From: 71054.266@CompuServe.COM (TT)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: [NEWS] VN-Intellectuals-Communism
Date: 12 Aug 92 18:33:17 GMT
Organization: Saigon.COM Public Access UNIX(tm), Sunnyvale CA  (408)739-1520

Reut05:54 08-12
 VIETNAM INTELLECTUALS URGE DROPPING OF COMMUNISM
    By Kathleen Callo
    HANOI, Vietnam, 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 Wednesday.
    Phan Dinh Dieu, the deputy head of the National Center 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
criticizing 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.
 REUTER
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese