Tran Khai Thanh Thuy

Viet Tan has learned that writer Tran Khai Thanh Thuy and her husband, Do Ba Tan, were attacked by undercover police in Vietnam. At about 8:30pm on Thursday, October 8, 2009, two thugs stormed into their residence in Hanoi (Kham Thien ward, Dong Da district). The thugs beat the couple with bricks and threatened to stick them with AIDS-infected needles.

About an hour later (9:30pm) uniformed police entered the home and took the couple away. It is believed that they are currently being held at the public security station in Kham Thien ward in Hanoi. Their only child, a 13-year old daughter, is currently at home alone and terrified after witnessing the attack on her parents. Read the rest at Viet Tran.

Can you imagine being arrested for posting a new blog entry?

Well, there is no need to imagine this. It’s happening right now in Vietnam.

As the world embraces the internet as forum for free expression and communication, Vietnam sees it otherwise. Earlier this year, the government of Vietnam requests internet companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to shut down blogs and hand over information of their users that could lead to their arrest.

A surge of internet users have been arrested this year merely for expressing their thoughts, and posting articles on the internet, including Tran Huynh Duy Thuc (pen name ChangeWeNeed), Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh (pen name Mother Mushroom) and Nguyen Van Hai (pen name Dieu Cay).

However, the time to act is now. A House resolution to call upon the internet companies to respect privacy rights of consumers will be introduced to the US Congress soon. Watch how Vietnamese Americans are responding to the series of recent arrests in Vietnam, and how they are speaking out for those who cannot.

Watch it, posted it, share it and support the Vietnam Blogger Movement by calling your representative today.

For more information on this campaign, please visit Viet Tan’s Internet Freedom Campaign

We’ve been reporting on the situation here and with VOA radio. The new agency sounds particularly menacing and a way of normalizing censorship

via Global Voices Advocacy

The Committee to Protect Bloggers was featured in a Vietnamese language radio program and web article along with The Committee to Protect Journalists. You can see how Google translates it here. There are some real limits to automated translations from English to Vietnamese, it seems, but the jist is there.

‚Äî VOA News – Vi?c tr?n √°p blogger ? VN ‘ng√†y c√†ng gia t?ng s?c m?nh’.

Pham Doan Trang

We received this email today from a¬† recent site visitor: “Dear committee, Pham Doan Trang, a journalist and a blogger in Vietnam, has been arrested on August 28, 2009. Trang edits Tuan Vietnam, an online weekly that is a component of VietnamNet, the country’s most popular news website.

She also owns Trang the Ridiculous, a blog on Blogspot. Trang’s articles on Tuan Vietnam cover a number of sensitive areas, including the relationship between Vietnam and China and the dispute between the two countries over territorial claims on the South China Sea. Most of entries on her personal blog, Trang the Ridiculous, are political. In some entries, she mocks Vietnamese political figures’ speeches. In others, she criticize the Vietnamese Congress for being weak handed and the Vietnamese Government’s leadership as silly and clueless.

Please help us to publicize this information.”

The Earth Times reports:

“Trang had written an article July 27 criticizing the conduct of Vietnamese leaders during the partition of the country in 1954. In the past, she had written articles criticizing Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, and arguing that the disputed Paracel and Spratly Islands belong historically to Vietnam.”

IFEX is running a Reporters Without Borders release which also mentions the arrest of another blogger, blogger Bui Thanh Hieu:

“Freedom of expression has contracted in recent months as a result of governmental paranoia about issues concerning relations with China. We call for the rapid release of Hieu and Trang as the criticisms they voiced posed absolutely no threat to national security and were part of their fundamental right to free expression.”

We’ve noted a marked increase in the pressure the Vietnamese government is putting on bloggers as of recent. While it would be good to gain some insight into why the crackdown is ramping up again, pressure needs to be exerted on the government to put the point across that these governments to let them know that these actions do not go unnoticed. Meanwhile, bloggers in the regions should take precautions and consider using online profiles divorced from their actual identities, work through proxy servers and be sure to erase web browser histories after each session.

The turmoil surrounds an August 24 aricle by the state-run Vietnam Net, titled A good Catholic is a good citizen. The article is said to take several of the Popes statements our of context or fabricated them, suggesting that the Pope’s comments proved that “Catholic priests to overthrow the government.” Bloggers questioning this assertion have been targeted.

Nguyen Van Hai, who blogs as Dieu Cay, was charged and convicted of tax fraud. A number of facts marshal against the notion that the charge was legitimate. Chief among them was the fact that Nguyen was not charged with tax fraud until five days after his arrested, as does the fact that he is a member of the democracy activism blogging group, Union of Independent Journalists.

Nguyen’s sentence comes on the heals of the equally ridiculous two-year sentence of Moroccan blogger,¬† Mohamed Erraji.

The newspaper Vietnam Law reported that Ho Chi Minh City police Tuesday arrested Nguyen Van Hai, who blogs under the name Dieu Cay, on charges of tax evasion. The paper said police had searched Hai’s house Monday and found evidence that he and his ex-wife had understated their monthly rent to avoid paying the full value-added tax.

Hai is a member of a group of bloggers known as the Union of Independent Journalists. Other members of the group have called for protests along the torch’s route when it is carried through Ho Chi Minh City.

Members of the group were also involved in organising demonstrations in December and January against Chinese moves to assert sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel Islands, which Vietnam also claims.

Vietnamese democracy activists, who requested anonymity, said that Hai had actually been detained on Monday in the resort town of Dalat, 300 kilometres north-west of Ho Chi Minh City, and escorted back to Ho Chi Minh City to facilitate the search of his house.

On his blog, Hai had featured articles on protests against the torch in other cities around the world, and others critical of China’s policies in Tibet and the Spratlys and opposing the torch’s relay through Vietnam.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung held a meeting with Ho Chi Minh City officials to review their plans for preventing demonstrations during the torch relay.

I rarely put forward that I am an American, as it’s usually not germane. But I have to say: Is there no single American company that realizes open discourse is the reason they exist and that every time they help to bury it they take one step closer to their own grave? I’m freaking speechless to add another American company to the gold is better than God group.

For more information on Vietnamese dissidents and Trung, read this Boston Globe article.

Update: Here’s a radio story on this situation by Matt Steinglass on PRI’s The World.