Vietnamese police detain Viet Tan members for visiting imprisoned colleagues

PRESS RELEASE
Security police in Vietnam detained three members of Viet Tan as they went to visit colleagues who have been held for over four months at a Ministry of Public Security detention center in Saigon.

The three recently detained Viet Tan members are:

• Ms. Nguyen Thi Xuan Trang, 35-year-old medical doctor and Swiss citizen. Dr. Nguyen is also a member of the Comité Suisse Vietnam (COSUNAM).
• Mr. Mai Huu Bao, 38-year-old electrical engineer and American citizen. Mr. Mai is a past Executive Board Member of the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations of Southern California and past President of the Phan Boi Chau Youth for Democracy.
• Mr. Nguyen Tan Anh, 28-year-old manager of a health-care non-profit and Australian citizen. Mr. Nguyen is a past president of the Vietnamese Students Association of New South Wales.

The three traveled to Saigon at the end of March with the goal of visiting Dr. Nguyen Quoc Quan, Mr. Somsak Khunmi, Mr. Nguyen The Vu, and Mr. Nguyen Viet Trung — held since November 17, 2007 at the Ministry of Public Security detention center located at 237 Nguyen Van Cu street, district 1, Saigon — and later with other democracy activists.

On the morning of April 3, Mai Huu Bao, Nguyen Tan Anh and Nguyen Thi Xuan Trang brought medicine and food to the detention center. After entering the facility at 10:00 a.m., they have not had any further communication and have gone missing. It has been over 24 hours since anyone has heard from them.

http://www.viettan.org

Vietnam rejects US rights report

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gpV5JwSU-elBiLI6RiHRR7UxdZ1g

HANOI (AFP) — Vietnamese authorities rejected a US State Department report criticising the communist country for curbing human rights, saying no one had been arrested for their political or religious views.

In a statement released late Thursday, foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung said the annual State Department report was not objective and based on “false and prejudiced information.”

“During the past years, Vietnam has made great achievements in ensuring and developing its citizens’ freedom in all fields, including freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of information, which can be clearly seen through the strong development of means of communication, especially the Internet,” he said.

“Nobody in Vietnam has been arrested for reasons relating to political views or religion, and only those who violate laws are handled in accordance with law.”

The report said last year’s parliamentary elections were neither free nor fair, and that the government was continuing to crack down on dissent, arresting political activists and forcing several dissidents to flee the country.

It also said authorities tightened their grip over the press and Internet and limited people’s rights to privacy and basic freedoms of speech, movement and assembly.

Le Dung said the report “still does not give objective observations on the real situation in Vietnam and is based on false and prejudiced information.”

Christopher Hill, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, Wednesday credited Vietnam during a Senate committee hearing with making great strides in economic and social reforms.

But he cautioned there were “serious deficiencies” in political and civil freedoms, citing a crackdown late last year that netted prominent Vietnamese dissidents.

Democratic pebble in Vietnam’s shoe

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JA18Ae01.html

KUALA LUMPUR – Before an audience of enrapt young ethnic-Vietnamese pro-democracy advocates, the political dissident spelled out his movement’s non-violent strategy for undermining Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party’s pillars of political power.

Behind the speaker hung conspicuously the red-and-gold striped flag of the former South Vietnam, a still potent symbol for the country’s post-1975 diaspora. So potent, in fact, Vietnamese diplomats requested on January 5 that Malaysian officials remove the flag from the civil society-promoting conference, which assembled 200 ethnic-Vietnamese youth from around the world, including from Vietnam.

The Vietnamese officials also claimed that some of the conference’s speakers promoted terrorism inside Vietnam during their presentations and told their Malaysian counterparts that if the dissident flag was allowed to fly, it could complicate bilateral ties only days before an official Vietnamese delegation was due to arrive in Malaysia. The flag, nonetheless, remained aloft throughout the event.

The symbolic skirmish marked the latest confrontation on an international stage between Vietnam’s Communist Party and the exile-run, pro-democracy Viet Tan. On November 17, Vietnamese authorities arrested and jailed a group of Viet Tan members, including US, French, Thai and Vietnamese citizens, who distributed fliers calling for non-violent democratic change. Four of the six foreign nationals have since been released, with one American and one Thai citizen still in detention.

