On a late spring day in
Hanoi, officers from the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security launched a
sudden raid on the home and business of well-known blogger, Nguyen Huu Vinh,
better known as Anh Ba Sam (Vietnamese for “Brother Gossiper”). Vinh and his assistant
Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy were detained immediately.
A sudden raid–and the
“urgent arrest,” as the police put it– is a technique regularly practiced by
the security forces in Vietnam in order to suppress political dissent. In
Vinh’s case, they have achieved this–for now. Two of the websites that he was reportedly managing at the time, Chep Su Viet (Writing Viet History) and Dan Quyen
(Citizens’ Rights), were shut down shortly after his arrest, which indicated
that the police were able to gain control of the sites and their passwords. The
other blogs, notably Ba Sam News, however, have stayed out of police control
and continue their daily work.
Vinh is currently held with
no access to a lawyer, and is denied family visits. He is one of the latest of
at least 300 prisoners of conscience in Vietnam in the past five years.
The Vietnamese press is
state-owned, and the People’s Police as well as the People’s Army both have
dozens of printed and broadcasting agencies of their own. They portray Vinh as
a blogger who specializes in “reporting and commenting on current social and
political issues of Vietnam with a deliberately critical tone” and “trying to
uglify Vietnam to make her as bad and ugly as he is.”
So who is Nguyen Huu Vinh?
He was born in 1956 into the family of a high-ranking communist official.
Vinh’s father, Nguyen Huu Khieu, was twice the ambassador to the Soviet Union,
between 1974 and 1980. As the Soviets were Vietnam’s “Big Brother” in Cold War
time, this was an enormous privilege, and as Vinh himself admitted in a short
memoir in 2012, he and his family led a life of which other Vietnamese could
only dream.
As a brilliant “princeling,”
Vinh became a student at the Academy of Public Security, then became a public
security officer before taking a position in the Department of the Overseas
Vietnamese. His experience working with Vietnamese intellectuals in foreign
countries made him obsessed with “how much social capital was wasted as a
result of bad policies.”
As a man full of ideas, Vinh
was possibly one of the first people to see the potential power of the Internet
in reaching people’s minds and opening their eyes in Vietnam. In 2005, when
Yahoo! 360° came to Vietnam, he soon found himself “blogging” like any teenager
in urban cities.
Anh Ba Sam, his first Yahoo!
360° blog created in September 2007, was initially filled with articles he
wrote for the state-owned media. However, Vinh soon realized the demand within
the country for information about Vietnam from a foreign perspective. People
wanted to know “what the world is thinking of us.” He then focused on
translating foreign articles into Vietnamese for his blog readers.
Eventually, he began to
provide not only articles about Vietnam but also materials about China-Vietnam
relations, which even today remains a highly politically sensitive issue.
Vinh’s connections with some
people in the state apparatus provided helpful news sources. However, at the
same time, they raised suspicions about him being an undercover policeman. A
question for many was why Nguyen Huu Vinh, who published material that the
ruling party did not want the public to see, was spared from arrest?
It was just a matter of
time.
Ba Sam was identified by the
police as a rallying point of “anti-state” forces in and outside Vietnam
earlier this year. The site was subject to continuous attacks. Five days after
Vinh and Thuy’s arrest, two of their colleagues published a defiant statement,
“Nguyen Huu Vinh was arrested, yes, but Anh Ba Sam will never be.” The
statement hints at the birth of an even more powerful blogging and writing
movement for change in Vietnam, with bloggers following Ba Sam’s path of
enlightening Vietnamese citizens on the values of democracy and freedom. There
are reasons to believe that it will not be easy for the Vietnamese government
to silence bloggers forever.
Happy birthday and freedom for you, anh Ba Sam!
(Photo courtesy of Minh Van Duong's FB page)
