Banned books and other forms of censorship in Vietnam during 2002 by Stephen Denney Library Assistant, U.C. Berkeley In honor of Banned Books Week, and because I collect daily news on Vietnam (formerly part of my job, now a personal interest), I am posting below a chronology of events in Vietnam related to banned books and other forms of censorship in Vietnam so far this year. I might update this chronology at the end of the year. This is not intended to be comprehensive but based on the news I have read. Vietnam is in a historically unique situation, making the transition from a closed, totalitarian society toward a more open society although still ruled by a one-party regime whose leaders maintain an authoritarian mindset. The change began in the mid-1980s, accompanied by economic reforms similar to China. The transition has been aided by the development of a market economy and opening to the West, along with the large influx of overseas Vietnamese who visit Vietnam and maintain contacts with their relatives and friends still in Vietnam. But, also similar to China, the Vietnamese Communist Party fears any threat to its monopoly of power and launches periodic crackdowns on those who advocate political democracy or in other ways challenge the political orthodoxy. Most of the dissidents mentioned below are northerners, formerly members of the Communist Party who became disillusioned with the regime. There are also prominent southern dissidents, such as Catholic priest Fr. Chan Tin, Buddhist monks Thich Quang Do, Thich Huyen Quang and Thich Tue Sy, or democracy advocates Nguyen Dan Que and Nguyen Dinh Huy, but the government treats these dissidents more severely than those in the north, in some cases including lengthy prison terms, thus making it more difficult for them to get their word out than their colleagues in the north. Much of the conflict described below centers around the use of Internet and Internet cafes in Vietnam, the great majority of users being young people. With a literate culture and many computer savvy youth, Internet is developing into the major battleground between censors and dissidents in Vietnam. In the entries below, I include the citation at the end in parenthesis; more than one entry is separated by a semi-colon. Most of these stories were posted by me to ALAOIF, so I also include the ALAOIF reference number when available. ALAOIF is the email discussion forum of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom. To retrieve a particular message posted to ALAOIF go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alaoif--ala1.ala.org/ and type : ALAOIF:[number] in the search archive box Abbreviations: AP = Associated Press AFP = Agence France Presse CPJ = Committee to Protect Journalists DPA = Deutsche Presse Agentur RSF = Reporters san Frontieres VNB = Vietnam News Briefs, an online service of the Financial Times that monitors the press in Vietnam VNA = Vietnam New Agency VOA = Voice of America Jan. 8 - A directive issued by Ministry of Culture and Information instructs police to confiscate and destroy publications lacking official approval. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Decision 12, issued by Vice Minister of Culture and Information Nguyen Khac Hai, "establishes formal nationwide regulations tightening restrictions over prohibited publications, including those that express dissenting political viewpoints." (CPJ, Jan. 17). Jan. 14 - Bui Minh Quoc, age 61, is arrested in Dalat and charged with "possessing anti-government literature", including his own writings. He had conducted extensive research on Vietnamese territorial concessions to China, according to international news reports. Quoc is a poet from northern Vietnam and former member of the Vietnamese Communist Party (CPJ appeal March 13, ALAOIF:20724; a biography of him can be found at http://www.fva.org/bios/bmquoc.htm) Jan. 16 - Police in Ho Chi Minh City set aflame 7.6 tons of books confiscated last year during various raids. The bulk of material is said to be pornographic books and magazines, as well as materials printed overseas. Books seized also include works by prominent dissidents, such as Diary, by Tran Do, Meditation and Aspiration by Nguyen Thanh Giang, and A Few Words Before Dying, by Vu Cao Quan. "Such events take place many times a year as the volume of books is too large to be stored," says an officer of the city police's cultural security division. (DPA Jan. 17, ALAOIF:19790; see also AP Jan. 15, ALAOIF:19789). Feb. 21 - Le Chi Quang, age 31, a computer teacher with a law degree, is arrested at an Internet cafe in Hanoi. He is