Vi Tran, co-director of Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM shared that Facebook should be, at the very least, honest to its users whenever their posts or accounts gets suspended.
Mai Khoi, the “Lady Gaga of Vietnam,” wants that country’s vigilante force kicked off Facebook. The company told her the group is well within its rules.
For the past two years, Do Nguyen Mai Khoi has been trying painfully, futilely, to get Facebook to care about Vietnam. The Vietnamese singer and pro-democracy activist, known best simply as Mai Khoi, has tried tirelessly to warn the company of a thousands-strong pro-government Facebook group of police, military, and other Communist party loyalists who collaborate to get online dissidents booted and offline dissidents jailed. Her evidence of the group’s activity is ample, her arguments are clear, and despite the constant risk of reprisal from her own country’s leadership, her determination seemingly inexhaustible. The only problem is that Facebook doesn’t seem interested at all.
Facebook, once briefly heralded as a godsend for a country like Vietnam, where social media allows citizens to squeeze past the state’s censorship stranglehold on traditional media, has now become just another means of strangulation. Private groups filled with government partisans coordinate takedown campaigns — or worse — against any views deemed “reactionary” by the Vietnamese state, while Facebook continues to do little but pay lip service to ideals of free expression. The Intercept was able to gain access to one such closed-door Vietnamese censorship brigade, named “E47,” where it’s obvious, through Facebook’s apparent indifference, that the company has failed its users terribly.
To ensure that it continues to enjoy a dominant, highly lucrative share share of Vietnam’s corner of the internet — reportedly worth $1 billion annually — Facebook increasingly complies with content removal requests submitted by the country’s government on the basis that the content itself is illegal in Vietnam. It’s a form of censorship employed by governments worldwide, and one that Vietnam seems to have played hardball to enforce: In April, Reuters reported that the Vietnamese government slowed Facebook’s servers to the point of inoperability, leading Facebook to agree to comply with more official takedown requests.
But as Mai Khoi discovered, Vietnamese Facebook is also plagued by unofficial censorship, achieved not by declaring content illegal but by coordinating users to flag it for violating Facebook’s own content rules, known as the “Community Standards.” This dupes Facebook into removing ordinary political speech as though it were hate speech, violent incitement, or gory video.
In a sign of just how desperate the situation has become, many Vietnamese dissidents threatened by Facebook’s inaction say that for now, they’d settle for honesty. “Dealing with Facebook is like a walk in the dark for us activists,” said Vi Tran, co-founder of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam, a pro-democracy group. “If Facebook decides to delete a status for any reason, please let us know what is the reason. Giving us the ‘violation of Community Standards’ is not enough because it is arbitrary and vague.”
Two months after her arrest, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is launching a campaign for the release of Vietnamese journalist Pham Doan Trang with a petition and a video in which Vietnamese diaspora colleagues voice strong support for this symbol of the fight for the freedom to inform in Vietnam.
Arrested at her Ho Chi Minh City home on the night of 6 October, the co-founder of the Luat Kuoa and TheVietnamese information websites is facing a possible 20-year jail sentence on a charge of “anti-government propaganda.”
In the #FreePhamDoanTrang campaign video released by RSF, Vietnamese journalists, bloggers and friends now based in France, Germany, Taiwan and the United States take advantage of their exile to say what their compatriots still in Vietnam cannot say without risking long prison sentences.
The RSF video includes interviews with people who are close to Trang, such as her friend Nguyen Ngoc Anh, now based in France. “I am very attached to Pham Doan Trang,” she says. “Firstly because we’re friends and went to the same secondary school, and secondly because I respect her determination, her energy and the enormous sacrifices she has made in order to write articles, publish books, and share her knowledge with as many people as possible.”
Trinh Huu Long, a journalist who joined Trang in founding the Legal Initiatives for Vietnam NGO and the Luat Khoa et TheVietnamese news sites, says: “Doan Trang is perhaps one of the most influential journalists, most effective activists and one of the bravest individuals that we have had in Vietnam’s contemporary history, from 1975 to the present-day.”
Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder Trinh Huu Long shares how their online magazines’ audience reach was greatly affected by Facebook’s agreement to censor anti-government posts in Vietnam. Amnesty International report says that there is a surge of people landing in jails for online criticism of the government.
Facebook is complicit in a dramatic increase in censorship on the platform in Vietnam, Amnesty International said Tuesday, in a new report detailing a surge in people jailed for their social media posts.
