At the beginning of December, Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Information and Communication announced that he wanted to create a “healthy environment” for bloggers. Doing this would be a huge step forward in achieving the goal of freedom of press. The government intends to succeed with the help of Google and Yahoo. They should regulate the blogging scene by stopping ‘incorrect information’ from being published. This measure is meant to reduce blogs to their original sense, being a personal diary and not a way to discuss opinions about politics.
Though the constitution guarantees freedom of press, the Communist Party controls and censors the media. The Internet is the only media people in Vietnam can use to express political opinions not in agreement with those of the Communist Party. It is therefore especially used for this purpose. Because there is no independent judiciary, the government influences court decisions and ignores freedom of the press. People are often threatened and arrested when they state something not conforming to the Party’s opinion. Dieu Cay, for example, was convicted to several years in prison.
Dieu Cay, whose real name is Nguyen Hoang Hai, was arrested on April 19th 2008 without an explanation until 5 days later. Later, he was charged and convicted of tax fraud. The government claimed that he hasn’t paid taxes for 10 years on the house he’s living in. Which is right. He didn’t. Not in person. He had the company from which he rented his house paying the taxes in his name.
The real issue is that Dieu Cay founded a group of bloggers called the “Free Vietnamese Journalists Club,” which focuses mainly on corruption and human rights. Furthermore, he published an article on his blog about protests staged during the Olympic torch relay in cities around the world including Ho Chi Minh City, where Dieu Cay lives, and encouraged people to take part in the protests. Prior to that, the police had already harassed and monitored him because he took part in a demonstration against China’s claim to sovereignty over Spratly and Paracel Islands in the beginning of the year.
Dieu Cay’s case is not an exception. There are now eight Internet dissidents in jail, which is why Vietnam is ranked 168 out of 173 countries in the Reporters Without Borders ranking of Internet enemies.
Another example of how little freedom of the press really exists in Vietnam is the case of Truong Quoc Huy. He uses Paltalk to meet with other like-minded people to criticize corruption and to talk about democracy. He is a member of the 8406 group, a Vietnamese pro-democracy movement about which he spoke in an interview with a foreign radio station. The next day, he was arrested and sentenced to a six-year jail sentence.
So even if the government succeeds in forcing the Internet giants to censor their blog platforms it is questionable if that it will silence all the Vietnamese who are obviously longing to talk about democracy and express their displeasure about their political system.
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