then sent to B14 prison outside Hanoi where he is held incommunicado. He had written an essay on Internet titled "Beware of the Northern Empire" criticizing the Vietnam-China border treaty. He is charged with sending "dangerous information" overseas. Police seize his computer and documents in his home. Officials announce in August that Quang will soon be brought to trial, charged under Article 88 of Vietnam's Criminal Code, which bans the distribution of information that opposes the government. (CPJ appeal March 13, ALAOIF:20724; Reporters without Borders, www.rsf.org, press release March 15, ALAOIF:20746; CPJ news alert Aug. 14, ALAOIF:24083). March 8 - Literature professor Tran Khue is arrested in Ho Chi Minh City following a police search of his home. The arrest is apparently for an open letter to China president Jiang Zemin, which he posted on Internet, protesting the Vietnam-China border treaty. On March 10 he is placed under house arrest and police cut him off from all outside communication, under administrative directive 31/CP. (CPJ appeal March 13, ALAOIF:20724; Reporters without Borders, www.rsf.org, press release March 15, ALAOIF:20746). March 27 - Pham Hong Son is arrested after translating into Vietnamese and posting online an article titled "What is Democracy?". Son, age 35, a physician, had also also forwarded one of his Internet articles, titled "Some Good Signs for Democracy in Vietnam" to Party chief Nong Duc Manh and various newspapers. He is detained in Prison B14 outside Hanoi. (CPJ appeal by Ann Cooper July 2, ALAOIF:23684; DPA July 8, ALAOIF:23723). April 1 - A resolution issued by the Communist Party of Vietnam states it will deal toughly with party members whose "words and deeds go contrary to the party's principles." It says any circulation of documents, books newspapers or other publication with "wrongful" or "bad" contents will be strictly banned. It adds that that the Ministry of Culture and Information will revamp regulations this year on the import of cultural items and will block radio broadcasts by "foreign reactionaries directed at Vietnam". (AP April 1, ALAOIF:21006). April 13 - A government directive goes into effect, instructing officials from the province level up to compile a list of secrets they are responsible for guarding. It designates three classes of classified information, ranging from basic state secrets to extremely sensitive top secret documents, particularly those concerning national security, foreign policy, espionage and counter-espionage and the internal wrangling of the Vietnamese Communist Party. (AP March 29, ALAOIF:20960). June 20 - Nguyen Khoa Diem, head of the Vietnamese Communist Party's Central Ideology and Culture Board, declares that the media are no longer permitted to report freely on the corruption cases involving a well known criminal gang. He says his board has instructed media not to "expose secrets, create internal divisions, or hinder key propaganda tasks." (CPJ appeal by Ann Cooper July 2, ALAOIF:23684) June 24 - Only top-ranking officials and foreigners will be allowed to watch international satellite TV in Vietnam under a new government order. Vietnamese allowed to view satellite television will include cabinet ministers and vice ministers, governors, vice governors, city mayors and vice mayors and media organizations. Foreign organizations and hotels with international guests will also be allowed to install satellite tv equipment. This directive reinforces an earlier ban which had been ignored by increasing numbers of people, particularly in Ho Chi Minh City, where shops had been selling satellite dishes and receivers. (AP June 24, ALAOIF:23588). June 27 - Prime Minister Phan Van Khai instructs the Ministry of Culture and Information to examine the management of Internet cafes and "correct their errors". The circular, published in Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper, is also addressed to the police, post office and various government ministries and Party committees. . The Ministry of Culture and Information instructs owners of Internet cafes to monitor customers' online activities in order to prevent them from accessing "state secrets" or "reactionary" documents. Approximately 2,000 websites are blocked, including sites of emigre opposition groups. There are nearly 5,000 Internet cafes in Vietnam. About 250,000 out of the nation's 80 million population have direct access to Internet. (AFP June 27, ALAOIF:23589; CPJ appeal by Ann Cooper July 2, ALAOIF:23684). July 9 - Hanoi police destroy 40,780 CDs, VCDs, CDRoms, 810 videotapes, 3,000 books and six kilograms of