushing the ecosystem to the brink.

One out of three Vietnamese depend solely on forest and forest products for their living and the number is rising steadily, according to the United Nations Development Programme. Whereas the Vietnam War destroyed close to five million acres of forestland, 10 times that amount has been destroyed since.

Vietnam also experiences terrible floods each year that kill thousands, because there are far fewer trees in the central mountains and hills to absorb the monsoons.

As Vietnam's forests shrink, some of the world's rare species now face extinction, including three of the world's 10 mammals only recently discovered, the green peacock, the Java rhino, the barking deer, the Asian elephant and the rare Sao La ox. There is a lack of public awareness for the need for environmental protection, so conservation practices are rare and government policies ineffective.

Vietnam boasts a 7.5 percent GNP growth, second fastest to China. Economic development needs natural resources, but no one seems to have an answer as to what to do when the forests are gone. Economic progress does not create what the country needs - a civil society in which citizens can fully participate, steering the course of their collective future. This is only possible with real political reform, a multiparty system with true freedom of expression, something the Communist Party staunchly denies its population.

To prepare for the economic meeting, Hanoi was cleaned up for weeks. Protesting peasants and the homeless were packed off to a camp far outside Hanoi. Soldiers patrolled all quarters, especially the homes of well-known political dissidents under house arrests.

Hoang Minh Chinh, Le Hong Ha, Nguyen Thanh Giang, Pham Que Duong, Hoang Tien, Nguyen Khac Toan, Nguyen Van Dai, Le Thi Cong Nhan, Tran Khai Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Phuong Anh, Bach Ngoc Duong, Le Chi Quang are men and women of conscience and sorely needed to participate in discussions on Vietnam's future.

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Seeking democracy in Vietnam

Local expatriates work to support a grass-roots movement for freedom and justice in their country


By Stephen Magagnini - Sacramento Bee Staff Writer

On Minh Thi's nightly talk show on TNT Vietnamese Radio in Sacramento, the sizzling topic is Vietnam's growing democracy movement -- and how Vietnamese Americans can help.

The grass-roots movement began April 8 in Ho Chi Minh City with a “Freedom Manifesto” signed by 118 priests, monks, retired officers, labor leaders, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists and others calling themselves Bloc 8406.

Since then, more than 2,000 people in Vietnam have signed the document calling for free elections, freedom of speech and religion, the release of political prisoners, the end of unfair labor practices and government corruption that has seized thousands of acres of farmland for development.

The backbone of the movement is thousands of Vietnamese expatriates who have signed the manifesto and are helping finance and distribute Vietnam's first independent news- paper, Freedom of Speech.

The 4,000- circulation paper, an alternative to Vietnam's 600 government-controlled papers, has asked the Vietnamese people to boycott the 2007 elections unless the communist government allows independent candidates to compete fairly, said Sacramento activist Hung Tran.

“If people boycott the election, the communists cannot lie to the world,” he said.

Tran, a former captain in the South Vietnamese air force, said activists are emboldened because of President Bush's visit to Vietnam for the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit (APEC) this weekend and Vietnam's efforts to seek more favorable trade nation status under the World Trade Organization.

“The eyes of the world are on the regime. They need international support, so the people of Vietnam know the regime can't repress them like before,” said Tran, one of 50 Sacramento democracy activists who have joined the movement.

Tran and other expats are lobbying hard in U.S. Congress and the international court of public opinion for true democracy in Vietnam.

Twenty-eight activists bought space in the Washington Post for an open letter to Bush that said: “Vietnam is classified as one of the most corrupt countries in the world -- the most corrupt people are high-ranking members of the Vietnamese Communist Party themselves.

“You have said many times that spreading democracy is one of your great goals. ... We hope therefore you will use your forthcoming visit to encourage the Communist leaders of Vietnam to adopt real democracy” and repeal Article 4 of the Vietnamese constitution, which gives them absolute power.

The Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco did not respond to a faxed list of questions on the movement, but one consular officer, Lam Le, remarked, “I don't know why these crazy people are acting like that.”

On Sacramento's TNT (“Talk Native Tongue”) radio show Tuesday night, Tran and other local activists said, “This is the first time an underground democracy movement has surfaced as a direct challenge to the Hanoi regime.”

