By Dustin Roasa

This was not Tran Khai Thanh’s first run-in with the authorities. She spent time in prison in 2007 for writing articles that criticized the government and called for multi-party democracy. Rights groups and foreign governments consider her a prisoner of conscience and are calling for her release. She is at least the sixteenth pro-democracy activist to be imprisoned in Vietnam since October 2009, in what the U.S ambassador to Vietnam described as a “spike” in human rights abuses.

There has indeed been a spike, but it is part of a much larger—and more historic—story. For the first time since reunification in 1975, the ruling Communist Party faces a sustained and organized challenge to its legitimacy. Political dissidents from all walks of life have come together to call for elections and political pluralism. The movement is small, but it is growing, and, judging from the severity of the crackdown, the authorities are taking it seriously.

Yet the outside world has barely noticed. As a journalist who has worked in Southeast Asia over the last five years and who is in contact with pro-democracy activists in Vietnam, I’ve often wondered why the movement has not captured the world’s imagination like similar movements in China, Burma, and Zimbabwe. Whatever the reasons for this, you are likely reading about Vietnam’s pro-democracy movement for the first time.

The story began on April 8, 2006, when a group of activists posted a petition online called “Manifesto 2006 on Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam.” More than two thousand people—lawyers, former Communist Party members, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, writers and intellectuals from all parts of the country—risked arrest and signed the document. They became known as Bloc 8406, after the date it was posted. The manifesto calls for elections and a political system that honors basic human rights, and its words strike at the heart of the Communist Party’s legitimacy. Vietnam’s wars for independence against the French and Americans, the authors wrote, were essentially nationalist in nature. Through violence and terror, Communist ideologues hijacked that struggle and co-opted it for their own ends. Whether or not this is true is mostly beside the point. By going after the government on what it considers sacred ground—its role in leading Vietnam’s wars for independence and reunification—the dissidents were sending a message that they meant business.

The authorities responded by making dozens of arrests. Those spared prison faced beatings, harassment, and intimidation. The state-run press ran articles criticizing the members of Bloc 8406 for “abusing democratic freedoms” and attempting to overthrow the government. The crackdown had a chilling effect. Most dissidents stopped speaking publicly, but a few went underground, where they quietly continued to organize and publish newsletters and manifestos.

I visited several members of Bloc 8406 in Vietnam in the winter of 2007, and their mood was pessimistic. Although they believed that with time and patience the general population would find the courage to join them, the movement was under siege and losing members to prison. The dissidents were isolated and needed an issue to galvanize support. Some hoped that labor rights would be the answer—strikes were a growing phenomenon in the country’s factories—while others hoped that land rights or religious freedom might generate popular support. The dissidents also hoped that journalists would begin pouring into the country to tell their story, and that foreign activists would take up their cause. With a few exceptions, this has not happened. Why?

Is it because Vietnam lacks a charismatic leader to stir the world’s conscience, like Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma or Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe? Leaders of the Vietnamese movement have no similar renown, but they have shown as much bravery and endured as many hardships. Nguyen Dan Que, for example, a physician in Ho Chi Minh City, has spent twenty of the last thirty years imprisoned, yet is unknown to all but the most devoted readers of the Human Rights Watch Web page. He works tirelessly as a writer, thinker, and strategist of the movement. He currently lives under de facto house arrest, where he endures constant police surveillance and harassment. Despite the immense cost to him and his family, he has refused offers of exile in the United States. There is no better voice for Vietnamese dissent than Nguyen Dan Que. But the world has not come calling.

Is it that the movement does not have enough support inside the country to be considered a genuine popular phenomenon? Although the dissidents themselves admit that their movement is small, with perhaps only a few thousand active members, they claim that there are many more Vietnamese who support them but can’t speak out because of fear of the authorities. There is no real way to test this proposition, but the pro-democracy movement in China, which is similarly small and has similarly undeterminable popular support, has been championed by the international media. Journalists like Howard French have rightly kept Chinese dissidents on the front page of the New York Times for years, while the paper has seen fit to mention the Vietnamese dissidents only a couple of times. Few other publications have acquitted themselves any better.


