Touring Asia in November, Barack Obama
hit all
the usual presidential themes, including free trade, investment, and
strategic alliances, except for one: human rights. During a scripted
press conference in Beijing, Obama barely mentioned it. In Shanghai he
offered only mild criticism of China's Internet blocks, saying he was a
"big supporter of noncensorship." Obama's nonstatements amount to a
clear break from nearly three decades of U.S. policy. From its
engagement with the brutal Burmese junta to its decision to avoid the
Dalai Lama when he first visited Washington during Obama's tenure to its
silence over the initial outbreak of protests in Iran, Obama's
administration has taken a much quieter approach to rights advocacy than
his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "Conceding to China
upfront doesn't buy you better cooperation further down the track," says
Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.
By DOAN VAN TOAI ( FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE )
hen the Communists took over North Vietnam in 1954, a million refugees fled to the South. I personally heard stories of their incredible suffering. But, along with other South Vietnamese, I refused to believe them. A generation later, I could not believe Solzhenitsyn's book "The Gulag Archipelago," either. I dismissed it as anti-Communist propaganda. But by 1979, I had published my own book, "The Vietnamese Gulag." Can those who have suffered the horror of Communism ever convince those who have not experienced it? From 1945, when I was born in the village of Caivon in Vinh Long province, 100 miles south of Saigon, until I left Vietnam in May 1978, I never enjoyed peace. My family's house was burned three times in the war against the French. To escape the fighting, my parents moved from one village to another throughout my youth. Like the majority of Vietnamese patriots, they joined the resistance forces fighting the French. As I grew up, I myself saw how the peasants were oppressed by the local officials of the successive Saigon regimes, how they were victimized by the French bombardments. I learned the history of my country's thousand-year struggle against Chinese occupation and its century-long effort against Western domination. With this background, my compatriots and I grew up with a hatred of foreign intervention.
New Arrests of Peaceful Critics Show Vietnam Lacks Commitment to Protecting Human Rights
(New York) - The Vietnamese government has rejected and ignored recommendations to improve its deteriorating human rights record raised during the UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review process that ended this week, Human Rights Watch said today.
"Shockingly, Vietnam denied to the Human Rights Council that it has arrested and imprisoned hundreds of peaceful dissidents and independent religious activists," said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Yet in just the four months since Vietnam's last appearance at the council, it has arrested scores more."
(New York) - The Vietnamese government should immediately free activists who have been unlawfully imprisoned for peacefully campaigning for workers' rights, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
Sep 12, 2009 - A crackdown on anti-China sentiment in Vietnam signals
factional politicking inside the ruling Communist Party ahead of the
next National Congress and has drawn critical attention to the
China-aligned General Department II (GD II), a controversial and
semi-autonomous intelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats to
domestic security.
Vietnamese
authorities have in recent weeks arrested and detained a handful of
journalists and bloggers who have penned materials critical of China,
including articles related to Beijing's investment in a bauxite mining
venture in the geographically strategic Central Highlands region and on
the long-lasting controversy over the two sides' contested claims to
the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Despite pleges to protect South Vietnam, former US
president Richard Nixon privately vowed to "cut off the head" of its
leader unless he backed peace with the communist North, tapes have
revealed.
The tapes appear to confirm charges by South Vietnam's late president,
Nguyen Van Thieu, who tearfully accused the United States of breaking
its word to protect Saigon when the southern capital fell in 1975.
HANOI (AFP) - - A global association of lawyers says Vietnam's
"arbitrary" arrest of a human rights lawyer contravenes international
legal standards and the country's own constitution.
The International Bar Association's (IBA's) Human Rights Institute made
the comments in a letter to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, dated
Wednesday and received by AFP late Thursday.
Almost all Vietnam state media outlets on Saturday June 13, 2009 simultaneously reported police had arrested a lawyer known for his role in defending pro-democracy activists, accusing him of working with 'hostile forces' against the communist state.
The People's Public Security Newspaper, run by Vietnam police force, and most of other state media outlets reported on Saturday that lawyer Le Cong Dinh had been taken into custody in an "expedited procedure" for "colluding with domestic and foreign reactionaries to sabotage the security of Vietnamese State."
Former South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu on Kissinger's memoirs and the Vietnam war
SPIEGEL:
Mr Thieu, for five years, from 1968 to 1973, the United States tried to negotiate peace for Vietnam. America's chief negotiator, Henry Kissinger, describes at length in his memoirs how you, as President of South Vietnam, undermined his efforts to bring peace in a war that had lasted for many years, cost millions of lives and, in his words, seemed destined to 'break America's heart'. Why were you obstructive?
THIEU:
That is complete nonsense. If I had been obstructive, there would have been no peace settlement in 1973 ââ¬â€œ although, as everyone knows, it was not a good peace, witness the consequences in Vietnam. Kissinger represented the policy and interests of the American Government. I, as President of Vietnam, had the task of defending my country's vital national interests.
I frequently pointed out to President Nixon and Dr Kissinger that abandoning a few unimportant positions in a little country like Vietnam might not mean very much to a great power like the United States. But for us, it was a matter of life and death for the entire nation. ....
By VO VAN AI From today's Wall Street Journal Asia.
Vietnam's human-rights record will come under scrutiny tomorrow at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Hanoi is hoping the council, which includes Cuba and Saudi Arabia, will rub clean its murky record on human rights. Freedom-loving countries shouldn't let this happen.
Vietnam's report to the Human Rights Council in preparation for this review paints a glowing self-portrait of the Communist nation as a "rule-of-law state of the people, by the people and for the people." But human beings are absent from Vietnam's concept of human rights. The document extols political stability over political rights. The "most sacred" human right, states the report, is the right to independence won by the Communists under Ho Chi Minh. It also claims Vietnam should be an exception to universal human-rights rules.
2008 Human Rights Report: Vietnam 
hen the Communists took over North Vietnam in 1954, a million refugees fled to the South. I personally heard stories of their incredible suffering. But, along with other South Vietnamese, I refused to believe them. A generation later, I could not believe Solzhenitsyn's book "The Gulag Archipelago," either. I dismissed it as anti-Communist propaganda. But by 1979, I had published my own book, "The Vietnamese Gulag." Can those who have suffered the horror of Communism ever convince those who have not experienced it? From 1945, when I was born in the village of Caivon in Vinh Long province, 100 miles south of Saigon, until I left Vietnam in May 1978, I never enjoyed peace. My family's house was burned three times in the war against the French. To escape the fighting, my parents moved from one village to another throughout my youth. Like the majority of Vietnamese patriots, they joined the resistance forces fighting the French. As I grew up, I myself saw how the peasants were oppressed by the local officials of the successive Saigon regimes, how they were victimized by the French bombardments. I learned the history of my country's thousand-year struggle against Chinese occupation and its century-long effort against Western domination. With this background, my compatriots and I grew up with a hatred of foreign intervention.
