Government attacks boost democracy movement

Do Hoang Diem knows the exact date when the Viet Tan democracy movement that he leads came of age.

“It was 29 March 2007,” he said. “Viet Tan was established in the early 1980s, but for more than two decades the Vietnamese Government just ignored us.

“Then on that date out of nowhere an article appeared in a Government newspaper attacking us, and since then there have been hundreds of articles, in newspapers and magazines, on television, radio and online.”

Diem is the international chairman of Viet Tan, or Vietnam Reform Party, which has the aim of replacing Vietnam’s single-party Communist system with a pluralist democracy. He says the attacks are the best thing that has happened to his organisation.

“Suddenly we have a profile,” he said. “People around the world now know we exist and we are getting a lot of attention from inside Vietnam as well.

“We have been broadcasting a radio program into Vietnam for the past 20 years, but since the attacks the feedback we have been getting has doubled. People are writing in saying they support us and offering comments and that is good.”

Viet Tan was originally formed among members of the Vietnamese Diaspora who fled during and after the fall of South Vietnam at the end of the war in 1975, but Diem says the membership is now much wider. “We operate both inside Vietnam and in countries around the world,” he said. “I would say the average age of our Vietnam-based membership is mid-30s, mainly professionals and students but with a good sprinkling of factory workers and farmers - it’s a fair representation of Vietnamese society.

“Around the world we do have many members who were associated with the former South Vietnamese Government, but also young people of 16 and 17 who had nothing to do with the war.”

The Vietnamese Government brands Viet Tan as a terrorist group and claims it has implemented “violent disturbances and terrorists acts against the Vietnamese Government”. However, these acts and disturbances are rarely documented although one report does state that activists were arrested for distributing “reactionary propaganda leaflets” and writing articles against the Vietnamese Government.

Diem says members inside Vietnam are routinely persecuted. “Article Four of the Vietnamese Constitution states that there should be only one lawful political party and that is the Communist Party, so our members keep their identities a secret. If they are discovered they usually find themselves under 24-hour surveillance, they are harassed and even jailed,” he said.

Viet Tan aims for a peaceful transition to democracy. “We would not have anything to do with a violent uprising. There has been enough violence in the past,” he said.

“If we are terrorists, then why was I invited to the Oval Office to meet President George W. Bush, why have Viet Tan representatives been asked to testify before the Australian Parliament?”

He sees change coming through four kinds of pressure. “The first is popular pressure and that can express itself in many ways in calls for social changes, protests against corruption or calls for land rights. The second type of activity is the creation of a united opposition front where political parties band together in a call for a multi-party system and eventually free elections.

“Then there is international pressure - we travel the world, seeking support; that is why I am in Canberra at the moment. Finally we look to eventually see pressure coming from within the party leadership itself. Only when we can have all four working in coordination will we have enough power to crack the system.”

A key factor is the increasing number of Vietnamese students who study in the West and are exposed to its democratic values.

Viet Tan Central Committee member Phong Nguyen, a Sydney cardiologist, believes this is where the final victory lies. “The students are warned not to have anything to do with ‘evil people’ in the counties where they study, but you can’t stop young people with inquiring minds from comparing the freedoms of the West with what they have back home,” he said.

“They see a free media, freedom of expression and the upholding of human rights and when they go back they see the stark contrast. There are thousands of them and eventually they will not be denied.”

Diem joined Viet Tan as a student in its earliest days and five years ago quit his management job in health care to work full time for the organisation. “It would have been so easy to walk away, to say I am an American now and get on with my life - and there is no doubt I have adopted a lot of American ways and cultures, but in my mind and my heart I have always felt that I am Vietnamese,” he said.

He remembers being taken to a ship to escape Saigon as a 12-year-old on the evening of April 29, 1975, hours before the final Communist victory. “There were two other ships all taking refugees away and they came under attack from the air and were sunk with everyone on board … women and children.

“It was a horrifying sight for a child and from that moment I knew what was happening in Vietnam was so very wrong. These weren’t soldiers, these weren’t the enemy, they were killing civilians, their own people.

“I resolved to work to ensure that things would change so that kind of brutality would never happen again.”

It would be easy to dismiss Viet Tan as yet another pressure group, a casualty of history, campaigning on issues resulting from a war the West would rather forget, but that would be to miss an important, perhaps even vital point extremely relevant to today.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union it was widely assumed that liberal democracy had won the battle of ideologies and would spread to the four corners of the earth, and for a while this seemed to be true.

But today, democratic values are in retreat in many parts of the world as China seeks to spread its influence into Africa, Asia and the South Pacific. Dictators from Bainimarama to Mugabe are being assured they have a partner in Beijing who, unlike the European Union and the United States, will not be attaching tiresome caveats about human rights and democracy to their aid packages or arms supplies.

Indeed indications from Africa suggest that China is aggressively denouncing Western-style pluralism as putting unnecessary stumbling blocks on the fast-track to prosperity. These developments will be music to the ears of the political leadership in Hanoi.

While many in the West are either mired in complacency or actively seeking to downplay and accommodate the expansion of totalitarianism for the sake of profit, it is left to organisations like Viet Tan to remind us of the words of one of the founders of liberal democracy, Thomas Jefferson.

“I have ever deemed it more honourable and more profitable, too, to set a good example than to follow a bad one.”

The Vietnamese Embassy in Canberra was asked to put its Government’s case for the branding of Viet Tan as a terrorist group. It did not reply.