IS IT THAT the Vietnamese government just isn’t all that bad? According to rights groups like Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Reporters without Borders, and many others, it is one of the most repressive in the world. The Vietnamese government does not permit political opposition; it controls all domestic media; it does not allow workers to organize; it regularly confiscates land from peasants for the enrichment of the authorities and those with political connections. Yet the government has somehow found a way to limit international discussion about Vietnam to the country’s booming economy and tourism sector. Westerners rediscovering the country after years of isolation are amazed to find that it no longer looks like a war zone and that it welcomes foreign investment. The conversation doesn’t go much beyond that.

Does the world treat Vietnam differently because Vietnam occupies a singular place in the Western imagination? First, of course, “Vietnam” is a war. In the Western imagination, all other meanings of the word derive from that. “Vietnam” is a metaphor for the perils of Western hubris and, conversely, for the nobility of third world revolutionary movements. “Vietnam” is linked to the sixties and to a tectonic shift in American values and the emergence of a new mass culture. In recent years, “Vietnam” has come to serve as a justification for any number of contradictory positions on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you support continued American involvement in these wars, “Vietnam” is a cautionary tale about the price of abandoning an ally, a story of re-education camps and boat people. If you oppose these wars, “Vietnam” is an equally cautionary tale about bombed-out villages and dishonest leaders. It’s not surprising, then, that in the Western imagination “Vietnam” no longer much resembles Vietnam, the country of eighty-five million people ruled by one of the last communist dictatorships on earth.

Perhaps the most powerful “Vietnam,” though, is the one of guilt. That the United States did horrific things—Agent Orange, carpet bombing, free-fire zones—is beyond dispute, and many consequences of those acts can still be seen in the landscape and people.


I LIVE IN PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, a country only now beginning to emerge from the trauma of being dragged into the Vietnam War. Among the most visible legacies of this era are the country’s numerous amputees, many of whom lost limbs to the thousands of unexploded bombs dropped by American planes during secret sorties in eastern Cambodia that razed entire villages and killed tens of thousands of people. Large areas of eastern Cambodia are still littered with these bombs, which continue to kill and maim poor rural Cambodians. Vietnam has its own remnants of the war, including unexploded ordinance and children born with birth defects caused by Agent Orange. I lived and worked in Vietnam in 2004-2005, and I experienced some version of remorse or shame often. But I was surprised that I never encountered hostility from the Vietnamese. Instead, I mostly experienced openness and curiosity. On those occasions when the subject of the war came up, the reaction tended to depend on the person’s age. Young people were mostly indifferent about a conflict that happened before they were born and had little bearing on their lives. Vietnamese old enough to have experienced the war were mostly respectful, which I think is due to the clear distinction Vietnamese make between the American people and the actions of the U.S. government. I even occasionally encountered what I interpreted as compassion, which I believe had something to do with the outcome of the war: they won and we lost. Regardless, I never got over my sense of remorse and shame.

I worked at state-run newspapers in Hanoi for most of my time in Vietnam. Early on in my stint at one of these papers, I was editing an article about American pilots held during the war at the “Hanoi Hilton,” a North Vietnamese-run prison that was notorious for its harsh treatment and torture of captives. The article claimed that North Vietnam had treated these prisoners well. As proof, it offered a series of grainy black-and-white photos of Americans in the prison courtyard playing volleyball and chess and sitting in circles chatting. With their rigid poses and awkward smiles, the photos were obviously staged. I thought about complaining to the editor. Not because it would make a difference in the next day’s edition—the paper’s censors had the final call on everything that went into print—but because somebody had, at minimum, to register a protest. After some thought, though, I didn’t do it. As an American, I reasoned, I had no right to complain, given all of the horrible things that my country had done in Vietnam during the war. That these things occurred before I was born, and that I would readily condemn them to anyone who asked, didn’t matter. I was willing to accept a version of history that I knew to be false in order to avoid dealing with a sense of shame, for which I had no good answers.

It’s a short leap from there to other, much more troubling positions. The last prisoners of war were returned to the United States more than thirty years ago; what about the here and now? Dissidents aside, there is real discontent among the general population in Vietnam about the current political system. Some of my Vietnamese acquaintances, after months of building trust, confided their thoughts. A journalist friend had a revelation while reading David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb at a university overseas. “It’s just like here,” she whispered to me late one night at a restaurant, “but I can’t do anything about it. I have a family to worry about.” A guitarist in one of the country’s few rock bands complained that musicians had to watch what they said onstage for fear of getting into trouble with the police. An unemployed dentist said he couldn’t go into business because he couldn’t afford the bribes necessary to start a clinic.

