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US human rights bill widens rifts in
Hanoi
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY -
Ideological differences are again surfacing in Hanoi
over Vietnam's delicate relationship with the United
States, as hardliners and reformers lock horns in their
response to Washington's latest human-rights salvo.
Reports in diplomatic and academic circles
suggest that some members of the ruling Politburo are
less than distraught over the prospect of disrupted
economic ties if the United States enforces a threatened
freeze on some forms of direct aid.
The Vietnam
Human Rights Act, approved by the US House of
Representatives last week, prohibits any increase in
non-humanitarian assistance until Hanoi has made
"significant progress" toward the release of political
and religious prisoners and in its treatment of ethnic
minorities.
Senators killed off a similar bill
last year even after it had been overwhelmingly
supported by the Lower House, but there is believed to
be broad support this time from both liberals and
conservatives.
"I pledge to do everything in my
power to ensure that this bill passes not only the House
but also the Senate and reaches the president's desk as
well," vowed Congressman Chris Smith, who co-sponsored
the legislation. "What this bill is all about is
standing with the oppressed rather than the oppressor."
Key provisions include the creation of a
17-member commission that would monitor and report on
Vietnam's human-rights position, and additional funding
for propaganda broadcasts by Radio Free Asia. Aid could
be resumed at any time if the president considered that
sufficient improvements had been made. The secretary of
state would be required to release an annual assessment
on Hanoi's adherence to the act.
A crucial
difference from the version rejected last year is that
Washington would no longer be required to use its
influence and voting power at international
organizations to discourage other countries from aiding
Vietnam. However, this concession has made little
impression in Hanoi, where the issue has reignited
internal conflict over the extent to which Vietnam
should be re-engaging the US and its capitalist allies
after the decades of Cold War Soviet patronage.
Diplomats say conservatives in the ruling
Communist Party Politburo, or central committee, believe
that warming relations with the United States, which
began with the lifting of an economic embargo in 1994,
have been imposing intolerable social and ideological
strains.
One catalyst has been a Bilateral Trade
Agreement (BTA) signed in July 2000 that the World Bank
confidently predicted would boost Vietnamese export
earnings alone by US$1.5 billion a year. Within four
months of its signing the BTA had been halted at the
instigation of Politburo hardliners, who feared it might
also lead to a tidal wave of reactionary information and
reformist pressures from Vietnam's huge overseas
population.
"The prospect of opening Vietnam's
markets to foreign competition is too intimidating to
conservatives in the Politburo. The problem lay not only
in the trends of liberalization and democratization, but
in their speed," exiled Vietnamese scholar Dr Doan Viet
Hoat wrote in an article for Harvard Law School. "The
reluctance of the communist leaders to smoothly
transform Vietnam from authoritarianism to democracy
creates a time-bomb of social unrest and political
upheaval," he warned.
Former prime minister Vo
Van Kiet, who is credited with instituting many of
Vietnam's open-door economic reforms in the early 1990s,
was one of the first members of the Communist Party
leadership to recognize the need for wider political
expression. In 1996 he warned that a failure to reform
would negate many of the benefits from market
liberalization. But his calls went largely unheeded
among the generation of Cold Warriors who controlled the
party apparatus.
On the eve of the BTA signing,
veteran ideologue Le Gian caused a stir by releasing a
letter he had sent to the Politburo proposing that the
party "temporarily put aside the slogan of socialism"
and allow the market system time to work. The Politburo
failed to respond, and economic ties have since moved
forward, with development assistance through the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID) now
accounting for two-thirds of all non-humanitarian
funding, or a total of $4.6 million in 2003-03, of which
$1.5 million comprised new allocations.
Ironically, most funding underwrites structural
reforms such as tariff liberalization and investment
licensing that will benefit the implementation of the
BTA and offer US firms improved access to domestic
markets. Among the most tangible achievements has been
the adoption of an enterprises law in 1999, with US
assistance, that brought company regulations up to
global standards for the first time as a precursor to
Vietnam's membership in the World Trade Organization
(WTO).
Existing programs will continue through
to 2005 even without any additional allocations. But
disruption of aid objectives is inevitable, and many of
those who strive to use the assistance as a mechanism
for change are not impressed with the new bill.
"I think the American government does not really
understand the culture and the environment in many
countries, particularly in Vietnam," Professor James
McCullough, former director of Washington State
University's International Business Institute, said in
an interview with the state-run Vietnam News Agency. "As
a result we tend to question human rights and we try to
take a position of self-righteousness. The difficulties
come when we don't understand each other," said the
professor, who was based in Vietnam for a decade.
There is some evidence that previous
human-rights pressure, mostly notably during the
negotiations that led to the 1994 diplomatic
normalization, have had an impact on Vietnam, though not
always in the ways intended. Scores of political and
religious detainees have been freed, but hundreds more
have taken their place. While most of the post-1975
labor camps appear to have been closed, police simply
put suspects under house arrest instead.
Although Vietnam ratified the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as far back as
1982, criminal laws do not offer the levels of
individual protection advocated by the United Nations
Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). The most contentious
edict is Article 73 of the Penal Code, which reserves a
penalty ranging from 12 years' imprisonment to death for
what are vaguely referred to as "threats to national
security", including attempts to overthrow the
government.
"There is no differentiation in the
code between the actions of, say, a student writing in
his college magazine and those of a genuine subversive,
and the CPV [Communist Party of Vietnam] has
consistently failed to remove this anomaly to the
satisfaction of the UNHRC and other international
institutions dealing with legal safeguards," said a
European diplomat.
"We have a situation where
even religious sects are treated as potential enemies of
the state because they offer an alternative thought
process to Marxist-Leninism. In this sense the
Vietnamese have made practically no concessions to world
opinion," he said.
Religious expression, one of
the key issues targeted by the US bill, is also
identified by human-rights activists as an area of
particular concern because of its ambiguous status under
law. Utilizing the infinitely flexible terms of the
Penal Code, police are permitted to jail worshippers for
up to three years for "abusing freedom of speech, press
or religion" by practicing without registration.
According to the US State Department's own
country report, Vietnamese religious groups are denied
recognition and their leaders often imprisoned unless
they provide full membership lists to the police.
Unregistered churches are destroyed. However, the report
also recognizes that the climate of religious expression
has improved since Washington began to re-engage Hanoi
at the diplomatic and economical levels. There are now
believed to be fewer than a dozen religious detainees,
and little harassment of individual worshippers occurs
provided they keep their views within their church.
"Overall the status of respect for religious
freedom did not change during the period covered by this
report, but remains improved from conditions of the
early 1990s," the State Department concluded.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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