In the 78-page report, Amnesty compiled information from Facebook and Google as well as interviews with human rights activists. The organization found that Vietnam is currently holding 170 prisoners of conscience — the highest they’ve ever recorded. Of this, 69 were imprisoned for online activism. This includes those who criticized authorities’ response to COVID-19 and shared independent information about human rights. These posts are seen to infringe upon the government’s interests, which could lead to imprisonment under Articles 117 or 331 of the Criminal Code.
According to the report, human rights defenders have been increasingly facing harassment in recent years, receiving messages that include death threats, suspected to come from state-sponsored cyber troops like the Du Luan Vien, also known as “opinion shapers” who target Facebook activist pages.
Similarly, Force 47, a government-run cyberspace army believed to have 10,000 members, allegedly hacks anti-government websites and spreads pro-government messages online. All this to “fight against wrong views and distorted information on the internet.”
The existence of such measures has left many people in Vietnam in fear. Facebook remains the most widely-used social media platform in the country, a rare outlet in the one party state where the government heavily restricts and regulates its citizens’ internet use. In 2018, digital advertising revenue in Vietnam amounted to around $550 million, of which 70 percent went to Facebook and Google, Reuters reported, citing Vietnam-based market researcher Ants.
In the same year, the Vietnamese government passed a cybersecurity law that compels tech giants like Facebook and Google to store user data and censor content the government deems offensive. In April this year, Facebook agreed to censor posts in Vietnam after its local servers were taken offline, reportedly by actions from state-owned telecommunications companies. Facebook said it reluctantly complied with the government’s request to “restrict access to content which it has deemed to be illegal.” Most content restricted locally are still available outside Vietnam.
The increased censorship worries human rights groups and organizations that address local politics and social issues.
“We have used Facebook since day one of our operation back in 2014. For the first four years, it was amazing. We were able to spread our message wide and far. But since 2018, our Facebook page’s traffic has been reduced dramatically,” Trinh Huu Long, co-founder of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam (LIV), an online magazine dedicated to discussing political and social issues in Vietnam told VICE World News.
He said that three years ago, their Facebook posts could easily reach roughly 50,000 people but today, they’d be lucky to even get to 20,000.
Nearly two months ago, one of LIV’s co-founders was arrested for “making, storing, disseminating or propagandising information, materials and products that aim to oppose the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” She is currently facing 20 years in jail. Such moves have led the magazine to change the way they disseminate their content, including the use of newsletters and channels on mobile messaging app Telegram. They are also currently trying to develop an app for their website.
Last year, Amnesty International talked Pham Doan Trang, co-founder of Luat Khoa Tap Chi, an independent online legal magazine. Trang explained: “There are hundreds of newspapers, but there is only one chief editor who decides what appears in every newspaper in Viet Nam and that person is the head of the [Communist Party of Viet Nam’s] propaganda department.”
Pham Doan Trang is now one of the country’s prisoner of conscience.
In recent years, the Vietnamese authorities have mounted a major crackdown against those who express critical views online. This report reveals how social media users in Viet Nam face the constant threat of arbitrary arrest, prosecution and other forms of harassment in retaliation for exercising their right to freedom of expression online. In addition to state repression, social media users are increasingly faced with arbitrary censorship when they seek to share critical views online. As this report details, some of the world’s largest technology companies – Facebook and Google – are playing an increasingly complicit role in the Vietnamese authorities’ censorship regime.
Pham Doan Trang was arrested and charged under article 117 of Vietnam’s penal code with “making, storing, distributing or disseminating information, documents and items against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
The author, Thomas A. Bass, recalls how he had met the beleaguered blogger last 2015 for his book “Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World.”
I met Trang in Hanoi in 2015 and wrote about her work in my book Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World. Here is a description of our meeting.
Hanoi
As I walk out of my hotel into the splash of color and bustle that marks Vietnam’s capital, I pass a woman with squids wriggling in the paniers of her bicycle and a flower vendor squatting over a bucket of tight-budded roses. Perched on plastic stools lining the streets are groups of neatly-dressed people eating breakfast, buying raffle tickets, chatting, and selling everything from electric fans to chicken soup. Songbirds brought out for their morning airing sing in their wicker cages. Vendors cycle down the street selling brooms, baguettes, bananas. Hanoi on a sunny morning is like a pointillist painting come to life, with the dots scurrying around the canvas, hailing each other in a whirl of rubber wheels and two stroke Chinese motors.
