Government attacks boost democracy movement

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.