ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON Sun Aug 8 - Cold War enemies the United
States and Vietnam demonstrated their blossoming military relations
Sunday as a U.S. nuclear supercarrier floated in waters off the
Southeast Asian nation's coast -- sending a message that China is not the
region's only big player.
HANOI, Vietnam -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chided Vietnam on Thursday for intolerance of dissent and infringement of Internet freedom, even as she celebrated its 15 years of normalized relations with the United States.
Mrs. Clinton said she raised the issues of jailed democracy activists, attacks on religious groups and curbs on social-networking Web sites during a meeting with Vietnam's deputy prime minister, Pham Gia Khiem.
Vietnam: Stop Cyber Attacks Against Online Critics Government Crackdown on Bloggers and Websites
(New York, May 27, 2010) -- Vietnam has launched a sophisticated and sustained two-pronged attack against online dissent, Human Rights Watch said today. The government is detaining and intimidating independent Vietnamese bloggers while also permitting cyber attacks from Vietnam to disable websites critical of the government.
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.
2009 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.
