Vietnamese Dissidents: Absent from the Western Mind
Roasa, Dustin
Vietnamese Dissidents: Absent from the Western Mind DUSTIN ROASA On October 8, 2009, a woman from Hanoi named Tran Khai Thanh Thuy was on her way to Hai Phong, a city on Vietnam's coast, to...
...it controls all domestic media...
...Large areas of eastern Cambodia are still littered with these bombs, which continue to kill and maim poor rural Cambodians...
...I was willing to accept a version of history that I knew to be false in order to avoid dealing with a sense of shame, for which I had no good answers...
...Another problem is that no one has bothered to talk to the Vietnamese...
...But guilt doesn't mean that Americans should be paralyzed with remorse...
...government and scientific and human-rights groups...
...In recent years, "Vietnam" has come to serve as a justification for any number of contradictory positions on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq...
...One critic who connected the China issue with democracy was Le Cong Dinh, a forty-one-year-old lawyer who studied at Tulane University on a Fulbright scholarship...
...If you support continued American involvement in these wars, "Vietnam" is a cautionary tale about the price of abandoning an ally, a story of re-education camps and boat people...
...He finally ran afoul of the authorities when he began blogging about the bauxite mine and also about territorial disputes with China over potentially oil-rich islands in the South China Sea...
...But the sorrow and shame...
...George W. Bush hosted four Vietnamese-American activists—one of whom had spent time in prison—at the White House in 2007 and helped secure the release of cyberdissident Nguyen Vu Binh before Vietnamese president Nguyen Minh Triet visted the White House that same year...
...I worked at state-run newspapers in Hanoi for most of my time in Vietnam...
...As a journalist who has worked in Southeast Asia over the last five years and who is in contact with pro-democracy activists in Vietnam, I've often wondered why the movement has not captured the world's imagination like similar movements in China, Burma, and Zimbabwe...
...Dissidents aside, there is real discontent among the general population in Vietnam about the current political system...
...The last prisoners of war were returned to the United States more than thirty years ago...
...The story began on April 8, 2006, when a group of activists posted a petition online called "Manifesto 2006 on Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam...
...I also tried to ignore what was happening but, unlike the other commuters, I didn't fear the police...
...That leaves two major American constituencies engaged in Vietnam, both of which are conservative: the missionary networks who focus on religious freedom and the investors who focus on economic freedom...
...Some Americans have spoken out about the situation in Vietnam...
...In addition, they say, the international community has a duty to enforce human rights standards through the international bodies to which Vietnam belongs or hopes to join...
...The dissidents were isolated and needed an issue to galvanize support...
...It's just like here," she whispered to me late one night at a restaurant, "but I can't do anything about it...
...Some of my Vietnamese acquaintances, after months of building trust, confided their thoughts...
...Yet the outside world has barely noticed...
...They became known as Bloc 8406, after the date it was posted...
...Vietnamese Dissidents: Absent from the Western Mind DUSTIN ROASA On October 8, 2009, a woman from Hanoi named Tran Khai Thanh Thuy was on her way to Hai Phong, a city on Vietnam's coast, to witness the trial of six pro-democracy activists...
...There is no better voice for Vietnamese dissent than Nguyen Dan Que...
...As the yolks oozed from the broken eggshells onto the pavement, petrified commuters pretended not to notice, and the vendor endured the assault without so much as a cry for help...
...Few issues unite the Vietnamese like suspicion of their large neighbor to the north...
...The Vietnamese committed their own "equally foolish and immoral" acts during and after the war, including the Land Reform campaign of the mid 1950s, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the brutal suppression of the Nhan Van movement, a reformist faction of the Communist Party...
...If you oppose these wars, "Vietnam" is an equally cautionary tale about bombed-out villages and dishonest leaders...
...The authorities responded by making dozens of arrests...
...As an expat, I lived a comfortable life and had very little to worry about from the authorities...
...There is no real way to test this proposition, but the pro-democracy movement in China, which is similarly small and has similarly undeterminable popular support, has been championed by the international media...
...It's a short leap from there to other, much more troubling positions...
...Whether or not this is true is mostly beside the point...
...The movement is small, but it is growing, and, judging from the severity of the crackdown, the authorities are taking it seriously...
...The United States has very little to feel good about when looking back on its history in Vietnam, but then neither does Great Britain when looking back on its history in Zimbabwe or Burma...
...He also undertook the potentially risky job of defending dissidents in court, but his fame and good standing with the government protected him from repercussions...
...A key piece of prosecution evidence was a photo of one supposed victim with a bandaged head, which Vietnamese bloggers later showed had been crudely altered...
...The article claimed that North Vietnam had treated these prisoners well...
...Guilt-induced fantasies about Americans paying penance for their past sins by staying on the sidelines are just that: fantasies...
