Vietnamese bloggers are increasingly driving the news agenda in the country. More robust reporting will be good for Vietnam’s development.
When security forces tried to evict a family of fish farmers from their land in Tien Lang district in northern Vietnam, they weren’t expecting to be met with guns and land mines. The ensuing battle ended up with six officers in the hospital and four men charged with attempted murder.
The case was explosive in more than one sense of the word. In a rare move in a country where news is strictly censored by the government, reporters were allowed to thoroughly investigate the case. Indeed, one former Western diplomat said at the time he had never seen local media cover a story to the same depth as bloggers.
Gradually, more and more details came to light revealing broken promises and mismanagement on the part of local authorities. Several officials were disciplined for their involvement.
Such reporting is highly unusual in Vietnam, a country rated 172nd out of 179 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index 2011-2012. Editors have to meet the Propaganda Department every Tuesday for “guidance” on what can and can’t be published. Although some go further than others in covering issues of corruption, self-censorship is rife. The incident therefore gave hope to some that things might change, but just a few months later, on April 24, another protest just outside Hanoi in Hung Yen Province provided evidence to the contrary.
Images of hundreds of police in riot gear facing residents of Van Giang village were posted on blogs, going viral instantly. The protesters were demanding higher compensation for land taken by local authorities to build a satellite city on the outskirts of Hanoi. But despite the hot news, local newspapers remained silent.
Non-governmental organization Red Communication works to improve the quality of journalism in Vietnam. Director Tran Nhat Minh says reporters weren’t given the same freedom to cover the protest in Van Giang as they were in Tien Lang.
“Before Van Giang authorities held a press meeting. The local authorities requested reporters to cover the story according to their own documents and not come to the site because of safety reasons,” he says.
Over the following weeks, a handful of stories filtered through. However, when two men captured on video being beaten by police at the protest were identified as journalists from a state-owned radio station, the incident started making headlines.
“The case in Van Giang showed the failure of the government to silence local media,” says Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Thi Hung.* “There was an order not to report on the case, but the beating of the two reporters from VOV was an excuse for people to cover it.”
Coverage of the attack lasted about a week, and didn’t delve into the details of the reasons behind the protest. But although reporting on the case in Van Giang was stifled, director Minh says change is in the air. “The situation now isn’t the same as a few years ago,” he says. “Before if there was a case of a project where the state had to take the land from the people, then journalists could only report from the point of the view of the state.”
Protests over land confiscation are common and have been for a long time, he says, but national newspapers have rarely paid any attention to them. Often only the immediate locality is interested and with the majority of readership living in cities, most news organizations simply aren’t concerned with the problems of farmers.
However, the battle between farmers and authorities in Tien Lang changed that. First, readers were attracted by the level of violence, and then appalled by the level of mismanagement by the authorities.
“The space for land protests in the national press is larger now because of the Tien Lang case,” Minh says, adding the incident established the issue as “hot,” meaning more cases will be covered.
Such coverage, if it does materialize, could also help boost Vietnam’s development efforts, says Britain’s ambassador to Vietnam.
Britain is a leading donor on anti-corruption in Vietnam and funds training programs for local media. Ambassador Antony Stokes says the role of the media is to bring information to light in a professional and independent way. This is fundamental in fighting corruption.
“It’s a bit of a challenge and we want to work with the Vietnamese government to address that challenge,” he says.
Stokes says he hopes helping the media become freer from political influence will help promote development.
“The media can play a very important part in identifying corrupt individuals. However, there’s a potential for individuals to feel threatened by this,” he adds.
Pham Van Linh,* who works for a Vietnamese newspaper, says he believes the system of censorship isn’t changing, and may even be becoming stricter.
“Reporting depends on the benefit group in government and who editors have support from,” Linh says. He believes the government restricts the media because it is afraid of losing control over public opinion.
“If authorities lose control they will lose the regime,” he says.
Fellow journalist Hung says she thinks restrictions remain on a case-by-case basis, but that the real force for change is blogging. The interest in the case in Van Giang was triggered almost entirely by the extent of coverage by bloggers.
“Blogging is pushing local coverage forward by bringing more information into the public forum,” she says. “The government can’t reverse information published on the internet.”
Some reporters get around the restrictions by writing blogs under pen names. However the rising influence of this medium hasn’t been overlooked by the government. Contents of blogs are used increasingly in indictments at court that end in jail terms.
One blogger, Le Duc Thich,* says he is regularly followed by police and his work is closely monitored. “They try to pressure me not to write about sensitive issues,” he says. There have also been reports that Hanoi blogger Nguyen Xuan Dien, who was one of the first to spread the news about the protest in Van Giang, has been harassed and forced to close his blog.
Vietnamese laws can serve either to repress or nurture the growth of quality journalism, according to some analysts. One piece of legislation which has sparked concern among the international community is a draft decree on usage of the internet, which is expected to be released this month. The U.S. Embassy in Vietnam issued its own comments on the draft in a letter to the Vietnamese government made public on Thursday 7 June. The decree could force internet users to register using their real names and force news sites to gain government approval before publishing.
The embassy said provisions on banned behaviour on the internet were “overly broad and vague, and therefore likely to negatively impact individuals’ rights to freedom of expression in Vietnam.”
