YouTube videos of the military-like land expropriation operation carried out by approximately 2,000 policemen and associated militia-like groups in Van Giang District, Hung Yen Province, showed two men being roughed up by the police and their associates. It turned out that they were two radio reporters from the government’s own Voice of Vietnam (VOV) who had been sent to cover the event.
[Watch videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2ILRETTeAo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=in0veUYNnQc ]
When this was revealed ten days later, VOV was hard pressed to explain why it had not protested the mistreatment of its employees. The authorities in Hung Yen discounted the incident by questioning the authenticity of the video and claiming that the reporters involved, Nguyen NgocNamand Han Phi Long, might not have revealed their press credentials in time to avoid the beating. This assertion seems to rest on the assumption that it would have been acceptable to beat the two men if they had been innocent bystanders rather than government-employed journalists. As public scrutiny intensified, the national Journalists Association and the Hanoi Bar Association sent investigators to Hung Yen to speak to authorities there. When it became clear that the police were at fault and that the Hung Yen authorities had failed to exert control over the police, reports on the attack on the VOV reporters and on the ensuing investigation disappeared from government news outlets. On 11 May the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement saying that the attack shows that “all reporters [are] at risk inVietnam”.