Near St. Joseph’s cathedral, I turn into a trendy café filled with black sofas holding young professionals skyping on their laptops. I order a coffee and sit for a few minutes before a woman with a noticeable limp and creased brow slips into the seat across from me. She is carrying a backpack that looks like it holds everything she owns. We introduce ourselves, and Pham Doan Trang begins recounting her life as a journalist.
Trang was born in Hanoi 1978. Her parents were high school chemistry teachers. Her mother worked in Hanoi, while her father was posted to the western highlands, where he spent fourteen years, before hunger and malaria forced him back to the city. Trang graduated with a degree in economics from Vietnam’s University of Foreign Trade. She attended when the school was on the cusp of big changes. Instruction in Russian suddenly flipped to English. “Facebook is where we get our news,” Trang says, “but very few of Vietnam’s thirty-five million Facebook users know how to speak English. So I think the duty of journalists who speak English is to tell the world what’s happening here.”
In 2000, Trang began working as a journalist for VNExpress, Vietnam’s first internet news site. Straightaway, she faced what she calls the “tragedy of the media” in Vietnam: censorship, self-censorship, government control, and the simple fact that “people are scared.”
“We have thirty thousand journalists in Vietnam.” she says. “Fewer than a hundred are political journalists, and fewer than twenty are democracy supporters. I can count them on my hands and feet. They face administrative sanctions, reductions in salary, fines, physical assault. Journalists are victims of the police state,” she says, before reminding me that every newspaper in Vietnam is state-owned. “If you include bloggers, every year there are hundreds of assaults on journalists, and lots of journalists have been put in jail for political reasons.”
Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as two hundred activists and bloggers like Vinh are currently imprisoned. Vietnam Right Now, a Hanoi-based human rights group, lists two hundred and fifty prisoners of conscience. “In 2013 I counted the number of political prisoners in Vietnam and came up with three hundred and twenty six, to be exact,” says Trang.
I ask Trang what the word “democracy” means to her. “The democracy movement is hardly a movement,” she says. “It’s unorganized.” The rest of her answer is straightforward. Democracy is the right to free and fair elections, organized political parties, majority rule with defense of minority interests, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and assembly. In other words, democracy is everything that we in the West take for granted and willingly compromise.
“In Vietnam, you can’t enter politics unless you’re a member of the Communist Party,” she says. “Those of us who want to get people involved in government, actively, effectively, and meaningfully … we are just waiting for the day they come to arrest us.”
Trang has been “temporarily” arrested many times. A few days before our meeting, she was detained by the police for seven hours. “It happens all the time,” she says. She had organized a seminar supporting victims of torture. “All the organizers were arrested, and the seminar was cancelled. ‘This is an illegal social gathering,’ they told us. ‘You’re inciting public disorder and disturbing the peace.’”
“The longest time they held me in detention was nine days,” she says. Trang swipes through her phone to show me photos of police assaults and beatings. I stare at a young man whose hand was smashed with a brick when he was roughed up by plainclothes policemen. Trang is limping today from a recent attack that left her lying in bed immobile for two days.
Cyber Trolls
Trang describes how Vietnam stage manages rigged elections, where one hundred percent voter turnout is matched by similarly large margins of victory. “A police state never tolerates the press,” she says. “The press is supposed to serve the interests of the Communist Party. The difference is that now we have social media. With other sources beside mainstream media, the state has lost its monopoly.
“Change is coming not because the state is more tolerant, but because it has lost control. It has to control the press plus the blogosphere. It has to deal with services based in the United States. The law requires Facebook to provide information to the police, and sometimes they do it. Google refuses, but Facebook complies. They work for profit, not for human rights. I have a Facebook account, which is more accessible than my blog, but I am wary about Facebook being more “cooperative” with the government than Google.”
“Vietnam is lost in the world technologically,” Trang says. “It’s way behind China.”
China began blocking foreign services as soon as they were introduced, and the Chinese market is big enough that even limited local services attracted large numbers of users. One unintended consequence of this reality is that Vietnam, unlike China, can block news only after it has been published. “This is why the Vietnamese government beats up so many bloggers and journalists,” Trang says. “It’s what happens when you can’t block information at the source.”
