Fængselsstraf til journalister og statslig kontrol med medierne tager til i Vietnam, som ellers bryster sig af sin åbne og globaliserede økonomi. Det skriver den internationale journalistorganisation Committee to Protect Journalists.
HANOI,19 September 2012: When Vietnamese police first detained blogger Nguyen Van Hai in 2008, they told his family it was for his own protection from Chinese secret agents angered by his reporting. Hai, widely known by his blog name, Dieu Cay (Peasant’s Pipe), had reported on local protests against China—rare events that were censored in government-controlled mainstream newspapers—and written critical commentaries about China’s claim to island territories contested by Vietnam.
Four years later, despite having completed a 30-month sentence on trumped-up tax evasion charges, Hai continues to languish in prison as authorities pursue new anti-state charges against him and two other bloggers who jointly created the Free Journalists Club, a website that carried stories critical of Vietnam’s relations with China.
Vietnam’s Communist Party-dominated government maintains some of the strictest and harshest media controls in all of Asia even as it portrays the nation as having an open economy. Through economic liberalization measures, beginning with market-oriented reforms in the mid-1980s and culminating in the country’s entry to the World Trade Organization in 2007, national leaders have worked to integrate the country into the global community.
Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s administration has tried to leverage this liberalized trade status into a more prominent global role, which includes a bid for a seat in 2014 on the U.N. Human Rights Council. His government has also sought to deepen military and other ties with the United States as a way to diversify its foreign relations and counterbalance China’s rising regional profile.
While Vietnam must maintain a certain degree of openness, including over its communications infrastructure, while integrating into the global economy, authorities are simultaneously striking back against independent journalists and political dissidents who use digital platforms. Rising grassroots resentment of state-backed land-grabbing, perceptions that the government has ceded territory and made unfavorable concessions to China, and, now, signs of an economic slowdown have all been covered critically in independent blogs. These types of reports, which are banned in state-controlled media, have challenged the Communist Party’s portrayal of itself as the sole guardian of the national interest, a narrative it has perpetuated since taking power and unifying the country in 1975.
Responding to this perceived threat, Prime Minister Dung’s administration has unleashed a harsh crackdown on dissent—a campaign of harassment and intimidation that since 2009 has led to the imprisonment of scores of political dissidents, religious activists, and independent bloggers, many for their advocacy of multi-party democracy, human rights, and greater government accountability. With at least 14 journalists behind bars, Vietnam is Asia’s second worst jailer of the press, trailing only China, according to CPJ research. Many of those in detention have been charged or convicted of anti-state crimes related to their blog postings. Authorities have also ramped up Internet surveillance and filtering and applied even more pressure on the long-repressed mainstream media. The Arab Spring uprisings that toppled autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa prompted a recent expansion of censored news topics, according to local journalists and editors.
This has lead to a culture of fear that keeps the country’s journalists on a knife’s edge. “It’s hard to know the line because even the Communist Party doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing,” said a Phap Luat (Law) newspaper reporter who blogs under a pseudonym and met with CPJ secretly at an underground café in Hanoi. “We don’t know how to protect ourselves. It’s a big fear that prevents us from raising our voices. … Even at this moment, I’m not sure if we’re being eavesdropped [on]. In Vietnam, you never know.
Læs mere her http://www.cpj.org/reports/2012/09/vietnams-press-freedom-shrinks-despite-open-economy.php