Vietnam’s state-controlled media have since taken to accusing Viet Tan of terrorism – charges the US ambassador to Vietnam has publicly contested. The Communist Party’s strong response, after years of publicly ignoring the underground movement and its frequent calls from overseas for democracy, points to an official squeamishness about Viet Tan’s rising profile and increasingly daring in-country civil disobedience campaign.

Last year the Vietnamese government cracked down hard on pro-democracy activists, including against the loosely organized protest group Bloc 8406. For its part, Viet Tan claims to be Vietnam’s second-largest political organization, trailing only the Communist Party, which since seizing power and reunifying the country in 1975 has maintained a monolithic hold on power.

Viet Tan declines to reveal its membership figures, saying its ultimate strength lies in the power of its ideas, not its numbers, but also that its growing network includes both exile-based and in-country members. After operating underground for nearly 25 years, Viet Tan members say they are now in the process of bringing the party above ground, with plans to implement its 10-program action plan, including grassroots activities to improve social welfare, restore civil rights and promote pluralism openly inside Vietnam.

Burying the past
Viet Tan’s origins somewhat controversially stem from the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (NUFLV), a group established by exiled Vietnamese in 1980 which aimed to topple the Communist Party-led government through a popular uprising, which to date has notably failed to materialize. Two years later, Viet Tan grew out of this movement along the Thai, Cambodian and Lao borders, advocating peaceful political change through underground activities.

The Vietnamese government has frequently accused the NUFLV of funneling arms and fomenting armed struggle inside Vietnam – charges one current Viet Tan member characterizes as a “misunderstanding” and “misperception”. In 2004, Viet Tan surfaced for the first time as a public organization in Berlin, Germany, symbolically where Soviet-led communism fell, and formally announced the dissolution of the NUFLV.

Those familiar with Viet Tan’s history say that the 2004 announcement and the party’s recommitment to non-violent struggle was at least partially influenced by the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the US and Washington’s subsequent recategorization of several armed resistance groups as terrorist organizations.

A competing interpretation points to the generational change inside the party, where the first generation of political refugees who initiated Viet Tan are slowly being replaced by a new generation of Western-educated professionals who are more willing to seek a political accommodation with the Communist Party with the implementation of democratic reforms.
To be sure, that’s still a political long shot, particularly in light of the government’s recent counter-propaganda campaign against the party. Consider, for instance, Duy Hoang, 37, the second-youngest member on Viet Tan’s executive committee, as a gauge of the Vietnamese government’s antagonism towards the party. Hoang fled Vietnam when he was three years old and was raised and educated in California, where he received degrees in economics and political science.

For nearly a decade he served as an investment banker at the World Bank-affiliated International Finance Corporation (IFC). However his appointment last year to head Deutsche Bank’s investment banking activities in Vietnam was shot down by government authorities, apparently over a critical op-ed he penned in an international newspaper in 2005, coinciding with the 30-year anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end, according to Hoang. The authorities may have also been unnerved by Hoang’s in-country family connections, which includes a high-ranking cadre in the Communist Party’s central committee

Hoang recently quit his job at the IFC and now works full-time calculating Viet Tan’s next moves. He believes the Communist Party, in light of last year’s accession to the World Trade Organization and this year’s assumption of a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council, is more sensitive than ever to outside pressure and garnering international support for Viet Tan’s democratic cause is a key party strategy.

What a communist fears
Hoang also contends that the Communist Party fears in particular outside-inside linkages between pro-democracy groups, which he hopes may one day be unified in popular front demanding political change, akin to the so-called “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. He points to the recent student-led nationalistic demonstrations in Hanoi against China’s maneuvers in the contested Spratly Islands and farmer-led protests in Ho Chi Minh City against alleged state-backed land grabs as evidence of a growing civil society movement that is increasingly willing to confront the authorities with their complaints and grievances.

