VIETNAM POLICE ARREST TWO DEMOCRACY ACTIVISTS, SAY SUPPORTERS
Mon Feb 5, 12:51 PM ET
HANOI (AFP) – Police in communist Vietnam have arrested two dissident lawyers as part of a crackdown on free speech, and the detainees have started a hunger strike, pro-democracy groups said.
Hanoi-based lawyers Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Cong Nhan were detained on Saturday and have refused food “to protest the authorities’ abusive oppression and illegal arrest,” said the banned People’s Democratic Party.
The government, in a one-line statement issued by foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung on Monday, said “this information is a total fabrication.”
Police in Hanoi said Monday they had no information about the arrests, which were reported to have occurred on Saturday, which marked the 77th anniversary of the foundation of Vietnam’s communist party.
Several pro-democracy groups, and a larger coalition known as ’Bloc 8406,’ have emerged over the past year in Vietnam, a one-party state which tolerates no rival political groups and controls the media.
The emergence of an identifiable pro-democracy movement, aided by the Internet, is “a new phenomenon in Vietnamese politics,” country expert Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Force Academy wrote in a December report.
The People’s Democratic Party, which has members among Vietnamese immigrant communities in the United States and Australia, said in a statement Monday that “recently the Hanoi government has cracked down hard on dissidents.”
In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s southern business hub, police recently detained Nguyen Phong, of the banned Progressive Party, for three days, the group said.
In January, police arrested Tran Quoc Hien, spokesperson of another banned group, the newly formed United Workers-Farmers Organization of Vietnam, after late last year arresting seven other members of the organisation, it said.
Another pro-democracy group, the Vietnam Reform Party, also said police were holding Dai and Nhan, of the Progressive Party, and that police had also temporarily detained Bach Ngoc Duong, and three other activists Saturday.
The group said that “during the interrogation, Mr Bach Ngoc Duong was assaulted by the police officer. He was punched in the face with his glasses broken while another officer strangled his neck.”
The group also claimed that police in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai had arrested and beaten two 21-year-old Protestant Christians.