The United States finds Vietnam's crackdown on dissidents "disturbing,"
AFP - April 24th, 2007

HANOI (AFP) - The United States finds Vietnam's crackdown on dissidents "disturbing," the US ambassador said Wednesday after police for the second time stopped him from meeting with several activists' wives.

The communist government's recent series of arrests and upcoming trials of activists "works against US and Vietnamese efforts to strengthen our relationship," ambassador Michael Marine told a media briefing, describing the actions as "disturbing to the US."

"The deteriorating situation is becoming a larger and larger part of our dialogue," he said, adding that the issue "frankly has reached a point of taking us away from discussing other points."

He said Vietnamese security forces had for a second time in recent weeks prevented a meeting he had scheduled with the wives or mothers of five dissidents by stopping four of the women from coming.

"One individual, the wife of Nguyen Vu Binh, was able to reach my house," he said, referring to the spouse of an imprisoned journalist.

"The others were preventing from coming, either by being called into police stations for discussion or having people outside their home preventing them coming," Marine said.

"In one case, one individual was intercepted on her way to my house."

Vu Thuy Ha, the wife of cyber-dissident Pham Hong Son, who is under house arrest in Hanoi, told AFP she was involved in a traffic accident on her way to Marine's house and then detained by police.

"I was in front of the opera when two men hit my motorbike," she said, referring to a traffic circle close to the ambassador's residence.

Immediately after the accident in which she suffered minor injures, she said, "policemen in uniform asked me to follow them to the police station. I was kept there two hours without any official report being issued."

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