Indeed, one of the Viet Tan presentations at the recent youth conference featured a video demonstrating how political dissidents in Serbia had organized to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic’s abusive regime in 2000. That particular movement was controversially known to receive financial support from the US Congress-funded International Republican Institute; according to party members, Viet Tan does not receive any US or other Western government funding but rather raises funds through business investments, share holdings and, to a lesser degree, donations.

At the same time, Viet Tan has developed strong connections on Capitol Hill. US officials have in recent years dangled economic carrots to persuade Vietnam’s Communist Party government to undertake democratic reforms, including allowing for greater religious freedoms. Last May, Viet Tan chairman Do Hoang Diem was called on by the US National Security Council to a meeting in the Oval Office with President George W Bush to discuss Vietnam’s rights situation.

Bush later publicly criticized the country’s rights record when Vietnam’s President Nguyen Minh Triet visited Washington. Despite such moral support, Viet Tan is clearly fighting an uphill battle, complicated by the fact the movement is managed mainly from overseas by people the Vietnamese authorities consider foreign nationals.

Despite its authoritarian and repressive ways, the Communist Party’s self-appointed mandate will nonetheless remain strong as long as the economy continues its breakneck expansion, including last year’s 8.5% GDP growth rate. In many rural areas, particularly in northern Vietnam, the Communist Party is still popular, particularly among the older generation who lived through the war and still views the three million strong political party as a national liberator.

Moreover, the government continues to implement World Bank and United Nations Development Program advised economic reforms and recently took onboard a certain civil society call for more participation in government planning approvals. Compared to Cambodia and China, where corrupt government officials have with impunity seized lands occupied by poor peasants, Vietnamese authorities have shown more sensitivity towards its aggrieved farmers, addressing land-grabbing complaints on a case-by-case basis. That would seem to indicate that certain upward pressures are impacting on the Communist Party’s decision-making, a realization Viet Tan has made and is now trying to capitalize on through calls for more clean governance, social justice and political freedoms. Barring any sudden collapse in economic growth, political change in Vietnam is still most likely to emerge from Communist Party cadres themselves, including the younger generation who favor political reforms that move the party away from its traditional faceless functionary approach.

In recent years, the party has allowed certain candidates to the National Assembly to run under an independent rather than Communist Party banner – though only one such candidate was selected last year, down from a previous three representatives. That’s clearly not the big bang sort of democratic reform Viet Tan envisages, and as the party ramps up its campaign of civil disobedience and the government retorts with accusations of terrorism, expect more crackdowns, confrontations and international outcry in the months ahead.

Shawn W Crispin

Youth delegates grill government on key issues

http://www.thanhniennews.com/education/?catid=4&newsid=34357

Vietnamese youth need to develop a long-term vision and self-motivation and master information and technology if they want to be a part of globalization and the knowledge economy, a deputy prime minister said Thursday.

In the first-ever direct dialogue between the government and members of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, held on the sidelines of the union’s 9th National Congress, Nguyen Thien Nhan, who is also the Minister of Education and Training, called on more young people to venture into business.

But for that, the deeply-etched belief that “entering university is the only way to career success” needed to go, he pointed out.

The government was working on a project to help those not choosing to pursue a university degree start up or develop their own business, he told them.

Members of the youth union challenged the deputy PM and other senior officials on a wide range of topics including the sluggishness in administrative reform, the role of the youth union in the Government’s policy in dealing with road safety, and employment for young people who complete their army service.

Replying to the question on administrative reform, Nhan admitted that the work to eliminate red tape was still far from satisfactory for the public, saying any ideas put for-ward by the union to accelerate the process were welcome.

He acknowledged that performance-based salaries and good allowances were vital to ensure highly-qualified young people in Government offices remained dedicated.

Some of the youth delegates called for more contribution from youths for soldiers deployed in the Paracels-Spartly Archipelago.

The appeal found almost unanimous support from the others.

There was also a suggestion that the youth union should organize more exchanges with the soldiers in the archipelago to educate all students about the situation there.

