The bad news and then the really bad news in Vietnam

The inept Dung and Xen, his minion

Monday, 23 August 2010
Roger Mitton
The Phnom Penh Post

LET’s take the really bad news first, because not only did it stink, but the Western governments that would normally lambast this kind of thing held their noses and moved on.

Last Tuesday, at the 65th anniversary of Vietnam’s public security forces, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung urged the country’s police to continue to crush any fledgling political bodies that might threaten the ruling Communist Party regime.

He told the security services to fight the “cunning plots of hostile forces and to prevent political opposition parties setting up to threaten our government.”

Vietnam’s constitution forbids the existence of any political party except the Communist Party of Vietnam. Keep that in mind when you castigate Myanmar, which may horribly oppress opposition parties, but at least allows them to exist.

Days before Dung’s odious exhortation, its effects were demonstrated when the police arrested Professor Pham Minh Hoang, a lecturer in applied mathematics at the Ho Chi Minh City Institute of Technology.

Hoang was charged with belonging to an opposition group, and while he was being arrested, the police read out Article 79 of Vietnam’s penal code, which bars “activities aimed at overthrowing the government”.

Under this provision, the authorities have detained dozens of pro-democracy activists and independent bloggers and sentenced them to years in jail.

An American diplomat in Hanoi informed me that public security officials have claimed quite aggressively that political dissidents were criminals.

“That is stupid and offensive,” he said.

But there was a deafening silence from the United States and Europe.

Indeed, last month, on the 15th anniversary of the normalisation of ties between Washington and Hanoi, the US senate foreign relations chairman, Senator John Kerry, said: “Vietnam’s domestic politics are gradually changing, becoming more open and transparent.”

Of course, they are. That’s why they arrested Hoang. That’s why they ban other political parties. That’s why they censor the internet.

That’s why, every Tuesday, the nation’s editors in chief troop over to the information ministry to be told what they can and can’t write.

Sure, Senator Kerry, things are getting more open and transparent in Vietnam. And pigs are flying higher too, you know.

Memo to Hanoi: There is nothing wrong with people getting involved in politics. As former US President John F Kennedy said: “Political action is the highest responsibility of a citizen.”

And now the bad news.

Vietnam has a collapsing currency. Last Tuesday, the same day that Hoang was arrested, Prime Minister Dung’s government devalued the dong for the third time since last November.

After the official 2.1 percent devaluation, the dong plummetted further and was not helped when a government adviser let slip that Vietnam risked a foreign-currency liquidity “shock”.

Its currency has now slumped 5.2 percent this year – the worst performance among 17 monitored Asian currencies.

Vietnam has racked up a catastrophic trade deficit this year that has nearly doubled to US$7.4 billion in the seven months to July.

It also has the world’s worst-performing stock market. The benchmark VN Index has dropped 8.4 percent this month, the most of 93 markets tracked by Bloomberg globally.

Dung’s communist regime is not only throwing innocent pro-democracy advocates into jail, but has proved utterly inept at running an economy.

Second memo to the dinosaurs: Consider why, despite social unrest, Thailand’s economy is booming.

The answer lies in last week’s comment by Thai Industry Minister Chaiwuti Bannawat, who said: “The government has a role to play in supporting the private sector, but not leading it. I don’t believe the government is more capable than the private sector.”

That last sentence should be blown up and hung over the desk of every Vietnamese official involved in leading its still largely state-run economy into bankruptcy.

And bureaucrats in Cambodia, which is becoming more and more economically tied to Vietnam, would be strongly advised to do the same.
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Roger Mitton is a former senior correspondent for Asiaweek and former bureau chief in Washington and Hanoi for The Straits Times.