As an expat, I lived a comfortable life and had very little to worry about from the authorities. But any time I began to lose sight of reality, a flashing street scene reminded me of how things really were. I’ll never forget the sight of an egg vendor being beaten by a group of policemen one morning as I drove to work. She was a poor migrant from the countryside, and I had no idea what offense—likely minor—she had committed. As the yolks oozed from the broken eggshells onto the pavement, petrified commuters pretended not to notice, and the vendor endured the assault without so much as a cry for help. I also tried to ignore what was happening but, unlike the other commuters, I didn’t fear the police. My reasons were different, and by that point had become a reflex: what right did I have to condemn the beating, given what my country had done in Vietnam during the war?

The guilt and shame behind my decision not to protest the egg vendor’s beating are, I believe, the same impulses that explain the international community’s decision to ignore Vietnam’s pro-democracy movement. A Westerner advocating for democracy in contemporary Vietnam might make arguments uncomfortably similar to the justifications for the American war—and didn’t we learn our lesson? Never mind that offering public and, where appropriate, material support to an indigenous dissident movement is categorically different from advocating military intervention. Westerners long ago lost their “moral authority” to be involved in contemporary Vietnam, the thinking goes, other than as tourists or investors.

One problem with this assumption is that it is self-serving—it allows Westerners to avoid complicated and uncomfortable feelings. Another problem is that no one has bothered to talk to the Vietnamese. It’s possible to ask the dissidents what kind of support they want, although their responses to this question involve considerable personal risk.


THE DISSIDENTS I know hope for foreign involvement in their cause. They ask for the support of journalists and activists in telling their story and pressuring the Communist Party to change. In addition, they say, the international community has a duty to enforce human rights standards through the international bodies to which Vietnam belongs or hopes to join. Finally, many single out the United States: Americans must do more, both as individuals and through their government, to demand change in Vietnam.

This last point invites controversy, but it’s based not on some naïve belief in American intentions; it’s an acknowledgment of geopolitical reality. The United States is one of Vietnam’s largest trading partner; it is home to the world’s largest Vietnamese diaspora; Americans are one of the largest groups to visit Vietnam every year; and, despite the recent emergence of China, the United States remains an influential actor in Southeast Asia. Guilt-induced fantasies about Americans paying penance for their past sins by staying on the sidelines are just that: fantasies. They fail to account for growing U.S. involvement in the country. As this involvement continues, Americans must ensure that it has a human rights component and doesn’t simply suit American strategic or business interests.

Among the dissidents I have spoken to, Nguyen Thanh Giang, a seventy-four-year-old geophysicist from the North, has fairly representative views on these subjects. Although he’s never been a member of the Communist Party, he held a government post at the Hanoi Geology Bureau for most of his career. The government allowed him to travel to the United States for a handful of conferences in the eighties and nineties—he was one of the first scientists since reunification permitted to do so—which opened his eyes to the problems in Vietnam. He began writing essays and open letters to the Communist Party calling for reform. In 1999, he was arrested for dissent and spent over a month in solitary confinement, but the authorities released him due to pressure from the U.S. government and scientific and human-rights groups. He is now retired and lives under house arrest in Hanoi.

Although Nguyen Thanh Giang calls for American support for the pro-democracy cause, he is no apologist for American conduct during the war. Americans are right to feel sorrow and shame, he wrote to me in an e-mail. “But the sorrow and shame…should be similarly expressed by the Vietnamese authorities,” he wrote. The Vietnamese committed their own “equally foolish and immoral” acts during and after the war, including the Land Reform campaign of the mid 1950s, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the brutal suppression of the Nhan Van movement, a reformist faction of the Communist Party. He brings these things up not to cancel out American conduct, but to demonstrate what he believes is war’s true nature—a “dirty game” from which no one emerges unsullied. But guilt doesn’t mean that Americans should be paralyzed with remorse; rather, it places a special burden on them to “compensate for the destruction caused by the bombing in Vietnam” by supporting the pro-democracy movement.