other publications; as part of a campaign against "poisonous cultural products." The materials had been confiscated from 175 shops in Hanoi and surroundings since March. Ho Chi Minh City police have destroyed 7,656 kg of banned publications, mostly pornographic magazines and pictures and books from overseas and domestic sources. (AFP July 10, ALAOIF:23750; VNB July 12, ALAOIF:23760). July 20 - Journalist Nguyen Vu Binh is brought to a Hanoi police station, his computer at work is searched, email read and all his personal documents confiscated. He is released three days later but placed under daily house arrest and summoned for daily questioning. Binh had worked for 10 years as a journalist for Tap Chi Cong San, the theoretical journal of the Vietnamese Communist Party. He resigned to form an independent organization, the Democracy and Freedom Party. Two weeks ago he signed along with 16 other intellectuals an open letter to the Communist Party of Vietnam, appealing for the release of imprisoned dissidents and multiparty democracy. (press release of The Democracy Club for Viet Nam, July 21, ALAOIF:23876, VOA July 24, ALAOIF:23901). July 24 - There has been an ongoing crackdown on writers and dissidents in Vietnam, says Demelza Stubbins, Asia program director for Amnesty International. She says dissidents who use Internet are particularly targeted: "There are ideas and views and criticisms of the Vietnamese government that are available on the Internet that are clearly not available in Vietnam in the print and broadcast media. And the issue with the Internet as far as the Vietnamese government is concerned is that people can get access to ideas and views that they would prefer them not to see." (VOA July 24, ALAOIF:23901). August 5 - The Directorate General of Posts and Telecommunications asks authorities in all provinces and cities to mete out severe punishment to those caught spreading dissent online. The department also requests ministries and agencies to compile a list of banned Internet sites and services. (AFP Aug. 5, ALAOIF:24011). August 7 - The Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information announces it has pulled the plug on one of the most popular websites in Vietnam, a youth-oriented site, for carrying inaccurate and frivolous articles. The site, ttvonline.com, was shut down Aug. 5 because it was improperly licensed and carried information that violated press laws and "distorted the truth." "The website exercised no integrity in carrying out their online journalism and behaved like a tabloid paper," said Do Quy Doan, head of the press and information department at the Ministry. Doan declines to specify the offending materials, but other officials say they objected to comments posted at the site's forum page on the Vietnam-China border treaty, corruption in the society, Vietnam-U.S. relations and demands for political change. The owner of the site, which had about 260,000 hits a day, pledges to work with authorities to get it up and running. (AFP Aug. 7 ALAOIF: 24028) August 8 - The August 8 issue of the Hong Kong weekly, Far Eastern Economic Review, is not placed on sale by the official distributor in Vietnam, Xunhusaba. It is still available in hotels for foreigners and to subscribers, however. No reason is given for the decision but it is apparently because of a brief article in the issue on American academic William Duiker's biography of Ho Chi Minh. Vietnam's National Politics Publishing House wanted to delete passages of the biography before publishing it in translation. The offending passages concerned Ho's marriage to a Chinese woman and other love affairs which contradict official accounts of "Uncle Ho" as a celibate devoted to the revolution. Duiker, who helped in the translation, says he would reject any changes by censors to the original version of his book, "Ho Chi Minh: a Life", first published in 2000 in New York. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh denies the magazine's circulation has been curtailed, but says the "Vietnamese people.. would never accept any wrong information" about Ho Chi Minh. The July 11 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review was also not allowed to reach the stands in Vietnam, apparently because of an article about the widening corruption scandal surrounding the arrest of crime boss Nam Cam. (AFP Aug. 8, ALAOIF:24035). August 13 - The official police newspaper, Cong An Nhan Dan, urges stricter control over the media, stating it has been abused by "hostile forces" out to overthrow the government. Enemies of Vietnam gather "negative" news from the state-controlled