Reported by Dang Long

High Political Oppression

 http://www.unpo.org/article.php?id=7423

Speaking under house arrest, Mr. Thich Quand Do reveals the political oppression he is facing along with other dissidents of the Vietnam’s government.

Below is an article published by Al Jazeera:

At 80 years old, Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Do is still one of Vietnam’s most prominent dissidents.

He is deputy leader of the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam and has spent more than 25 years in detention for advocating greater religious freedoms and rights.

In video tapes smuggled out of the country and obtained by Al Jazeera, Thich Quang Do reveals a life of political repression and misery not found in the glossy tourist brochures luring vistors to Vietnam.

In Vietnam today we are not free. We are prisoners in our own country … Prisoners of a regime which decides who has the right to speak, and who must keep silent.

As I speak to you today, I am under house arrest at the Thanh Minh Zen monastery in Saigon. Secret police keep watch on me day and night, and I am forbidden to go out.

I have been continuously repressed right from 1975 by the communist regime. For me, I’m not afraid of anything, of anything, because I am struggling for the right cause. For the truth.

Today we have no opposition parties, no free press, no free trade unions, no civil society. All independent religions are banned.

All citizens who call for political reform, democracy or human rights risk immediate arrest. Only economically speaking [are things] any better. But politically speaking, nothing changes.

If you go to the country from here 20km from Saigon, you will see. People more or less as peasants [are] very, very miserable.

We must have pluralism, the right to hold free elections, and to choose our own political system.

To enjoy democratic freedoms. In brief, the right to shape our own future, to shape the destiny of our nation. For the last 32 years we always speak out to the outside world. And we hope like you … that you foreigners listen to our cry.

Chinese local official denies plan to designate islands as city – HK paper

(BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific) Text of report by Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post website on 19 December

[Report by Kristine Kwok: "Plan To Designate Islands a City Denied"]

The diplomatic row with Vietnam over the designation of disputed islands at China’s southern tip as a city took another turn yesterday when a Hainan official denied such a plan was on the agenda.

A Wenchang government representative said there was no plan to set up Sansha, a 2.6 million sq km county-level city to govern China’s claims in the Spratly and Paracel islands, a source of territorial disputes between China and its Southeast Asian neighbours.

It had been reported that Wenchang would administer Sansha, an abbreviation for Xisha, Nansha and Zhongsha, the terms Beijing uses to refer to territory it claims in the two island groups.

“There is no such thing. In Hainan, we only have Sanya, but not Sansha,” the official said.

Another official from the Hainan provincial government said the authorities had not received any documentation from the central government on redesignating the area as a city.

News that Beijing ratified a plan last month to create Sansha was first reported by Vietnamese media and followed up overseas. In sharp contrast to the attention outside China, no mainstream mainland media have covered the issue, which would otherwise be a source of pride.

But the reports have been discussed in many internet chat rooms and widely circulated through personal blogs. In one of the few available reports by mainland media, www.voc.com.cn , a website affiliated with the official Hunan Daily , said the new city would administer a quarter of China’s total area.

It also said the Wenchang government had pledged in a Communist Party Committee meeting it would promote the State Council’s plan to change the status of the islands.

But the Foreign Ministry gave a rather vague response yesterday when asked to confirm such a plan, with spokesman Qin Gang saying it was normal for China to conduct activities in its own territory.

Mr Qin said Beijing was concerned by anti-China protests in Vietnam over the past two weekends in response to the alleged Sansha plans.

“We require the Vietnamese government to take practical and effective measures to prevent the situation from getting worse,” he said.

Rallies in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday attracted several hundred demonstrators and followed similar protests in the cities a week earlier. Analysts said the protests were the most damaging in the relationship between China and Vietnam, where demonstrations are a rarity.

A territorial dispute between the neighbours in 1979 sparked a brief border war.

Zhang Xizhen, of Peking University’s School of International Relations, said the border war remained a scar between the two countries despite warming trade and political ties.

But Anthony Wong Dong, chairman of the International Military Association in Macau , said a more pressing issue than the scars of history was the right to explore energy in the disputed areas. The Spratlys and Paracels are claimed, in part or in full, by the mainland, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia, and are believed to have oil and gas reserves.

