“The US government and rights groups are expressing concern over Vietnam’s crackdown on freedom of expression, as the regime faces growing dissent and labor militancy,” the Democracy Digest of April 18, 2012, reports.
Among the more notorious human rights violations in recent days figure the following:
A Catholic priest, Nguyen Van Binh of Yen Kien Parish, Hanoi, was beaten unconscious by a gang of thugs on April 14 when he tried to stop the demolition by police of a house he had used as an orphanage. (The Archdiocese of Hanoi protested this in a letter of April 15, 2012.)
This followed an incident on February 23, 2012, when Father Nguyen Quang Hoa of Kon Hring Parish, Kon Tum Province, was pursued on a motorbike by three aggressors after he performed funeral rites for a parishioner in Turia Yop village (Dak Hring township, Dak Ha prefecture). After catching up with him they pursued him for over 200 yards beating him with iron rods as he fled into a rubber plantation.
One month later, the police cited “insecurity” as the reason for not allowing the celebration of Easter in Turia Yop village–a decision protested by Bishop Hoang Duc Oanh of Kon Tum in a letter of April 4.
On April 17, the police arrested Ms. Nguyen Thi May of Phu Tuc township, Phu Xuyen District, Hanoi, for transplanting rice in a disputed field. About 200 of her fellow villagers went to the police demanding her release because the arrest was considered arbitrary.
On the labor front, the regime is struggling to contain an upsurge in worker militancy, and the authorities were recently forced to raise wages and amend the law governing strikes. “More dramatically,” Forbes Magazine reports, “ever rising costs have fomented a growing number of wildcat strikes over pay.”
The problem here is that the official Vietnam General Confederation of Labor, the only one allowed to operate in the country, tends to side with the bosses and not with the workers. Attempts to form independent workers unions are severely repressed as can be seen in the prison sentences meted out last year to Nguyen Hoang Quoc Hung (9 years), Do Thi Minh Hanh and Doan Huy Chuong (7 years each) for organizing a wildcat strike at a shoe factory in Tra Vinh the year before.
One focus of extreme popular dissatisfaction with the regime is land use. Theoretically the state owns all the land, which it parcels out to individual and collective users for a certain period of time. However, local authorities can arbitrarily “recover” the land by claiming higher use priorities paying dirt-cheap compensation but then turning around making millions of dollars selling the land to private developers or foreign investors.
Things have got to a point where hundreds of thousand of complaints are filed but are rarely resolved. “This is a ticking time bomb,” says political commentator Carl Thayer who is now teaching in Australia.