media and distort it to deceive the public it says: "To what extent and when information should be published should be carefully considered and controlled.. We must control and prevent bad information from flowing into Vietnam through different channels." (AP Aug. 13, ALAOIF:24071). Sept. 9 - A group of visiting European parliamentarians investigating Vietnam's religious situation are refused permission to meet leading religious dissidents in the country. These include Thich Quang Do, deputy head of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (the major Buddhist church of the south before 1975) and Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest who was jailed for 15 years in October last year for "harming national unity". Ly had infuriated authorities by providing written testimony to the US Commission for International Religious Freedom in February 2001. Thich Quang Do has spent most of the last 25 years in prison or under house arrest for protesting human rights violations and religious repression; several of his statements over the years have been smuggled out and published abroad. (AFP Sept. 9; press releases of the Vietnam Committee for Human Rights [Paris], Aug. 28, Sept. 7) Sept. 18 - The Ministry of Culture and Information announces it will prevent popular Vietnamese-American singer Jimmy Nguyen from performing in the country again after he gave two concerts last month without permission. He was originally banned after his first performance in Vietnam in Feb. 1997 during which he sang uncensored and unregistered material. However in August this year he performed at a Hanoi nightclub and in Haiphong without obtaining licences from the Ministry and local authorities. A Ministry official says Nguyen is the only overseas Vietnamese singer banned from giving concerts in Vietnam. (AFP Sept. 18). Sept. 18 - The official army newspaper Quan Doi Nhan Dan denounces as a traitor and "conscience-seller" a popular Vietnamese actor who starred in two recent Hollywood movies, "We Were Soldiers Once" and "The Green Dragon": "By being a propagandist and a lackey of hostile forces, smearing the image of the People's Army soldiers and smearing the Vietnamese people, Don Duong has sold his conscience at a cheap price and has become a traitor." It says his involvement in these two films was unforgivable and that he must be disciplined. In the film "We Were Soldiers Once", American troops fight off wave after wave of attacks in a famous battle and emerge bloodied but victorious. In "Green Dragon" Duong plays the manager of a refugee camp for the first wave of Vietnamese who fled in 1975. Both films are officially banned in Vietnam but pirated copies are widely available, according to AFP. Ho Chi Minh City authorities are considering banning Duong from traveling overseas, and preventing him from appearing in all movies for five years, an official of the Ministry of Culture and Information tells AFP. (AFP Sept. 18, ALAOIF:24381). Sept. 20 - Police ransack the house of Dr. Nguyen Dan Que, one of the most prominent dissidents in the south. According to his colleague and fellow dissident Dr. Doan Viet Hoat (now living in exile) "They also confiscated all his writings and documents and threatened to detain him due to the circulation of his writings in advocacy of human rights and democracy for Vietnam." (Press release of the International Institute for Vietnam, Sept. 23, ALAOIF:24458). -------------------------------------------------------------- Additional notes: See http://www.hrw.org/press/1999/mar/vie0311.htm for background on Nguyen Thanh Giang; http://www.vnhrnet.org/website/HanoiBatVuCaoQuan.html on Vu Cao Quan; and for an open letter the late Gen. Tran Do wrote to authorities appealing for democratic reforms, see http://www.fva.org/document/dissident/trando1.htm Among banned books in Vietnam published abroad: Chuyen Ke Nam 2000 (Chuye^.n Ke^? Na(m 2000 ) (Stories told in the Year 2000), by Bui Ngoc Tan. A member of the Vietnam Studies Group forum (affiliated with the Assn. For Asian Studies) informed me that this work is "a semi-fictional account of his and others' experiences in jail in North Vietnam from 1968-72." He noted that according to the overseas publisher in southern California, Cau Lac Bo Tuoi Xanh, the Ministry of Culture and Information issued an order to stop the distribution, retrieve and destroy all copies of the book published by Thanh Nien in Vietnam, for violating publishing laws. This book is available at Cornell University library, PL4389.B97 C48 2000, and at Harvard, PL4378.9 .B865 C49 2000. Duong Thu Huong is a writer from