China, Vietnam clash over lonely islands

 http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=175296

Vietnam and China have plunged into a new war of words over Asia’s most hotly contested pieces of real estate, the Spratly Islands.

For the second week in a row, hundreds of Vietnamese nationalists have been holding rare public demonstrations outside the Chinese embassy in Hanoi and the Chinese consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.

Shouting anti-Chinese slogans and singing patriotic songs, they accuse China of staging a creeping invasion of the Spratlys, which have become one of Asia’s major potential flashpoints.

Most of the islands are low-lying coral reefs and rocky outcrops in the middle of the South China Sea, home to little more than a few dozen seabirds. Some of them are so small they are covered at high tide.

Yet the island chain is strategically located in the centre of one of Asia’s largest potential reservoirs for oil and natural gas, and surrounded by rich fishing grounds.

Six nations, including China, have staked overlapping claims to the 200 islands, rocks and reefs that make up the chain.

Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei have claims to some of the islands, while China claims sovereignty over them all. Taiwan’s claim is similar to China’s.

There have been numerous military skirmishes in the past 30 years to reinforce the conflicting claims, the most serious in 1976, when China invaded and captured a nearby island chain, the Paracel Islands, from Vietnam.

Twelve years later, the two countries clashed again as their navies waged a brief battle off Johnson Reef in the Spratlys. Several Vietnamese boats were sunk and more than 70 sailors died.

Since then, Beijing and Hanoi have tried to ease tensions by promising to seek a diplomatic solution.

But China has continued to build military installations on some of the islands and reefs, insisting they are only shelters for Chinese fishermen.

More recently, the legislature in Beijing ratified a plan to manage the Paracels and Spratlys as a new administrative district of Hainan province, turning the islands into a new “county-level city” called Sansha.

That has infuriated Vietnam, which tried last spring to let drilling and pipeline rights for a US$2-billion gas field to energy giant BP in an area of the Spratlys off its southern coast.

When Beijing accused Hanoi of infringing Chinese territory, the company decided to halt exploration work.

Still, Vietnam insists many of the Spratly Islands lie within the bounds of its sovereignty and it resents China’s claims, which are backed by an assertive new nationalism and one of its biggest military spending sprees ever.

Regional rivalries take on an added geopolitical importance because the islands straddle Asia’s most vital seal lanes.

About 25% of world shipping passes through the region, carrying Middle East oil to Japan and the western United States.

Washington’s alliances and defence agreements with countries in the region could drag the United States into a confrontation with China if the conflict over the Spratlys turns violent.

That concerns Washington, because in 1995 the U.S. Naval War College ran a series of computer war games simulating a conflict with China over the South China Sea, and in each case China won.

Since then, Beijing has spent billions modernizing and expanding its navy with an eye to a possible confrontation in the Spratlys.

China has filled a virtual power vacuum in the South China Sea after the end of the Cold War and the withdrawal of the former Soviet Union’s navy from Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay and the U.S. withdrawal from Subic Bay in the Philippines.

As if to assert that fact, China infuriated Vietnam by staging a naval exercise in the South China Sea in November near the Paracels.

Now, Beijing is accusing Vietnam of threatening relations between the two countries by permitting street demonstrations in front of the Chinese embassy for two weekends in a row.

The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry insists the protests were spontaneous and quickly ended by police.

But a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “We are highly concerned over the matter. We hope the Vietnamese government will take a responsible attitude and effective measures to stop this and prevent bilateral ties from being hurt.”

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Pro-reform party coddled in US, branded terrorists in Vietnam

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iOtP7l62eNx7eGczXXzs8x0Eua7g

WASHINGTON (AFP) — They rub shoulders with US President George W. Bush and lawmakers in Washington but are shunned as “terrorists” by Vietnam’s communist leadership — members of US-based Viet Tan are stepping up their campaign for democratic reforms in their motherland.

Short for Vietnam Reform party, Viet Tan has built up a vast membership of Western educated Vietnamese spanning the globe and is fuelling an underground dissident network inside Vietnam.