Some Americans have spoken out about the situation in Vietnam. Very few of them are from the Left. The handful of American publications that have carried pieces in support of the pro-democracy movement are conservative: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Sun. George W. Bush hosted four Vietnamese-American activists—one of whom had spent time in prison—at the White House in 2007 and helped secure the release of cyber-dissident Nguyen Vu Binh before Vietnamese president Nguyen Minh Triet visted the White House that same year. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has not shown the same interest in the subject, which is perhaps unsurprising given his reticence to speak about human rights in Asia at all. That leaves two major American constituencies engaged in Vietnam, both of which are conservative: the missionary networks who focus on religious freedom and the investors who focus on economic freedom.

Religious and economic freedom are indeed important issues to the pro-democracy movement, but its platform is much broader and includes issues dear to progressives, such as minority and labor rights. The dissidents have identified as natural allies the millions of workers in Vietnam’s factories producing goods for the West. Strikes, although illegal, have increased in recent years, and the dissidents are working hard to make inroads with the workers, despite the government’s attempts to block them. As long as the Vietnamese government and Western businesses are the sole voices on the factories, workers will continue to face harsh conditions, low pay, and political isolation.

Still, there is a way forward for Americans who care about democracy and human rights in Vietnam. The United States has very little to feel good about when looking back on its history in Vietnam, but then neither does Great Britain when looking back on its history in Zimbabwe or Burma. And still, Britons and their government have become leading critics of both regimes, even if this has meant putting up with predictable charges of old habits dying hard. Americans who voice their opposition to the current regime in Vietnam can expect to hear the same charge—from the Vietnamese government and from outside the country too. This will stir uncomfortable memories, especially given the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


BUT THE COST of doing nothing is too high, especially in light of recent developments in Vietnam, which suggest that the movement is at a critical stage. In the summer of 2008, the dissidents received an unlikely gift from the authorities. The Vietnamese government had quietly granted a multibillion-dollar land concession to a Chinese mining company in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Under the terms of the deal, the Chinese company brought in thousands of guest workers, at a time of high unemployment in Vietnam, and built housing complexes and restaurants with signs in Chinese.

Few issues unite the Vietnamese like suspicion of their large neighbor to the north. The two countries share a stormy history marked by long periods of Chinese occupation and war—most recently, a brief but bloody border conflict in 1979. The backlash to the mining deal was swift. Ninety-eight-year-old General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military hero of Vietnam’s wars against the French and Americans, publicly criticized the concession. Vietnamese bloggers wrote about potential infiltrations by undercover Chinese military and intelligence agents. The pro-democracy movement seized on the issue and made fiery appeals to Vietnamese nationalism, couched in democratic principles: unaccountable, greedy government elites were selling Vietnam’s soul to Beijing, and only a truly democratic system could hold them in check.

One critic who connected the China issue with democracy was Le Cong Dinh, a forty-one-year-old lawyer who studied at Tulane University on a Fulbright scholarship. Le Cong Dinh is famous in Vietnam for having represented the government in a number of high-profile cases, including a trade dispute with the United States over catfish dumping, which Vietnam won. He also undertook the potentially risky job of defending dissidents in court, but his fame and good standing with the government protected him from repercussions. He finally ran afoul of the authorities when he began blogging about the bauxite mine and also about territorial disputes with China over potentially oil-rich islands in the South China Sea. On January 20 of this year, he was sentenced to five years in prison for conducting propaganda against the state. Le Cong Dinh’s imprisonment sent a clear message: speaking out about China and democracy, even for those with government connections or from politically prominent families, would no longer be tolerated.

As more Vietnamese become aware of the pro-democracy movement through the China issue, and as the crackdown against the dissidents continues to intensify, international support for the pro-democracy cause in Vietnam is crucial now more than ever. Le Cong Dinh’s case is a reminder that political dissent in authoritarian societies is a risky business with no guarantee of success. Imagine, though, if Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of the gulag had fallen on deaf ears. Or if Charter 77 had never been read beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia. There are Solzhenitsyns and Havels in Vietnam right now. Will anyone listen?

Dustin Roasa is a freelance journalist based in Cambodia who writes about human rights and development issues in Southeast Asia. He lived in Vietnam in 2004–2005 and regularly returns to the country.