...I thought about complaining to the editor...
...Under the terms of the deal, the Chinese company brought in thousands of guest workers, at a time of high unemployment in Vietnam, and built housing complexes and restaurants with signs in Chinese...
...He began writing essays and open letters to the Communist Party calling for reform...
...I visited several members of Bloc 8406 in Vietnam in the winter of 2007, and their mood was pessimistic...
...On January 20 of this year, he was sentenced to five years in prison for conducting propaganda against the state...
...The two countries share a stormy history marked by long periods of Chinese occupation and war—most recently, a brief but bloody border conflict in 1979...
...Is it that the movement does not have enough support inside the country to be considered a genuine popular phenomenon...
...The conversation doesn't go much beyond that...
...She is at least the sixteenth pro-democracy activist to be imprisoned in Vietnam since October 2009, in what the U.S ambassador to Vietnam described as a "spike" in human rights abuses...
...As this involvement continues, Americans must ensure that it has a human rights component and doesn't simply suit American strategic or business interests...
...The Vietnamese government does not permit political opposition...
...Religious and economic freedom are indeed important issues to the pro-democracy movement, but its platform is much broader and includes issues dear to progressives, such as minority and labor rights...
...Le Cong Dinh's case is a reminder that political dissent in authoritarian societies is a risky business with no guarantee of success...
...Journalists like Howard French have rightly kept Chinese dissidents on the front page of the New York Times for years, while the paper has seen fit to mention the Vietnamese dissidents only a couple of times...
...The United States is one of Vietnam's largest trading partner...
...Among the dissidents I have spoken to, Nguyen Thanh Giang, a seventy-four-year-old geophysicist from the North, has fairly representative views on these subjects...
...Is it that the Vietnamese government just isn't all that bad...
...He currently lives under de facto house arrest, where he endures constant police surveillance and harassment...
...Never mind that offering public and, where appropriate, material support to an indigenous dissident movement is categorically different from advocating military intervention...
...Le Cong Dinh is famous in Vietnam for having represented the government in a number of highprofile cases, including a trade dispute with the United States over catfish dumping, which Vietnam won...
...Instead, I mostly experienced openness and curiosity...
...In the summer of 2008, the dissidents received an unlikely gift from the authorities...
...But she would never reach the courthouse...
...Very few of them are from the Left...
...what about the here and now...
...Human Rights Watch issued a statement calling the trial "Kafkaesque...
...As more Vietnamese become aware of the pro-democracy movement through the China issue, and as the crackdown against the dissidents continues to intensify, international support for the pro-democracy cause in Vietnam is crucial now more than ever...
...Vietnam has its own remnants of the war, including unexploded ordinance and children born with birth defects caused by Agent Orange...
...should be similarly expressed by the Vietnamese authorities," he wrote...
...The dissidents also hoped that journalists would begin pouring into the country to tell their story, and that foreign activists would take up their cause...
...And still, Britons and their government have become leading critics of both regimes, even if this has meant putting up with predictable charges of old habits dying hard...
...Among the most visible legacies of this era are the country's numerous amputees, many of whom lost limbs to the thousands of unexploded bombs dropped by American planes during secret sorties in eastern Cambodia that razed entire villages and killed tens of thousands of people...
...A guitarist in one of the country's few rock bands complained that musicians had to watch what they said onstage for fear of getting into trouble with the police...
...That these things occurred before I was born, and that I would readily condemn them to anyone who asked, didn't matter...
...Ninety-eight-year-old General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military hero of Vietnam's wars against the French and Americans, publicly criticized the concession...
...On those occasions when the subject of the war came up, the reaction tended to depend on the person's age...
...It's a fabrication and total slander," Tran Khai Thanh Thuy said of the charges...
...By going after the government on what it considers sacred ground—its role in leading Vietnam's wars for independence and reunification—the dissidents were sending a message that they meant business...
...involvement in the country...
...He brings these things up not to cancel out American conduct, but to demonstrate what he believes is war's true nature—a "dirty game" from which no one emerges unsullied...
...Barack Obama, on the other hand, has not shown the same interest in the subject, which is perhaps unsurprising given his reticence to speak about human rights in Asia at all...
...Tran Khai Thanh Thuy's trial took place in February of this year and lasted one day...
...More than two thousand people—lawyers, former Communist Party members, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, writers and intellectuals from all parts of the country—risked arrest and signed the document...
...Instead, she was met by a police roadblock and ordered to return to her house until further notice...
...Strikes, although illegal, have increased in recent years, and the dissidents are working hard to make inroads with the workers, despite the government's attempts to block them...
...The guilt and shame behind my decision not to protest the egg vendor's beating are, I believe, the same impulses that explain the international community's decision to ignore Vietnam's pro-democracy movement...