Diem Huong Pham, 55, editor of Sacramento's bilingual BN Magazine, said she feels “for young Vietnamese who don't have schools to go to, or are sold as sex slaves to other countries. We have to move strongly to take back the country.”

TNT's Thi, a radio name for Dr. Chan Tran, said thousands of displaced people staged daily protests in Hanoi's May Xuan Thuong Park.

Activists report that demonstrators in the park were cleared out this week, and the government is trying to block movement leaders from communicating with the outside world.

Activist Nguyen Chinh Ket, who signed the letter to Bush, said he is the co-chair of the Alliance for Democracy and Human Rights in Vietnam -- an umbrella organization that includes several grass-roots parties, including Bloc 8406.

Nguyen, a philosophy professor, said Wednesday that the U.S. State Department Web site suggests human-rights abuses are lessening in Vietnam, which has released some political prisoners in the past year.

“That is just a mirage created by the Vietnamese government,” he said from Vietnam in a phone interview. “Dissidents like myself have basically been put under house arrest.”

Through an interpreter, he said his computers have been confiscated and he was interrogated “12 hours straight for three weeks until I refused and said, 'I don't care what you do to me.'
“More and more Vietnamese are joining the struggle every day,” said Nguyen, 54.

“More than 80 percent of the 83 million Vietnamese live in the countryside,” Nguyen said. “They have not benefited at all from Vietnam's economic progress -- the gap between haves and have-nots is a lot more than it was 10 years ago.”

Thousands of farmers have had their lands seized by corrupt officials who pressure them to sell cheaply and resell the land at huge profits to developers, Nguyen said. “Unless the government takes some action to resolve these issues, we predict in the very near future these people will stand up.”
So will factory workers “whose working conditions have deteriorated, and they've been oppressed by foreign factory owners while the government does nothing at all,” Nguyen said.

“In the past, there was no close relationship between intellectuals and workers,” he said, but now they have joined forces.

Vietnamese expats, “especially those in California, have played a very important role in this democracy movement,” Nguyen said. “One of the main tactics of the totalitarian government is to cut down on your livelihood -- activists like me have been barred from working, and expats have helped us a lot with financial support.

“Those in California have also played an important role in lobbying governments in the West -- our lives have been secured because Western governments and media know of the movement. Five or 10 years ago, people like me would have been put in jail and killed immediately without any knowledge at all.

“We realize freedom is not free,” Nguyen said. “We will achieve freedom through our struggles and with our lives.”

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Harper urges human rights progress in talk with Vietnam's PM

CBC News

Prime Minister Stephen Harper raised a number of human rights issues Friday during a meeting with Vietnam's prime minister ahead of the APEC summit.

Harper began his discussion with Nguyen Tan Dung by describing Canada's growing trade relationship with Vietnam, one of Asia's fastest growing economies.

“This has been my first trip to this part of the world,” Harper told his counterpart. “I do have a brother that has been involved in business in Vietnam, so I am aware of the growing business co-operation between the two countries.”

The two leaders sat side by side in the Vietnamese prime minister's office, adorned with scarlet rugs, immense white chandeliers and a giant bust of late president Ho Chi Minh.

Canadian officials said the tone of the talks shifted during the private portion as Harper brought up as many as 10 cases of Vietnamese people who were harassed or jailed for their political or religious beliefs.

Vietnam's Communist leaders have been criticized for their religious persecution, particularly of Buddhists and Christians and a crackdown on press freedoms.

Harper told Nguyen that economic openness goes hand in hand with social and political freedoms.

“While recognizing that the country has progressed, there remains areas where it's possible to progress more, and that's what the prime minister underlined today,” Gabriel Lessard, Canada's ambassador to Vietnam, told reporters.

A meeting between Harper and Chinese President Hu Jintao remained up in the air Friday.

Harper's spokeswoman, Sandra Buckler, said he is open to meeting with Chinese officials, who said they didn't appreciate “irresponsible meddling” in their internal affairs.

On Wednesday, Canadian officials said China rejected a private meeting because of Ottawa's criticisms of its human rights record and a case involving a Chinese-Canadian man being held prisoner.

However, on Thursday, a Chinese diplomat told a news conference the two leaders would meet.