Page 2 of 2 ASIA
HAND Hanoi's double-cross on
democracy By Shawn W Crispin
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 Tan, 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.
Shawn W
Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia
editor.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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