...She spent time in prison in 2007 for writing articles that criticized the government and called for multi-party democracy...
...With a few exceptions, this has not happened...
...After some thought, though, I didn't do it...
...An unemployed dentist said he couldn't go into business because he couldn't afford the bribes necessary to start a clinic...
...The backlash to the mining deal was swift...
...My reasons were different, and by that point had become a reflex: what right did I have to condemn the beating, given what my country had done in Vietnam during the war...
...First, of course, "Vietnam" is a war...
...One problem with this assumption is that it is self-serving—it allows Westerners to avoid complicated and uncomfortable feelings...
...Le Cong Dinh's imprisonment sent a clear message: speaking out about China and democracy, even for those with government connections or from politically prominent families, would no longer be tolerated...
...Regardless, I never got over my sense of remorse and shame...
...With their rigid poses and awkward smiles, the photos were obviously staged...
...Does the world treat Vietnam differently because Vietnam occupies a singular place in the Western imagination...
...Although they believed that with time and patience the general population would find the courage to join them, the movement was under siege and losing members to prison...
...In the Western imagination, all other meanings of the word derive from that...
...Leaders of the Vietnamese movement have no similar renown, but they have shown as much bravery and endured as many hardships...
...Whatever the reasons for this, you are likely reading about Vietnam's pro-democracy movement for the first time...
...Will anyone listen...
...Although the dissidents themselves admit that their movement is small, with perhaps only a few thousand active members, they claim that there are many more Vietnamese who support them but can't speak out because of fear of the authorities...
...Vietnam's wars for independence against the French and Americans, the authors wrote, were essentially nationalist in nature...
...Political dissidents from all walks of life have come together to call for elections and political pluralism...
...Vietnam" is linked to the sixties and to a tectonic shift in American values and the emergence of a new mass culture...
...Through violence and terror, Communist ideologues hijacked that struggle and co-opted it for their own ends...
...I'll never forget the sight of an egg vendor being beaten by a group of policemen one morning as I drove to work...
...Early on in my stint at one of these papers, I was editing an article about American pilots held during the war at the "Hanoi Hilton," a North Vietnameserun prison that was notorious for its harsh treatment and torture of captives...
...Still, there is a way forward for Americans who care about democracy and human rights in Vietnam...
...According to rights groups like Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters without Borders, and many others, it is one of the most repressive in the world...
...This will stir uncomfortable memories, especially given the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...
...In 1999, he was arrested for dissent and spent over a month in solitary confinement, but the authorities released him due to pressure from the U.S...
...He works tirelessly as a writer, thinker, and strategist of the movement...
...Americans are right to feel sorrow and shame, he wrote to me in an e-mail...
...Despite the immense cost to him and his family, he has refused offers of exile in the United States...
...Finally, many single out the United States: Americans must do more, both as individuals and through their government, to demand change in Vietnam...
...There are Solzhenitsyns and Havels in Vietnam right now...
...Westerners rediscovering the country after years of isolation are amazed to find that it no longer looks like a war zone and that it welcomes foreign investment...
...The Vietnamese government had quietly granted a multibillion-dollar land concession to a Chinese mining company in Vietnam's Central Highlands...
...I live in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a country only now beginning to emerge from the trauma of being dragged into the Vietnam War...
...Young people were mostly indifferent about a conflict that happened before they were born and had little bearing on their lives...
...I have a family to worry about...
...Westerners long ago lost their "moral authority" to be involved in contemporary Vietnam, the thinking goes, other than as tourists or investors...
...Although Nguyen Thanh Giang calls for American support for the pro-democracy cause, he is no apologist for American conduct during the war...
...The handful of American publications that have carried pieces in support of the pro-democracy movement are conservative: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Sun...
...Is it because Vietnam lacks a charismatic leader to stir the world's conscience, like Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma or Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe...
...This last point invites controversy, but it's based not on some naïve belief in American intentions...
...The court sentenced her to three and a half years in prison, but she did not hear the verdict because the judge had thrown her out of court for talking out of turn...
...Nguyen Dan Que, for example, a physician in Ho Chi Minh City, has spent twenty of the last thirty years imprisoned, yet is unknown to all but the most devoted readers of the Human Rights Watch Web page...
...There has indeed been a spike, but it is part of a much larger—and more historic—story...
...But the cost of doing nothing is too high, especially in light of recent developments in Vietnam, which suggest that the movement is at a critical stage...
...Although he's never been a member of the Communist Party, he held a government post at the Hanoi Geology Bureau for most of his career...
...Dustin Roasa is a freelance journalist based in Cambodia who writes about human rights and development issues in Southeast Asia...
...Perhaps the most powerful "Vietnam," though, is the one of guilt...
...it is home to the world's largest Vietnamese diaspora...
