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ASIAWEEK: A human rights record fin



     THE FREE RIDE MAY BE OVER

           A human rights record finally gets noticed

                              By Ken Stier / Hanoi


AFTER STUDYING IN EUROPE, Dr. Nguyen Dan Que turned down a United Nations
job offer in 1974 and returned to his native Saigon to teach at the local medical school. He was 31
years old, and he knew what he was getting into. When communist forces defeated the South
Vietnamese army and entered the city the following year, Que and his valuable skills stayed. In
1978, he was arrested and jailed for 10 years - often enduring beatings and solitary confinement -
after starting up his own newspaper that called attention to human rights abuses. Que emerged from
prison in 1988, but he would not keep quiet. He was arrested again in 1990 and, after a 15-minute
trial, sentenced to 20 years at hard labor. 

Today, the doctor works under the tropical sun at Camp K3 Xuan Loc prison northeast of Saigon,
now Ho Chi Minh City. Que has been likened to Nelson Mandela, but the comparison is not
appropriate. He heads no movement agitating for greater rights and is little known inside the
country. The truth is, the vast majority of Vietnamese are apolitical. "There would be a lot more
political prisoners here if people cared more about politics," says one Western diplomat. 

Ordinary Vietnamese are more concerned with the sorts of abuses of power they are likely to
encounter daily. For example, when a middle-class Vietnamese tourist guide was beaten to death in
a local police station. Initially, police claimed the death was a suicide. The culprits were eventually
convicted and sentenced to five years - the maximum sentence for injury or death caused by state
officials on duty.

Western governments have been less than robust about calling Hanoi to task on human rights. In
part, the explanation may be crass: Business interests have seen Vietnam as one of the world's great
untapped opportunities, which puts pressure on governments to lie low and not jeopardize
contracts. But this is only part of the explanation. Many Western governments probably feel bad
about the hardships Vietnam has endured in the 20th century, first at the hands of French colonialists
and then the American anti-communist crusade. The lack of criticism suggests a lingering guilt
complex.

Hanoi got a taste of how this reluctance to criticize may be changing at the Francophone conclave it
hosted last fall. In a pre-summit meeting with journalists, senior Vietnamese officials were
confronted with demands for the release of Doan Viet Hoat, a U.S.-trained educator and probably
Vietnam's best-known dissident. He has spent all but two-and-a-half years in prison since 1975.
Also, Hanoi is beginning to hear loud complaints from Western religious organizations. An
"Adopt-a-Religious-Prisoner-in-Vietnam" campaign is gaining momentum in the U.S. Finally,
corruption, an inefficient bureaucracy and policy flip-flops have exasperated the business people
who saw so much potential. "Vietnam has been like a lady that everyone was trying to court but
now no one is trying to get anything from," says one seasoned diplomat.

The Communist Party is beginning to take note of the criticism. It recently drew up a raft of laws
that lend a patina of legality to what critics claim were the government's arbitrary and unfair
punishments of dissidents. Another small move: A party think-tank has formed a special research
center to study international human rights conventions. And Hanoi has also quietly been releasing
political prisoners. Pham Duc Kham, perhaps the most prominent dissident to be released in the last
decade, won his freedom last year after a quiet campaign by his family, which is in the U.S. Since
joining his family there, Kham has kept a low profile while continuing to seek freedom for still-jailed
dissidents, apparently convinced that the discreet approach is the right one.

That's the good news. In other ways, Vietnam has made no progress or fallen backwards. Consider
the case of Nguyen Hoang Linh, former editor of the state-run Doanh Nghiep (Enterprise)
newspaper. In the early part of 1997, Linh felt secure enough to run an exposé revealing and
deploring corruption related to a government purchase of foreign patrol boats. He was arrested last
October and originally threatened with 15 years in prison. Recently, charges against him were
reduced but he still faces a three-year term.

Just how many political prisoners Vietnam holds is impossible to say. Amnesty International has
identified a few dozen "prisoners of conscience." In contrast, a few organizations of overseas
Vietnamese suggest the number is actually 1,000 or more. Hanoi will not acknowledge that it holds
any. It says everyone jailed is guilty of an established criminal law. However, the government does
not distinguish in its penalties between violent and non-violent dissent. It has enjoyed a relatively free
ride in the recent past on such matters. But that is likely to end unless Hanoi demonstrates progress.