the north who was widely published in Vietnam and whose earlier writings are still available. But following the publication of her novel Paradise of the Blind (Morrow), her subsequent novels have not been available in Vietnam. These include Novel Without a Name (Penguin) and Beyond Illusions (Hyperion East). Her works are widely available in translation and she is featured along with other authors of banned works at the web site of the International Freedom to Publish Committee, Assn. Of American Publishers, http://www.iftpc.org/banned.html Censorship, of course, is not new to Vietnam and is practiced to some degree by virtually every country of the world. In Vietnam the most systematic effort to eradicate the "neo-colonialist culture" of the south took place immediately after the change of regimes in April 1975. Fortunately this effort failed, within a few years confiscated books, recordings and other materials were smuggled up north. See http://www.OCF.Berkeley.EDU/~sdenney/SRV_Cultural_Revolution_1981 for an article I wrote in Jan. 1982 on this subject. The failure of this campaign was one of the early signs that efforts by the Communist Party leaders to impose a totalitarian model over the entire country would not succeed. The first major statement of dissent to be smuggled out of Vietnam was an April 1977 appeal of Buddhist monks, leaders of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, which had developed close ties with the international peace movement during the war. This was followed immediately by their arrest, including Thich Huyen Quang and Thich Quang Do. Their statements were smuggled outside the country and published in a book written by James H. Forest, The Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam: fifteen years for reconciliation. Published in Alkmaar, Netherlands, by the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1978. It can be found at the Univ. of Michigan, Cornell and the Graduate Theological Union Library. In 1978 Nguyen Chi Thien smuggled a collection of his poems out of the country through the British embassy in Hanoi. These were subsequently published both in the original Vietnamese and in translation by Yale University as Flowers from hell = Hoa dia-nguc / Nguyen Chi Thien ; a bilingual edition of poems selected and translated from the Vietnamese by Huynh Sanh Thong. New Haven, CT, USA : Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University, c1984; call number: PL4378.9.N4487 H6213 1984. It is widely available in university libraries. These poems were composed mostly when Thien was in prison. He was allowed a few years ago to leave Vietnam on medical grounds and now lives in the U.S. Two other dissidents during this period whose statements were smuggled and published overseas were Fr. Chan Tin (formerly a leading critic of the South Vietnam government) and the late archbishop of Hue, Nguyen Kim Dien. Beginning in 1986 under Party leader Nguyen Van Linh, Vietnam began to move toward more openness with the boundaries of dissent being pushed even in official publications. Since then there has been a growing dissent movement and periodic crackdowns. Some of the dissident statements can be found at my web page at: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/vietnam.htm A fascinating book that I have just begun reading is A world transformed: the politics of culture in revolutionary Vietnam, 1945-1965 / by Kim N.B. Ninh. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2002. Call number: DS5566.8 N56 2002. For other background reports, see: http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/09/vietnam-0908.htm, a report of Human Rights Watch on the crackdown on dissent in Vietnam launched last year. http://www.cpj.org/attacks96/sreports/viet1.html Controlling Interest: Vietnam's Press Faces the Limits of Reform by Vikram Parekh, written in 1996 and posted at the Committee to Protect Journalists' website. http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=1429&Valider=OK The annual report on Vietnam and the press from Reporters san Frontieres. Los Angeles Times Correspondent David Lamb (author of the recently published book, Vietnam Now: a Reporter Returns) examines the state of free press in Vietnam in a brief article, "Free enterprise but not freedom of the press: in Vietnam, self-censorship and government scrutiny muffle journalists," Nieman Reports v56, n2 (Summer, 2002):69 (ALAOIF:24053). He notes that there is significantly more freedom of the press now than ten years ago, even while Communist Party leaders try to maintain tight controls on the flow of information.