From: vinsight@netcom.com (Chan T. Vninsight)
Subject: The Fox Guarding The Hen House
Originator: daemon@media.mit.edu
Reply-To: vinsight@netcom.com
Organization: N/A
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 07:59:45 GMT


THE FOX GUARDING THE HEN HOUSE:
How can a corrupt regime fight corruption?
(Vietnam Insight February 1992)

The current communist regime in Vietnam is rife with corruption. Its
communist counterparts everywhere else have contracted the same illness
with similar degrees of severity. The strike is hardly by chance for
there is no exception throughout the communist world. It is indeed an
endemic ailment of communism.

It rules by and through the corruption of power. The party's
monopolistic power is not only absolute, total but also life-enveloping.
It touches every aspect of life around the clock to the most private
parts of one's existence -- from what one eats to what one says or
reads, from whom one meets and where one goes. And it is protected not
only by a well-armed militia, army and secret police, but also by law
and the Constitution.

This corrupt system uses privilege, threats, and worse to force
virtually every citizen to become eyes and ears of the communist party.
Children spy on their own parents, friends turn against friends, and the
entire society is ruined by the lack of trust. Recently, the German
government opened to the public the secret files compiled on them by the
communist regime. Many were shocked to find out loved ones, close
friends, or relatives had turned against them. This social scar will
take decades to heal.

Ironically, the very instrument communism uses to maintain its grip
works against the system over time. Corruption feeds on itself, thrives
as the system slids and poverty rises, and grows like a tumor plagued by
immeasurable greed and self-rewarding impetus. With time, the one-party
rule system takes on a secondary shape of multiple warlords which, like
a snake with many heads, fails to follow a central command. This is
precisely the factor that brings the system to complete catastrophe and
final collapse.

More than any other communist regime, Vietnamese communism has failed
miserably. And not coincidently, its corruption is also the most
pervasive and rampant. Virtually everything in Vietnam can be bought or
sold, including the very people employed to combat corruption!

It is the hopeless case of a system which based its survival on
corruption, and in the end, was destroyed by the very monster it
created.

Despite the Vietnamese communists' repeated pronouncements of efforts to
curb corruption, it will never succeed. Even the regime's deputy Prime
Minister Phan Van Khai admitted so in December: "Our corruption disease
is incurable," he said. It is not because the problem is too immense,
but because the regime could not do away with itself. Eliminating
corruption is analogous to taking away the regime's absolute power and
destroying the highly privileged machine designed for its own
protection. The drive against corruption in reality is more of a
disguised move to eliminate other factions or unwanted elements. Under
the banner, thousands of party members have been purged or jailed. All
the while, unchecked corruption continues to erode the society and
bleed dry the nation.

Vietnam can only rise from the seas of corruption and become a healthy
and prosperous society when the system that nurtures the illness is done
away with. This takes the gut of a leader to attack the problem at its
roots such as Boris Yeltsin of Russia. This man demonstrated his
resolute stand against the communist system by sincerely combating
corruption in his province long before he became the hero who freed his
nation. Until the Vietnamese Communist leadership places the nation's
interest above that of themselves and the party, or is overthrown by the
people, Vietnam can never change for the better.


-- 
Vietnam Insight (vinsight@netcom.com)
Chan Tran, editor
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese