September 4, 2007
HANOI (AFP) – A rights group Tuesday said it fears communist Vietnam may soon arrest a dissident and supporter of dispossessed farmers after the government stepped up state media attacks and intimidation against him.
Nguyen Khac Toan, deputy editor of banned online publication Tu Do Dan Chu (Freedom and Democracy), was harassed by a recent “people’s tribunal” of retired party members and police, said Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
The Paris-based media watchdog and human rights group said the August 31 incident in Hanoi and a recent government-orchestrated media campaign against the army veteran “could foreshadow his imminent imprisonment.”
The people’s court in Toan’s Hanoi neighbourhood accused him of inciting farmers to demonstrate in the capital last month, and officials recommended sending him to a political re-education camp, said RSF in a statement.
Toan spent four years in jail from 2002 for “spying” after circulating pro-democracy articles online, and his movements have been restricted since.
He was attacked last week in a state media article entitled “A political opportunist unmasked” — along with leaders of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) — for allegedly encouraging the peasant protests.
The state-run Voice of Vietnam said he had contacted farmers protesting land confiscations and “encouraged them to cause social disorder by giving them money supplied by Vietnamese reactionaries living abroad.”
The UBCV has also reported increased harassment since supporting the farmers’ protests, in which one of its monks was detained for handing out money raised in an international campaign for “Victims of Injustice in Vietnam.”
“Security police have intensified threats, harassments, controls, surveillance and interrogations against UBCV members in Ho Chi Minh City” and other provinces, said the International Buddhist Information Bureau.
“Give the intensity of this mounting pressure, the International Buddhist Information Bureau is deeply concerned that arrests may be imminent,” said a statement by the activist group, which is also based in Paris.
