Vietnam news...today:
US human rights bill widens rifts in Hanoi
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - Ideological differences are again surfacing in Hanoi over Vietnam's delicate relationship with the United States, as hardliners and reformers lock horns in their response to Washington's latest human-rights salvo.
Reports in diplomatic and academic circles suggest that some members of the ruling Politburo are less than distraught over the prospect of disrupted economic ties if the United States enforces a threatened freeze on some forms of direct aid.
The Vietnam Human Rights Act, approved by the US House of Representatives last week, prohibits any increase in non-humanitarian assistance until Hanoi has made "significant progress" toward the release of political and religious prisoners and in its treatment of ethnic minorities.
Senators killed off a similar bill last year even after it had been overwhelmingly supported by the Lower House, but there is believed to be broad support this time from both liberals and conservatives.
"I pledge to do everything in my power to ensure that this bill passes not only the House but also the Senate and reaches the president's desk as well," vowed Congressman Chris Smith, who co-sponsored the legislation. "What this bill is all about is standing with the oppressed rather than the oppressor."
Key provisions include the creation of a 17-member commission that would monitor and report on Vietnam's human-rights position, and additional funding for propaganda broadcasts by Radio Free Asia. Aid could be resumed at any time if the president considered that sufficient improvements had been made. The secretary of state would be required to release an annual assessment on Hanoi's adherence to the act.
A crucial difference from the version rejected last year is that Washington would no longer be required to use its influence and voting power at international organizations to discourage other countries from aiding Vietnam. However, this concession has made little impression in Hanoi, where the issue has reignited internal conflict over the extent to which Vietnam should be re-engaging the US and its capitalist allies after the decades of Cold War Soviet patronage.
Diplomats say conservatives in the ruling Communist Party Politburo, or central committee, believe that warming relations with the United States, which began with the lifting of an economic embargo in 1994, have been imposing intolerable social and ideological strains.
One catalyst has been a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) signed in July 2000 that the World Bank confidently predicted would boost Vietnamese export earnings alone by US$1.5 billion a year. Within four months of its signing the BTA had been halted at the instigation of Politburo hardliners, who feared it might also lead to a tidal wave of reactionary information and reformist pressures from Vietnam's huge overseas population.
"The prospect of opening Vietnam's markets to foreign competition is too intimidating to conservatives in the Politburo. The problem lay not only in the trends of liberalization and democratization, but in their speed," exiled Vietnamese scholar Dr Doan Viet Hoat wrote in an article for Harvard Law School. "The reluctance of the communist leaders to smoothly transform Vietnam from authoritarianism to democracy creates a time-bomb of social unrest and political upheaval," he warned.
Former prime minister Vo Van Kiet, who is credited with instituting many of Vietnam's open-door economic reforms in the early 1990s, was one of the first members of the Communist Party leadership to recognize the need for wider political expression. In 1996 he warned that a failure to reform would negate many of the benefits from market liberalization. But his calls went largely unheeded among the generation of Cold Warriors who controlled the party apparatus.
On the eve of the BTA signing, veteran ideologue Le Gian caused a stir by releasing a letter he had sent to the Politburo proposing that the party "temporarily put aside the slogan of socialism" and allow the market system time to work. The Politburo failed to respond, and economic ties have since moved forward, with development assistance through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) now accounting for two-thirds of all non-humanitarian funding, or a total of $4.6 million in 2003-03, of which $1.5 million comprised new allocations.
Ironically, most funding underwrites structural reforms such as tariff liberalization and investment licensing that will benefit the implementation of the BTA and offer US firms improved access to domestic markets. Among the most tangible achievements has been the adoption of an enterprises law in 1999, with US assistance, that brought company regulations up to global standards for the first time as a precursor to Vietnam's membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Existing programs will continue through to 2005 even without any additional allocations. But disruption of aid objectives is inevitable, and many of those who strive to use the assistance as a mechanism for change are not impressed with the new bill.
"I think the American government does not really understand the culture and the environment in many countries, particularly in Vietnam," Professor James McCullough, former director of Washington State University's International Business Institute, said in an interview with the state-run Vietnam News Agency. "As a result we tend to question human rights and we try to take a position of self-righteousness. The difficulties come when we don't understand each other," said the professor, who was based in Vietnam for a decade.
There is some evidence that previous human-rights pressure, mostly notably during the negotiations that led to the 1994 diplomatic normalization, have had an impact on Vietnam, though not always in the ways intended. Scores of political and religious detainees have been freed, but hundreds more have taken their place. While most of the post-1975 labor camps appear to have been closed, police simply put suspects under house arrest instead.
Although Vietnam ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as far back as 1982, criminal laws do not offer the levels of individual protection advocated by the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). The most contentious edict is Article 73 of the Penal Code, which reserves a penalty ranging from 12 years' imprisonment to death for what are vaguely referred to as "threats to national security", including attempts to overthrow the government.
"There is no differentiation in the code between the actions of, say, a student writing in his college magazine and those of a genuine subversive, and the CPV [Communist Party of Vietnam] has consistently failed to remove this anomaly to the satisfaction of the UNHRC and other international institutions dealing with legal safeguards," said a European diplomat.
"We have a situation where even religious sects are treated as potential enemies of the state because they offer an alternative thought process to Marxist-Leninism. In this sense the Vietnamese have made practically no concessions to world opinion," he said.
Religious expression, one of the key issues targeted by the US bill, is also identified by human-rights activists as an area of particular concern because of its ambiguous status under law. Utilizing the infinitely flexible terms of the Penal Code, police are permitted to jail worshippers for up to three years for "abusing freedom of speech, press or religion" by practicing without registration.
According to the US State Department's own country report, Vietnamese religious groups are denied recognition and their leaders often imprisoned unless they provide full membership lists to the police. Unregistered churches are destroyed. However, the report also recognizes that the climate of religious expression has improved since Washington began to re-engage Hanoi at the diplomatic and economical levels. There are now believed to be fewer than a dozen religious detainees, and little harassment of individual worshippers occurs provided they keep their views within their church.
"Overall the status of respect for religious freedom did not change during the period covered by this report, but remains improved from conditions of the early 1990s," the State Department concluded.
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