ASIA
HAND Democratic pebble in Vietnam's
shoe By Shawn W Crispin
KUALA LUMPUR - Before an audience of
enrapt young ethnic-Vietnamese pro-democracy
advocates, the political dissident spelled out his
movement's non-violent strategy for undermining
Vietnam's ruling Communist Party's pillars of
political power.
Behind the speaker hung
conspicuously the red-and-gold striped flag of the
former South Vietnam, a still potent symbol for
the country's post-1975 diaspora. So potent, in
fact, Vietnamese diplomats requested on January 5
that Malaysian officials remove the flag from the
civil society-promoting conference, which
assembled 200
ethnic-Vietnamese youth from around the world,
including from Vietnam.
The Vietnamese
officials also claimed that some of the
conference's speakers promoted terrorism inside
Vietnam during their presentations and told their
Malaysian counterparts that if the dissident flag
was allowed to fly, it could complicate bilateral
ties only days before an official Vietnamese
delegation was due to arrive in Malaysia. The
flag, nonetheless, remained aloft throughout the
event.
The symbolic skirmish marked the
latest confrontation on an international stage
between Vietnam's Communist Party and the
exile-run, pro-democracy Viet Tan. On November 17,
Vietnamese authorities arrested and jailed a group
of Viet Tan members, including US, French, Thai
and Vietnamese citizens, who distributed fliers
calling for non-violent democratic change. Four of
the six foreign nationals have since been
released, with one American and one Thai citizen
still in detention.
Vietnam's
state-controlled media have since taken to
accusing Viet Tan of terrorism - charges the US
ambassador to Vietnam has publicly contested. The
Communist Party's strong response, after years of
publicly ignoring the underground movement and its
frequent calls from overseas for democracy, points
to an official squeamishness about Viet Tan’s
rising profile and increasingly daring in-country
civil disobedience campaign.
Last year the
Vietnamese government cracked down hard on
pro-democracy activists, including against the
loosely organized protest group Bloc 8406. For its
part, Viet Tan claims to be Vietnam’s
second-largest political organization, trailing
only the Communist Party, which since seizing
power and reunifying the country in 1975 has
maintained a monolithic hold on power.
Viet Tan declines to reveal its membership
figures, saying its ultimate strength lies in the
power of its ideas, not its numbers, but also that
its growing network includes both exile-based and
in-country members. After operating underground
for nearly 25 years, Viet Tan members say they are
now in the process of bringing the party above
ground, with plans to implement its 10-program
action plan, including grassroots activities to
improve social welfare, restore civil rights and
promote pluralism openly inside Vietnam.
Burying the past Viet Tan's
origins somewhat controversially stem from the
National United Front for the Liberation of
Vietnam (NUFLV), a group established by exiled
Vietnamese in 1980 which aimed to topple the
Communist Party-led government through a popular
uprising, which to date has notably failed to
materialize. Two years later, Viet Tan grew out of
this movement along the Thai, Cambodian and Lao
borders, advocating peaceful political change
through underground activities.
The
Vietnamese government has frequently accused the
NUFLV of funneling arms and fomenting armed
struggle inside Vietnam - charges one current Viet
Tan member characterizes as a "misunderstanding"
and "misperception". In 2004, Viet Tan surfaced
for the first time as a public organization in
Berlin, Germany, symbolically where Soviet-led
communism fell, and formally announced the
dissolution of the NUFLV.
Those familiar
with Viet Tan's history say that the 2004
announcement and the party's recommitment to
non-violent struggle was at least partially
influenced by the September 11, 2001 terror
attacks on the US and Washington's subsequent
recategorization of several armed resistance
groups as terrorist organizations.
A
competing interpretation points to the
generational change inside the party, where the
first generation of political refugees who
initiated Viet Tan are slowly being replaced by a
new generation of Western-educated professionals
who are more willing to seek a political
accommodation with the Communist Party with the
implementation of democratic reforms.
To
be sure, that's still a political long shot,
particularly in light of the government's recent
counter-propaganda campaign against the party.
Consider, for instance, Duy Hoang, 37, the
second-youngest member on Viet Tan's executive
committee, as a gauge of the Vietnamese
government’s antagonism towards the party. Hoang
fled Vietnam when he was three years old and was
raised and educated in California, where he
received degrees in economics and political
science.
