The
plainclothes security police had severed the telephone line at his home,
so he depended on the café to read the news and exchange
e-mails with Vietnamese dissidents at home and abroad.
“I was
surfing the internet when somebody grabbed me with an arm, choking my
throat,” he recalls. The police dragged Dr. Que away from his screen,
and into jail. It would be two years before he was released for the
crime of “abusing democratic rights” — posting on the internet
statements denouncing Vietnam ’s suppression of the media.
“The
internet is a battlefield of the Government and dissidents,” he said at
home in Ho Chi Minh City , as government spies with cameras hovered
outside. “It’s a dangerous weapon of repression in the hands of the
Government. But we have to exploit this tool, even if it means going to
prison.”
This
weekend, as President Bush and the leaders of China , Japan , Russia and
17 other countries fly in for the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec)
Forum , Vietnam has a rare opportunity to present an attractive modern
face to the outside world. Behind the smiles, however, ugly realities
are concealed.
The
Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights, says that homes of
dissidents in Hanoi have been blockaded by police and signs posted in
English ordering foreigners to stay away. Ho Chi Minh City , or Saigon ,
as it was called until 1975, is such a lively city that it
is difficult to
imagine it as a place of repression. A visit to Dr Que reveals the
reality.
Two plainclothes policemen stand by the
gate and film me as I arrive, and my taxi is followed by a relay of
young men on motorbikes when I leave. Inside, Dr Que, 64, draws the
curtains and gives me an envelope containing an account of his career as
a dissident.
“Take this now,” he says. “If they come
in after you, we will not have time to talk.” Since 1978, he has spent
20 of his 64 years in jail, and has suffered torture, beatings and
grievous medical neglect.
For much of the rest of the time he has
lived, as he does now, in a state of virtual house arrest — his phones
bugged and frequently disconnected, his movements followed, his friends
and family harassed. Politically, his demands are the bare democratic
minimum — a free press, freedom of speech and assembly, and an end to
the 31-year old monopoly of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Until
recently his was a lonely and isolated voice.
Dr Que insists that it is the harshness
of the repression that has silenced the majority — but the internet is
fast changing that.
“You have to face brutal
measures when you stand up to these authorities,” he says, “but this
year the democratic movement has been progressing a lot compared with
the past two or three decades. That momentum will continue.”
One in six of the 84
million Vietnamese people is estimated to be an internet user, compared
with one in nine a year ago. Most do not have home computers but use the
5,000 cyber-cafés for a few pence an hour.
Dissidents also make use of online voice
services such as Skype to speak in person to one another in a medium
less susceptible to tapping than fixed or mobile telephone lines.
Even the Venerable Thich Quang Do, the 77-year old Buddhist monk who is
perhaps the most eminent and revered dissident in Vietnam, is installing
an internet connection in the temple where he has spent eight years
under “pagoda arrest”.
The authorities are now blocking access
to dissident websites and recruiting the proprietors of cyber-cafés to
spy on their customers. Some dissidents suspect that anonymous
contributors to chat rooms may include agents provocateurs hoping
to flush out and identify dissidents. “The communists are like a person
afraid of the wind blowing outside,” says the Venerable Do. “They won’t
open the door because they fear they will catch a cold.”