The Quiet American and the Khmer Rouge's 'Brother Number Two'

September 19, 2007
By Tracy Dove, Ph.D
Editor, The Russia News Service
U.S. Politics Today (USA)

It is praiseworthy that the capture of "Brother Number 2"- Nuon Chea- made international headlines this week, although the tale of the Cambodian Killing Fields has long since been diluted by time, disinterest, and dishonesty. The Khmer Rouge orchestrated the deaths of over 1.2 million in a country that had only 7.5 million residents, making it a much greater tragedy in relevant numbers that the Holocaust was during World War II. How could it be that the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970's doesn't even make it on to our national radar screens? In the case of the Holocaust, the American people and its national government acknowledged the crime and fought the Nazi regime with courage; in regard to the Khmer Rouge, Americans were oblivious, because their government tacitly supported the brutal regime because it carried on the struggle against Vietnam that the Americans lost years before.

The humiliation of watching those last marines evacuate the American Embassy in Saigon back in 1975 is an event from which patriotic America has never entirely recovered. It wasn't so much that Vietnam won the war, but that the United States lost it, and any regime that opposed Hanoi was an automatic friend of Washington. The tale of this relationship begins with the carpet bombings conducted by the US in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Modern historians, using declassified documents about the bombings, have drawn correlations between the incidence of US bombings and the recruitment of villagers to the Khmer Rouge, and concluded that the bombings indeed influenced high amounts of Cambodian youth to join the party.

Meanwhile, the United States had been propping-up the government of Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge insurgency, but in 1973, the support was cut off. This was convenient for Communist China, which had an interest in the region, and so with support from Chairman Mao- who had just finished hosting Richard Nixon for dinner on the eve of getting his UN Security Council seat back from Taiwan- the Chinese moved in to support the Khmer Rouge's leaders, who were fresh from their generous exchange programs in Paris. Artificially, the Khmer Rouge grew in power, and in 1975 it had overrun the capital, Phnom Penh. And so the story of the Killing Fields begins.

The gruesome details of the genocide can be found in more authoritative studies than this column can provide, but what is of interest with the arrest and handover of Nuon Chea to the international tribunal is why it took so long. While the Khmer Rouge worked the Cambodian people to their deaths, the regime grew increasingly hostile to its neighbor, Vietnam. Fearing an attack from Hanoi, the Khmer Rouge's leader, Pol Pot, ordered a preemptive strike into Vietnam, and a few border villages were ransacked by Cambodian paramilitary forces. Vietnam responded with a complete invasion of the country, and occupied most of it from 1979 until 1989.

Enter the United States; with arch foe Vietnam spreading its influence in Southeast Asia, and backed by uber arch foe the Soviet Union, America stepped in to prop-up the Pol Pot regime, which was hiding in the forests of Cambodia along the Thai border. The logic resounded through the halls of the White House that destabilization of Vietnam's hold on Cambodia took precedence over the crimes against humanity that the Khmer Rouge had thus far committed. It wasn't until the end of the Cold War that the situation in Cambodia was normalized, but the final peace plan was anything but normal.

While the world was watching the Berlin Wall crumble and Ceausescu getting shot on Christmas Day, 1989, peace negotiations were going on unnoticed between the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and other fighting factions. With the absence of powerful partners to ensure that justice was done, the final agreement between the warring groups stipulated that the word "genocide" could never be used when referring to the Khmer Rouge. It was a horrible mistake, and could have been corrected if the United Nations or the United States had horned in more forcefully, but again, there was a vacuum of interest, and the negotiations were concluded. As a result, collecting the political will to establish a tribunal was exceedingly difficult, but nevertheless, the United Nations was able to push one through. Only in 2006 were jurors sworn in to begin the trials, which are scheduled to begin now- hence the arrest of Brother Number 2 this week.

The United States is conspicuously absent from this legal affair, and it is unlikely that any justice will be served on the octogenarian defendants who killed all of those innocent people all of those years ago. It is a slap in the face of justice and an irony of the Cold War legacy, but one can be sure that if it were Castro's trial, the United States would have certainly reserved the entire front row for itself and the Little Havana Cubans of greater Miami. It seems that once a rogue country has been on the payroll once, then a golden parachute or a "get out of jail free" card always seems to be in the bargain.

Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and the Department Chair of International Relations at the University of New York in Prague.