Now, the group is boldly testing the limits of the authorities in Hanoi by secretly sending members to the tightly governed Southeast Asian state, taking the pro-democracy campaign right to the home ground.

Three of its members — two Americans and a French — were caught last month by the Vietnamese authorities together with three other Viet Tan associates — a Thai and two locals — in Ho Chi Minh City as they were preparing to distribute pro-democracy pamphlets.

One of the arrested Americans, a mathematician developing a machine to translate English to Vietnamese, was accused of entering Vietnam on a fake Cambodian passport.

All were branded “terrorists” in the state media and the arrests triggered protests from France and the United States, where lawmakers criticized Vietnam for what they call political and religious repression.

Hanoi has released one of the two Americans and the French citizen Nguyen Thi Thanh Van, a journalist with Radio New Horizon, whose nightly broadcast spreads Viet Tan’s message to counter Vietnam’ state-controlled media.

To highlight its growing influence in Vietnam, Viet Tan’s chairman, Do Hoang Diem, said farmers who participated in land protests that journalist Van featured in her broadcasts came to the jail were she was detained to offer flowers.

“Viet Tan holds that the Vietnamese people must solve the problems of Vietnam,” he told AFP.

“Change, therefore, must come through the power of the people in the way of grassroots, peaceful means,” said Diem, 44, who met Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney at the White House earlier this year to seek action against Hanoi for cracking down on dissent.

Most of the leadership of Viet Tan were just teenagers or younger when the Vietnam war ended. Viet Tan’s members in Vietnam include intellectuals, university students, and workers.

Diem as a 12 year old was among hundreds of thousands of “boat people” who fled to the United States in the late 1970s after the war fearing communist rule.

A masters graduate in management from the University of Houston, Diem quit as a senior health care executive to work full time in Viet Tan, whose name is a contraction of “Viet Nam” and “Canh Tan,” which means wide-ranging reform and modernization.

“To support civil society in Vietnam, Viet Tan focuses on empowering the Vietnamese people through independent associations and a de facto free media,” said Duy Hoang, 36, who also quit as an investment banker to concentrate as Viet Tan central committee member.

When its members were caught last month by Vietnamese authorities preparing pro-democracy leaflets, Viet Tan rallied 300 Vietnamese-Americans to stage protests in front of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington and organized press conferences with lawmakers to highlight their plight.

The lawmakers wrote letters of protest to the Vietnamese leaders and sought intervention by the Bush administration, which swiftly lodged a protest with Hanoi.

Republican lawmaker Ed Royce said he raised the issue with Vietnamese envoy in Washington Le Cong Phung but was told that Hanoi regarded Viet Tan as a “terrorist organization that had long advocated armed activities against the government.”

Viet Tan said that while some of its members carried arms for self defense during its founding days in the 1980s, it has never pursued an armed struggle.

“Our activities for many years now have been promoting democracy by purely peaceful, non-violent means,” Duy Hoang said.

Viet Tan members arrested in Ho Chi Minh City “didn’t come armed with guns and ammo but leaflets and pamphlets touting democracy,” Royce said.

Angered by what it sees as a breach of promise by Hanoi to embrace reforms when it joined the World Trade Organization a year ago, the US House of Representatives has passed binding legislation that will tie US foreign aid to Vietnam to its human rights record.

Viet Tan is now knocking on the doors of the Senate to do the same.

Newly released journalist says thanks for international campaign

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=24764 

Nguyen Thi Thanh Van, the French journalist and activist who was detained from 17 November to 12 December in Ho Chi Minh City, gave a news conference at Reporters Without Borders headquarters in Paris this morning in which she talked of her fears while held and thanked all those who campaigned for her release.

“Locked in my cell, I was anxious because I could not imagine how I would ever get out of this situation,” she said. “There was never any violence against me, but I was interrogated for one or two hours by policemen every day except Sundays. They tried to unsettle me. It was a form of moral terror.”

Than Van works for Vietnamese exile community media, including radio Chan Troi Moi (New Horizon – http://www.radiochantroimoi.com), which broadcasts to Vietnam on the medium wave.