...Most dissidents stopped speaking publicly, but a few went underground, where they quietly continued to organize and publish newsletters and manifestos...
...They fail to account for growing U.S...
...But I was surprised that I never encountered hostility from the Vietnamese...
...That the United States did horrific things—Agent Orange, carpet bombing, free-fire zones—is beyond dispute, and many consequences of those acts can still be seen in the landscape and people...
...Some hoped that labor rights would be the answer— strikes were a growing phenomenon in the country's factories—while others hoped that land rights or religious freedom might generate popular support...
...Few other publications have acquitted themselves any better...
...The dissidents have identified as natural allies the millions of workers in Vietnam's factories producing goods for the West...
...Rights groups and foreign governments consider her a prisoner of conscience and are calling for her release...
...it's an acknowledgment of geopolitical reality...
...They ask for the support of journalists and activists in telling their story and pressuring the Communist Party to change...
...This was not Tran Khai Thanh's first run-in with the authorities...
...The police then arrested Tran Khai Thanh Thuy and charged her with assault...
...Those spared prison faced beatings, harassment, and intimidation...
...The government allowed him to travel to the United States for a handful of conferences in the eighties and nineties—he was one of the first scientists since reunification permitted to do so—which opened his eyes to the problems in Vietnam...
...As an American, I reasoned, I had no right to complain, given all of the horrible things that my country had done in Vietnam during the war...
...it regularly confiscates land from peasants for the enrichment of the authorities and those with political connections...
...The state-run press ran articles criticizing the members of Bloc 8406 for "abusing democratic freedoms" and attempting to overthrow the government...
...rather, it places a special burden on them to "compensate for the destruction caused by the bombing in Vietnam" by supporting the pro-democracy movement...
...I lived and worked in Vietnam in 2004-2005, and I experienced some version of remorse or shame often...
...it does not allow workers to organize...
...government...
...He is now retired and lives under house arrest in Hanoi...
...Yet the government has somehow found a way to limit international discussion about Vietnam to the country's booming economy and tourism sector...
...A journalist friend had a revelation while reading David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb at a university overseas...
...She was a poor migrant from the countryside, and I had no idea what offense—likely minor— she had committed...
...It's not surprising, then, that in the Western imagination "Vietnam" no longer much resembles Vietnam, the country of eighty-five million people ruled by one of the last communist dictatorships on earth...
...Or if Charter 77 had never been read beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia...
...The crackdown had a chilling effect...
...Vietnamese bloggers wrote about potential infiltrations by undercover Chinese military and intelligence agents...
...It's possible to ask the dissidents what kind of support they want, although their responses to this question involve considerable personal risk...
...Vietnamese old enough to have experienced the war were mostly respectful, which I think is due to the clear distinction Vietnamese make between the American people and the actions of the U.S...
...Imagine, though, if Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the gulag had fallen on deaf ears...
...But any time I began to lose sight of reality, a flashing street scene reminded me of how things really were...
...But the world has not come calling...
...Americans who voice their opposition to the current regime in Vietnam can expect to hear the same charge—from the Vietnamese government and from outside the country too...
...As proof, it offered a series of grainy black-and-white photos of Americans in the prison courtyard playing volleyball and chess and sitting in circles chatting...
...Not because it would make a difference in the next day's edition—the paper's censors had the final call on everything that went into print—but because somebody had, at minimum, to register a protest...
...I protest this trial, and I did not come here to suffer this...
...Vietnam" is a metaphor for the perils of Western hubris and, conversely, for the nobility of third world revolutionary movements...
...As long as the Vietnamese government and Western businesses are the sole voices on the factories, workers will continue to face harsh conditions, low pay, and political isolation...
...The manifesto calls for elections and a political system that honors basic human rights, and its words strike at the heart of the Communist Party's legitimacy...
...Americans are one of the largest groups to visit Vietnam every year...
...The dissidents I know hope for foreign involvement in their cause...
...He lived in Vietnam in 2004-2005 and regularly returns to the country...
...That night, two intruders entered her home and beat her with bricks in front of her husband and daughter, as police officers looked on from outside...
...The pro-democracy movement seized on the issue and made fiery appeals to Vietnamese nationalism, couched in democratic principles: unaccountable, greedy government elites were selling Vietnam's soul to Beijing, and only a truly democratic system could hold them in check...
...A Westerner advocating for democracy in contemporary Vietnam might make arguments uncomfortably similar to the justifications for the American war—and didn't we learn our lesson...
...and, despite the recent emergence of China, the United States remains an influential actor in Southeast Asia...
...For the first time since reunification in 1975, the ruling Communist Party faces a sustained and organized challenge to its legitimacy...
...I even occasionally encountered what I interpreted as compassion, which I believe had something to do with the outcome of the war: they won and we lost...
Vol. 57 • July 2010 • No. 3
