Nguyen Huu Vinh [Nguyễn Hữu Vinh] (aka Anh Ba Sam [Anh Ba
Sàm]), one of the most famous and influential political bloggers in Vietnam,
was arrested at his home in Hanoi on Monday, May 5, said the Investigative
Public Security Office, Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.
Vinh, 58, founded and edited the Basam.info blog (originally named Anh Ba Sam, or Brother Gossiper). He was accused of “publishing online articles with bad
contents and misleading information to lower the prestige and create public
distrust of government offices, social organizations and citizens” under
Article 258 of the Vietnamese Penal Code.
The Investigative Public Security Office said Vinh’s home
was searched and he was “urgently arrested”.
Also detained was Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy [Nguyễn Thị Minh
Thúy]. Thuy, 34, an employee in Vinh’s business, is the mother of two small children.
Vinh's website www.basam.info is one of the most popular
alternative sites in Vietnam. He also calls the site “Thong Tan Xa Via He”, or
the Sidewalk News Agency, to mock the Vietnam News Agency. Sidewalk news is a
Vietnamese slang for “gossip”, “canards” or “unverifiable information” that
people tell each other when they are fooling away their time at sidewalk cafes.
Established on September 9, 2007 as a Yahoo! 360° blog
and then operating on a wordpress platform, Anh Ba Sam is a hot “online meeting
point” for those concerned about politics. Known as a blog that advocates
democracy and freedom for Vietnam under the slogan “Pha vong no le” (“break the
chains of slavery”), the site has been regularly hacked and attacked, arguably
by both Vietnamese police forces and Chinese hackers.
“They are trenchant critics of the regime, for sure, but
Anh Ba Sam’s first priority has been to publish an objective summary of
newsworthy events in and about Vietnam. It’s up with the news 24/7. As might be
expected, the blog has given particular emphasis to the stories that Vietnam’s
state-supervised media has been unable to report. Its daily digest is the hook
that has caught the attention of 100,000-plus regular readers,” wrote David
Brown, a retired US diplomat with extensive experience in Vietnam, in one of
his articles published on the Asia Sentinel in March 2013, when Anh Ba Sam was
undergoing one of the many attacks.
Vinh himself does not have any personal ax to grind with
the government. His father was a member of the Vietnamese Communist Party’s
Central Committee, former Minister of Police, and former Ambassador to the
Soviet Union.
The arrest of Vinh and Thuy came as tension rose anew
between Vietnam and China after Beijing moved its first deep-water drilling rig
into the disputed South China Sea and prohibited all marine vessels entering
into a one mile radius of the Haiyang Shiyou 981′s drilling work.
The Article 258 is described as a crime of “abusing
democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the State”. It has
frequently been used to imprison bloggers and democracy activists in Vietnam in
the recent years.