For nearly a decade he served as
an investment banker at the World Bank-affiliated
International Finance Corporation (IFC). However
his appointment last year to head Deutsche Bank's
investment banking activities in Vietnam was shot
down by government authorities, apparently over a
critical op-ed he penned in an international
newspaper in 2005, coinciding with the 30-year
anniversary of the Vietnam War's end, according to
Hoang. The authorities may have also been unnerved
by Hoang's in-country family connections, which
includes a high-ranking cadre in the Communist
Party's central committee
Hoang recently
quit his job at the IFC and now works full-time
calculating Viet Tan's next moves. He believes the
Communist Party, in light of last year's accession
to the World Trade Organization and this year's
assumption of a temporary seat on the United
Nations Security Council, is more sensitive than
ever to outside pressure and garnering
international support for Viet Tan's democratic
cause is a key party strategy.
What a
communist fears Hoang also contends that
the Communist Party fears in particular
outside-inside linkages between pro-democracy
groups, which he hopes may one day be unified in
popular front demanding political change, akin to
the so-called "color revolutions" in Georgia,
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. He points to the recent
student-led nationalistic demonstrations in Hanoi
against China's maneuvers in the contested Spratly
Islands and farmer-led protests in Ho Chi Minh
City against alleged state-backed land grabs as
evidence of a growing civil society movement that
is increasingly willing to confront the
authorities with their complaints and grievances.
Indeed, one of the Viet Tan presentations
at the recent youth conference featured a video
demonstrating how political dissidents in Serbia
had organized to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic's
abusive regime in 2000. That particular movement
was controversially known to receive financial
support from the US Congress-funded International
Republican Institute; according to party members,
Viet Tan does not receive any US or other Western
government funding but rather raises funds through
business investments, share holdings and, to a
lesser degree, donations.
At the same
time, Viet Tan has developed strong connections on
Capitol Hill. US officials have in recent years
dangled economic carrots to persuade Vietnam's
Communist Party government to undertake democratic
reforms, including allowing for greater religious
freedoms. Last May, Viet Tan chairman Do Hoang
Diem was called on by the US National Security
Council to a meeting in the Oval Office with
President George W Bush to discuss Vietnam's
rights situation.
Bush later publicly
criticized the country's rights record when
Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet visited
Washington. Despite such moral support, Viet Tan
is clearly fighting an uphill battle, complicated
by the fact the movement is managed mainly from
overseas by people the Vietnamese authorities
consider foreign nationals.
Despite its
authoritarian and repressive ways, the Communist
Party's self-appointed mandate will nonetheless
remain strong as long as the economy continues its
breakneck expansion, including last year's 8.5%
GDP growth rate. In many rural areas, particularly
in northern Vietnam, the Communist Party is still
popular, particularly among the older generation
who lived through the war and still views the
three million strong political party as a national
liberator.
Moreover, the government
continues to implement World Bank and United
Nations Development Program advised economic
reforms and recently took onboard a certain civil
society call for more participation in government
planning approvals. Compared to Cambodia and
China, where corrupt government officials have
with impunity seized lands occupied by poor
peasants, Vietnamese authorities have shown more
sensitivity towards its aggrieved farmers,
addressing land-grabbing complaints on a
case-by-case basis. That would seem to indicate
that certain upward pressures are impacting on the
Communist Party's decision-making, a realization
Viet Tan has made and is now trying to capitalize
on through calls for more clean governance, social
justice and political freedoms. Barring any sudden
collapse in economic growth, political change in
Vietnam is still most likely to emerge from
Communist Party cadres themselves, including the
younger generation who favor political reforms
that move the party away from its traditional
faceless functionary approach.
In recent
years, the party has allowed certain candidates to
the National Assembly to run under an independent
rather than Communist Party banner - though only
one such candidate was selected last year, down
from a previous three representatives. That's
clearly not the big bang sort of democratic reform
Viet Tan envisages, and as the party ramps up its
campaign of civil disobedience and the government
retorts with accusations of terrorism, expect more
crackdowns, confrontations and international
outcry in the months ahead.
Shawn W
Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia
Editor. He may be reached at
swcrispin@atimes.com.
(Copyright 2008 Asia
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