At a trendy café in the smart Saigon Centre shopping mall, a place where the nouveau riche go to see and be seen, Nguyen Ngoc Quang recalls the moment he fell foul of the darker side of Vietnam’s much-lauded economic miracle.
Men hired by the security police, he says, knocked him to the ground and drove over him with a motorcycle. The message to the political dissident and online activist was blunt: stop or else.
But the former designer (49), whose face is scarred from the September attack, is unbowed. “I won’t back down,” he said. “The government is trying to stop us because we are telling the truth. The people have been lied to for so many years.”
Nguyen, who recently completed a three-year jail sentence for dissent, is part of a growing, vocal group of Vietnamese who are challenging the authority of the Communist party, which has ruled the country since reunification in 1975 and does not permit political opposition. On blogs and social networking sites, activists have attracted a growing audience by writing about human rights abuses, corruption and restrictions on speech.
But as the authorities kicked off the Communist Party national congress on Tuesday, a decisive planning session that will set the country’s course and leadership for the next five years, the government has sought to reassert its authority by cracking down on critics such as Nguyen.
In the past year dozens of dissidents have been arrested and imprisoned and numerous others have been harassed and monitored by the police. In a confidential diplomatic cable from its embassy in Hanoi, the United States ambassador last year spoke of “the excessive use of violence” in putting down one protest, which he said was “troublesome and indicative of a larger GVN [government of Vietnam] crackdown on human rights in the run-up to the January 2011 party congress”.
As the leadership prepares to address a number of domestic concerns at the congress, including a poorly performing economy and public criticism of Vietnam’s growing economic ties with its traditional rival China, tension has risen. Police in the central city of Hue roughed up an American diplomat who tried to visit Nguyen Van Ly, a dissident Catholic priest who is under house arrest. The authorities are also blocking Facebook, a key networking tool for activists.
“The Communist Party wants to silence any criticism or unrest,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Crackdowns on peaceful government critics are nothing new in Vietnam, but right now we are seeing a dramatic spike in repression.”
Reviving faith in Vietnam’s economy, which has begun to falter after years of growth, will be high on the party’s agenda. This month a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that Vietnam would be the world’s 14th biggest economy by 2050, a giddy ascent for a country that experienced near-famine in the mid-1980s.
Evidence of this economic miracle is everywhere in Ho Chi Minh City, with its skyscrapers, including the 68-storey Bitexco Tower opened in October, and boulevards clogged with cars.
The turnaround owes much to Vietnam’s Doi Moi policy of change, launched in the 1990s, which gradually deregulated the economy while maintaining strict political control, much as has happened in China. But the problems are mounting. Double-digit inflation is disproportionately affecting the poor. Rapid development has evicted farmers from their land. There have been a growing number of strikes in the country’s export-driven factories and worries about industrial pollution.
And despite the leadership’s public commitments to accelerate reform of the centrally planned economy, the state-run sector continues to receive subsidies despite poor performance.
Vinashin, a shipbuilder that is one of the largest state-run entities in the country, has come to epitomise government mismanagement of the economy. The company is on the verge of bankruptcy with debts of $4,5-bn, but the government is Âkeeping it afloat.
The week-long congress is expected to be dominated by internal party rivalries as two competing factions jostle for control of the leadership, according to Carl Thayer, a Vietnam expert at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Party conservatives, who look to China as a model, fear the continued liberalisation of the country and are probably directing the crackdown against dissidents as a warning to party reformers, Thayer said.
The prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, the country’s most powerful politician, is likely to be granted another five-year term. In 2008 the Vietnamese government granted a land concession to a Chinese firm for a multibillion-dollar bauxite mine in central Vietnam.
Pro-democracy activists attracted unprecedented support among urban elites and within the party — including independence hero General Vo Nguyen Giap — with criticism of the mine and China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, which contains potentially resource-rich islands claimed by both countries.
The US, which has sought to reassert itself in Southeast Asia as a regional counterweight to China, sensed an opportunity. Secretary of state Hillary Clinton visited Hanoi twice in 2010 and during her visit in July she said the US had a “national interest” in freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Communist Party conservatives, backed into a corner by the furore over the China issue, have sought to silence the debate by blocking and hacking websites and arresting anti-China bloggers.
Despite these hazards, urban intellectuals are continuing to join the ranks of the activists. Nguyen Thu Tram (33) recently became involved in the Club of Free Journalists, a loose collection of amateur reporters who post stories about everyday injustices in their cities and offer an alternative to the heavily censored state-run press.
Nguyen had to separate herself from her family out of fear of endangering them and she says she is regularly interrogated by the security police.
“I insist on talking to people and reporting on what is happening in their lives,” she said. “But using the internet is not a safe thing to do. I feel that half of my body is already in jail.” — Guardian News & Media 2011