Vietnamese politics
Confidence tricks
The repression is fierce; the self-criticism mild
AsiaJun 22nd 2013 edition
Jun 22nd 2013
THE police in Vietnam have been busy. Their targets, as so often, have been the nation's pesky bloggers. On June 13th they arrested Pham Viet Dao in Hanoi; two days later it was the turn of Dinh Nhat Uy in Long An province in the south. Both have criticised the government online; both were detained under a sweeping provision of the penal code that allows arrest for "abusing democratic freedoms" to "infringe upon the interests of the state". Mr Dao, a former official, carried particular clout in Vietnam's blogosphere, as did Truong Duy Nhat, another blogger, who was arrested in the city of Danang on May 26th. Under Vietnam's laws they all face up to seven years in prison.
These arrests form part of a wider crackdown on dissent, particularly online, that has been gathering pace since last December, when the prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, repeated an order to the police to move against "hostile forces" using the internet to "to spread propaganda which threatens our national security and oppose the Communist Party and the state". So far this year more than 40 democracy activists and bloggers have been picked up, more than during the whole of 2012.
Vietnam's reputation as an increasingly repressive society is worsening. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog, says the country is now the world's sixth-biggest jailer of journalists. As in other authoritarian systems, the government is encouraging the spread of the internet for economic reasons (about one-third of the population is now online) yet trying to stifle its use to express views or to gain access to alternative sources of information to the mainstream newspapers and television, which are under strict government control.
The proliferation of critical blogs shows no sign of abating, however, perhaps because there is now so much legitimately to criticise. Gone are the days when Vietnam was the darling of Western development agencies, growing by over 8% a year. In the past few years the economy has hit the rocks, with a plunging currency, thousands of bankruptcies and a badly indebted banking system. In particular, government ministers have been accused of corruption and incompetence as state-owned enterprises have nearly gone bust.
Mr Dung, the prime minister, has become the target of much of the anger. Vietnamese have been reminded of this by a hunger strike started on May 27th in prison by Cu Huy Ha Vu. Mr Vu, a legal scholar, was jailed in 2011 after filing a lawsuit against Mr Dung for abusing his power. His protest is against poor prison conditions that have affected his health.
The government's own response to the mounting criticism was to undergo a confidence vote in the National Assembly. On June 10th the 498 members were invited to cast a vote of "high confidence", "confidence" or "low confidence" in Mr Dung and 46 other ministers and officials. Almost one-third of lawmakers assigned Mr Dung the lowest mark. Mr Dung's great rival in the in-fighting that now characterises the ruling party, the president, Truong Tan Sang, won the best approval rating.
The exercise, however, was largely symbolic. Two-thirds of the assembly would have had to express "low" confidence in someone for heads to roll. Moreover, legislators were not given the option of "no confidence" in the government, which would have reflected more accurately the feelings of many Vietnamese.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Confidence tricks"
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