Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Date:         Thu, 7 Jan 1993 17:09:23 -0500
              USENET." <VIETNET@USCVM.BITNET>
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: Vietnam's Human Rights

01/02

Vietnam-Rights

Copyright, 1993. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By GRANT PECK
 Associated Press Writer
   HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- A dissident intellectual detained without trial for
more than two years has written Communist Party leaders asking for democratic
freedoms, the human rights group Asia Watch said Sunday.
   The letter from Doan Viet Hoat, a prominent academic in his 50s, has drawn
new attention to the fate of dissidents in Vietnam as relations with the United
States warm.
   In a separate case, a Vietnamese-born American arrested for trying to
establish a new political party will face trial.
   While Vietnam has revitalized its economy over the past five years with
free-market reforms, there has been only limited liberalization in the
political sphere.
   Hoat's appeal, issued from his cell in Ho Chi Minh City, called on leaders
of the one-party state to launch a process of "dialogue and national concord."
The letter, dated Nov. 1, specifically sought the release of all political
prisoners, the implementation of civil and political freedoms, and a commitment
to free elections.
   The New York-based Asia Watch, which published the letter's text in a report
on Hoat, did not say how it obtained a copy.
   Vietnam's human rights record probably will receive more attention as its
U.S. relations improve, Asia Watch's executive director, Sidney Jones, said in
a telephone interview Saturday.
   The United States has maintained a diplomatic freeze and economic embargo
against Vietnam since 1975. But a recent agreement to accelerate efforts to
resolve the fates of 2,264 Americans still missing from the war makes its
likely the embargo will be lifted this year.
   "I think that cases like Hoat's will come more and more to the fore as
normalization proceeds," Jones said.
   Hoat was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City in November 1990 and charged with
publishing a newsletter called Freedom Forum, Asia Watch said. The typewritten
sheets, passed hand to hand, criticized government policies and proposed
reforms.
   About eight other intellectuals prominent in South Vietnam before the 1975
Communist takeover also were arrested in the case, according to a May article
in the official newspaper Saigon Giai Phong.
   The article, cited by Asia Watch as the source for most of its information
on the case, said Freedom Forum was used to try to "overthrow the people's
power," a crime punishable by death.
   Hoat was previously detained without charge for "re-education" from 1976 to
1988.
   In the other separate case, Nguyen Si Binh, a 37-year-old businessman from
Alpharetta, Ga., was arrested with 16 other people in Ho Chi Minh City in April
and charged with trying to overthrow the government, his family said last week.
   Binh, who left Vietnam in April 1975, helped start a political party in 1990
aimed at abolishing the Communists' monopoly on power, according to documents
sent to The Associated Press by his family.
   His People's Action Party had about a dozen Vietnamese-American members, but
also claimed to have branches in 40 Vietnamese provinces, the documents showed.
   Binh's family said relatives in Vietnam told them he will go on trial in the
next month.
   Vietnamese officials would confirm only that Binh's case is being handled by
the Ministry of the Interior.
   A Foreign Ministry official said Saturday his office would not answer a
series of questions submitted by the AP last week about human rights policy
because they concerned a "sensitive" subject.
   A recent report by Human Rights Watch, Asia Watch's parent group, said
Vietnam saw some positive human-rights developments in the past year, including
constitutional reforms giving more prominence to individual rights and the
release of many officials of the Saigon regime who had been held without trial
since 1975.
   "On the negative side," the report said, "the government continued to
arrest, detain and sentence individuals for nonviolent dissent, to hold
prisoners in conditions that threatened their health and safety, to censor
writers, and to repressively control religious institutions."
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU