From: Nhan Tran <tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com>
Subject: NEWS/VN: VN intellectuals urge dropping of communism
Originator: daemon@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Reply-To: tran@peora.sdc.ccur.com
Organization: N/A
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 14:37:42 GMT


08/12

VIETNAM INTELLECTUALS URGE DROPPING OF COMMUNISM

    By Kathleen Callo
    HANOI, Aug 12, Reuter - Vietnamese intellectuals have been urging the ruling
Communist Party to drop its Marxist ideology and allow greater freedom of
expression, a prominent academic said on Wednesday.
    Phan Dinh Dieu, the deputy head of the National Centre for Scientific
Research, said he had urged the party chief, Do Muoi, to accept more political
openness and drop irrelevant ideology.
    Dieu said that at one meeting with Do Muoi last year, the two of them spent
more than three hours discussing his petition blaming socialism for ruining the
economy.
    "I told Mr Do Muoi: 'I hope you can transform the Communist Party from a
party of dictatorship to a party of leadership in a democratic society'," Dieu
said.
    Dieu, a 55-year-old mathematician, said most members of the Communist Party
no longer believed in communism.
    Intellectuals were now urging the party to recast itself as a patriotic or
nationalist party, he said, adding that the present Communist Party was more
popular than sister parties in the old Soviet bloc because of its original
struggle against French colonialism.
    "There have been some changes in the last year but they are not enough," he
told Reuters in an interview.
    People could now circulate criticial petitions like his but the official
media would not publish them, he said. Four or five years ago people risked
arrest for even circulating such tracts.
    Some people say the official media have been told to avoid criticising
communism since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    But Dieu said Vietnamese in state offices -- including two top party
institutions -- were hotly debating the crisis of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet
collapse and the future of Vietnam.
    The party offices were the Nguyen Ai Quoc institute, the institute of higher
learning for top party cadres, where he recently lectured, and the
Marxism-Leninism Institute, a party think-tank.
    "There is a contradiction. In the press there is perhaps less freedom but
among the people, in the institutions, in the collectives, there is more debate,
more discussion," he said.
    "If you compare the political climate in our country now to five or six
years ago, we have made progress...the process of change in the party will be
very complicated, not a straight line."
    Diplomats told Reuters recently that five or six people were arrested this
spring for political reasons in Danang, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City, including a
man who expressed support for change in the former Soviet Union.
    No immediate confirmation was available from the government, which denies
holding political prisoners.
    The communist party began to move in the mid-1980s from a centrally-planned
to a market economy. The shift was accompanied by limited political reforms
allowing more freedom of speech and giving government and legislative bodies
more independence from the once-all powerful communist party.