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2 ASIA HAND Hanoi's
double-cross on democracy By
Shawn W Crispin
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
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