“When you are released and discover all that was done on your behalf, it warms the heart,” she said. “I had this concern while in prison that people did not know what was happening to me. At the same time, I was shocked by all the lies and manipulation in the Vietnamese media. It bore no relation to what I was saying during interrogation.”

Her lawyer, Serge Lewisch, said: “It was a happy outcome, but the risk was enormous. She faced the possibility of life imprisonment on these terrorism charges. And the way the authorities were drawing other things into this case was dangerous for her. It is significant that during all this time I was unable to find a Vietnamese lawyer who dared to defend her. It is an indication of the lack of freedom in Vietnam.”

Bui Xuan Quang, the head of the Thanh Van support committee, thanked all those who participated in the campaign including former French government minister Françoise Hostalier, who interceded with both French and Vietnamese governments. “The Vietnamese ambassador to France told Madame Hostalier that distributing leaflets was a very serious crime,” he said.

Do Hoang Diem, the head of the Viet Tan (Reform) party said: “This case confirms that international pressure is fundamental in this kind of case that the Hanoi regime is not ready to abandon its repressive policy towards dissidents.”

Pointing out that a journalist, Father Nguyen Van Ly, and eight cyber-dissidents are still imprisoned in Vietnam, Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard said: “We welcome this happy outcome, but we should not stop here. The repression against journalists and dissidents continues, as shown in the conviction two days ago of four trade unionists for giving information to Radio Free Asia.”

Hawaii man jailed in Vietnam vows to continue democracy fight

HONOLULU (AP) – A Hawaii man who spent almost a month in a Vietnam jail after he was found preparing to distribute pro-democracy pamphlets said Wednesday he’s happy to be back in the islands and vowed to campaign for the release of colleagues left behind.

About 30 supporters met Leon Truong at Honolulu International Airport and piled his neck high with flower lei.

Truong, who is called Truong Van Ba in Vietnam, said he thought he might be stuck in prison for months, if not years. He spent 24 days in prison before being released Tuesday.

The activist said he endured hours of interrogation day after day, including weekends. And though he wasn’t physically abused, he said the relentless questioning “terrorized” him mentally and psychologically.

Truong said he had to risk getting thrown into jail because Vietnamese are being denied their basic rights.

“While living in America, I appreciate the freedoms and the rights that we have here,” Truong said through an interpreter in his first interview since returning to the U.S. “I cannot turn away when the people in Vietnam are living absolutely without dignity and freedom that we enjoy here. When you know that it is the right thing to do, you have to take the risk.”

Truong and five colleagues were arrested at a house in Ho Chi Minh City on Nov. 17 when authorities found them preparing to circulate pamphlets on behalf of Viet Tan, a California-based pro-democracy group that Vietnam considers a terrorist organization.

Viet Tan says it promotes nonviolent political change in Vietnam. The U.S. ambassador to Vietnam has said he’s seen no evidence that the group is engaged in terrorism.

Viet Tan said Wednesday the Vietnamese government released one of the others, French journalist Nguyen Thi Thanh Van, after holding her for 25 days. Nguyen is expected to arrive in Paris on Thursday.

Nguyen Quoc Quan, a mathematician from Sacramento, Calif., has yet to be released. Somsak Khunmi, from Ubon, Thailand, and two Vietnamese citizens, Nguyen The Vu and Nguyen The Khiem, also remained in custody.

Truong said he persevered in prison by exercising and meditating. He also thought of his friends and supporters around the world who he knew would fight to get him out.

A strong belief in his work also gave him strength, he said.

Truong, who has lived in Hawaii for 28 years, said his interrogators pushed him to admit that he was a terrorist. He said he finally signed papers his captors drafted for him, but now disavows them.

“They forced me to sign statements. Therefore I deny anything that I said or signed in prison,” Truong said.

He vowed to continue campaigning for democracy in Vietnam.

“I would like everybody to continue putting pressure on the Hanoi regime to help free my friends, colleagues who are working peacefully to democratize Vietnam,” Truong said.