Interview with Nguyen Dac Kien:
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=bTXPm9-QX5g&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DbTXPm9-QX5g&gl=DE
Nguyen Phu Trong. Reporter Nguyen Dac Kien
HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam’s government has asked its citizens to
debate planned revisions to the country’s constitution. But when
journalist Nguyen Dac Kien weighed in on his blog, he quickly discovered
the limits of its willingness for discussion. His state-run paper fired
him the next day.
Kien had taken issue with a statement by the Communist Party
chief in which he said discussions over the revisions should not include
questions over the role of the party.
In a post Monday that rapidly went viral, he wrote that the party
chief had no right to talk to the people of Vietnam like this, and that
state corruption was the real problem.
Kien said he wasn’t
surprised by his firing, which was announced Wednesday in an article on
page 2 of the Family and Society, the paper where he worked.
“I
knew that there would be consequences,” Kien said by telephone. “I have
always expected bad things to happen to me. The struggle for freedom and
democracy is very long and I want to go to the end of that road, and I
hope I can.”
Vietnam opened up its economy in the 1990s after the
collapse of the Soviet Union deprived it of a vital economic partner and
ally, but under an authoritarian regime, government critics, free
speech activists and other people the party regards as dissidents can be
locked up for many years. The emergence of the Internet as an arena of
free and uncontrollable expression, coupled with a stuttering economy,
has led to new pressures on the regime, but few think its grip on power
is seriously weakening.
The government is revising the
constitution for the first time since 1992, citing the need to speed up
the country’s development.
Perhaps the most significant change in
the draft on the government’s website is the removal of language
stipulating that the state sector “plays the leading” role in the
national economy. That could help the government in its pledge to
restructure the country’s lumbering, corruption-riddled and unproductive
state-owned sector, which eats up much of the national budget and has
been blamed for the current economic difficulties.
The government has asked for public discussion on the revisions, even
opening up its website for comments, a move that carried some risk. In
response, a group of several hundred well-known intellectuals, including
a former justice minister, have circulated an online petition calling
for multiparty elections, private land ownership, respect for human
rights and the separation of the branches of government. More than 5,000
people have signed it.
Vietnam’s state-owned television station
quoted the Communist Party’s general secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, as
saying those ideas amounted to the abolishment of article 4 of the
constitution, which guarantees the political dominance of the party. He
said that was a “political, ideological and ethical deterioration” and
should be opposed.
Kien immediately took to his blog, writing “you
are the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. If you
want to use the word deterioration, you can only use it in relation to
Communist Party members. You can’t say that about Vietnamese people.” He
said there was nothing wrong with wanting political pluralism, and that
“embezzlement and corruption” by party members was a bigger problem.
The
Family and Society newspaper, which is owned by the ministry of health,
said in the article that it fired Kien for “violating the operating
rules of the newspaper and his labor contract,” adding that he alone was
“accountable before the law for his behavior.”
In a posting on
his Facebook page after his firing, Kien said “whatever happens, I just
want you to understand that I don’t want to be a hero, I don’t want to
be an idol. I just think that once our country has freedom and
democracy, you will find out that my articles are very normal, really
normal, and nothing big.”
He also said he understood the decision of the paper’s editors, saying “if I were in their position, I may have acted the same.”
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2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-vietnam-journalist-hits-limits-of-governments-willingness-to-debate-new-constitution/2013/02/27/784b1de6-80ab-11e2-a671-0307392de8de_story.html