Still, not everyone is pessimistic about the rights of journalists and bloggers in Vietnam. Red Communications director Minh says there are provisions under existing laws that can help improve reporting, but these are rarely implemented. He says under Articles 6 and 8 of Decree 02 “Sanctions for Administrative Violations in Journalism and Publishing” journalists have the right not to be obstructed, and government agencies are obliged to give them information.
“The president of the Vietnam Journalist Association said after Hung Yen that we should wait and see if the reporters acted according to the law. But this was wrong,” Minh says. “According to the law journalists are allowed to work in all territories of Vietnam so they were right to be there.”
While blogging is pushing news reporting to new limits, Minh says people will report more when they know their rights.
“When journalists understand the law they will be more confident and there will be less self-censorship,” he says.
Marianne Brown is the Hanoi-based correspondent for Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and VOA News, among other outlets.
*Names have been changed to protect identities
Photo Credit: Yun Huang Yong
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Tom Tran
This article was written by a foreigner with wishful thinking. I can't be sure if in my life I was ever allowed to speak freely about what the Communism is for? Remember, 3 millions died for the communists during the war. If you ever asked (or allowed to ask, until then I will believe a revolution) if those people were given a chance to say (just say, not do), would they still give their lives to build that regime in power?
Tuan nguyen
in VN the reporter are free to cover story of thief, killing and rape, nude… but are restricted to cover the " sensitive issue" related to the dictatoship. They spend millions dollars to cover the EURO SOCCER CHAMPIONSHIP while millions farmers have convicted their land in silence!
manhhai
The activism is getting stronger and stronger in Vietnam. The dissidents are getting younger and younger.
nirvana
@vninsider,
You are wrong. Democracy and freedom of speech is a universal concept, not a Western invention. It takes a long time to practice such freedom. Freedom is never a dream nor a privilege, it is a constant fight, whether in Vietnam or in the West.
@Observer,
Not only in communist countries, but in any dictatorial regime.
The common dream in the West is that a regime overthrow will instantaneously bring democracy and freedom. I say, the reality speaks for itself.
John Chan
@Nirvana,
You have missed out the worse offender in your list that is those nations proclaimed they are democracy, but behave like a thug, such as the USA, the UK, and the Philippines.
Errol T
The last time democracies didn't behave like a thug, worse thugs from fascist governments came out. Does anyone remember Hitler, Moussolini, and Tojo?
Patrick
@John Chan- Even if you believe that the above mentioned nations act like thugs, you cannot dispute the fact that they don't like thugs with their own citizens unlike China, North Korea, Vietnam etc and that is a very crucial difference. Free media has a very moderating influence on a government and its people.
A governement cannot act like a criminal if its every move is scrutinized.
John Chan
@Patrick,
You are wrong, the governments of USA, UK, Japan, and the Philippines are like thugs toward their citizens, the politicians openly called the freedom fighters of the Spring and Occupying movements in their respective nations the thugs, and crashed them without mercy.
There is no free media in the western nations, there are only seemed free media in the western nations, the western nations control their media with higher degree of sophistication than China, NK, Vietnam, etc.
The western nations steal money from the 99% for the 1% in the name of QE, too big to fail, free market, etc. just like the thugs collecting protection ransom from small business owners.
Indeed a government cannot act like a criminal, but who is scrutinizing the western governments except bloggers like me?
Patrick
@John Chan- I agree with the fact that their authorities ill-treated their own protestors especially during the Occupy wall street movement and yes there is selective or slanted reporting regarding controversial issues. There have been incidents were mainstream media houses and corporations have attempted to lie to the public but it always gets out!! because there is an army of bloggers and journalists from independent media sources who have the freedom to publicly disagree with the government.
Wikileaks is a prime example, most goverrments want to string up Julian Assange on a pole and the US authorities would do anything to send him to prison and yet he is still out, persecuted but safe. I can't say the same about the dissidents in China where they and their families are sent to labor camps to get "reharmonised"
The chance of something like the Tianmen incident ever happening in these countries is impossible to say the least. People can protest and the government will try to harass them but they wont run them over with tanks.
John Chan
@Patrick,
Please get down from your high horse, the large scale demonstration against the US government insanity in front of the Capital Hill perhaps was bigger than the one in the Tiananmen Square. USA uses State Troopers, KKK, militia and assassination instead of tanks, that is the difference when it comes to suppressing the protestors.
Please do not ever say never, USA and those so called western democracies are just volatile like everybody else; do not get complacent just because you are in a window of tranquility.
Observer
Freedom of speech is not allowed in communist countries such as Vietnam, china, N. Korea, Cuba, etc.
If anyone says anything against the state, that person will be in jail or under house arrest.
vninsider
"Blogger revolution" for Vietnam – Don't dream of it.
With a sophisticated network of human spies cascading down to almost every neighborhood community from major cities to small villages, an anti-government blogger can easily be spotted and quarantined. The local authorities just order a few local gangs to throw dirty trash and bags of s**t into the the blogger's house and their relatives' homes for a week or so , then the blogger's personal career and freedom are done. Most of the time, those freedom fighter blogges "voluntarily" surrendered and made public apologies. End of story and his dream of western democracy!