Instead of trying to ban Facebook and Google, the Vietnamese government has switched techniques. “They hack our accounts,” Trang says. “They report us to Facebook so that we lose our accounts. They set up fake sites to attack us. They defame us. They steal our personal information and try to blackmail us with it.”
“My phone is tapped,” she says. “I hear agents talking in the background. You begin to fear for your safety. It becomes too dangerous to speak about human rights. This is why so few people do it.”
“In the political culture of Vietnam, people don’t want to be different from other people,” she says. “You will be isolated from friends, family, community members. This is especially hard for women. Police pressure your employers to dismiss you. You can’t find a job. You can’t rent an apartment, or you find yourself being evicted in the middle of the night. Young activists have to sleep in the parks overnight. You can be attacked or arrested or sent to prison for a long time.”
A Confession
Traveling to the Philippines, which does not require a visa for Vietnamese visitors, Trang secretly left Vietnam in January 2013. The following year, she received a fellowship from the German government to study public policy at the University of Southern California. After ten months in Los Angeles, she was offered political asylum in the United States but chose instead to return to Vietnam. In January 2015, she was arrested at the airport in Hanoi and told she was on a blacklist of people not allowed to leave the country.
“News about my detention went viral on Facebook,” she says. “They released me that night but told me I was banned from leaving Vietnam for ‘national security reasons.’” Today, one of Vietnam’s best political reporters is basically unemployed and unemployable.
Back in 2009, when Trang was working as a columnist for VietnamNet, she and two well- known bloggers were arrested in a crackdown on dissidents. Held for nine days, she was accused of making “advocacy tee-shirts” and leading protests against Chinese bauxite mining.
“They confiscated my lap top when I was in jail and opened it to find private photos of me with my former lover,” she says. “They tried to make me sign forty of these photos and confess to being in them. I refused to do this. Then they ‘invited’ my mother to the police station… They forced me to sign the photos and write a confession in front of my mother.”
Trang slumps in her chair as she tells me this story. Her face is grave and unsmiling. “In tears, before the Tet holiday, I wrote a confession telling everyone that I could do nothing to defend myself and them. I asked them to forgive me,” she says.
“The police aren’t using physical torture and imprisonment, but something more subtle,” she says. “I suffered psychological trauma after that. I flash back to dozens of policemen staring at my photos, my body exposed before them. I cannot forget the way my mother looked that day—a traditional, soft-spoken woman who was then in her late sixties, wracked with misery and pain.”
“When I was offered asylum in the United States, I told the consular official, ‘I don’t want to be a burden. You have enough political refugees.’”
“‘You are not a burden. You are an asset,’ he told me. I have never heard these words in my own country, where I have been arrested and beaten many times.”
“On a national level, I see signs of hope in Vietnam. More and more young people want to build a democracy. Many others are declining to become members of the communist party. But here the phrase ‘anti-communist party’ means ‘anti-state.’ This is illegal. It is a crime.”
“For myself I see no hope. I no longer have the chance to live a peaceful life. No more love life. No more family life. No more privacy. I have to live as a public enemy, with police repression.
“You can never take the prison out of someone’s mind,” she says. “It becomes part of your life. I can never get those nine days of detention out of my mind, with the police preaching to me in front of my mother about morality.
“My scandal has given me a slave mind. Fear is all around, and the police take advantage of this.”
Sweet Virtues
Trang invites me to attend a journalism class that she teaches once a week at a café on the outskirts of Hanoi. “These are very brave students,” she says. “Classes like this are raided by the police.”
Trang explains how public meetings in Vietnam are blocked. “You have to leave your apartment one or two days in advance to get to a protest. Otherwise, the police shut you in. The government is scared to see young people gather in groups,” she says. “They’re afraid of what they might do in the future.”
The students begin asking me questions about journalism. “Are there occasions when journalists should not publish something?” “Is truth always the ultimate goal of journalism?” “Is there ever anything more important than publishing the truth?” They are polite, inquisitive, curious. They are doing nothing more than exploring the world around them, which, unfortunately, in Vietnam makes them criminals.
For these young people, “democracy” is not a plot to overthrow the government. It is a request to vote in elections that aren’t rigged. “Freedom of speech” is the desire to talk among themselves about Vietnam and the larger world. “The rule of law” is a wish to assemble in discussion groups, go to poetry readings, watch movies, and read books without being beaten and harassed. For someone like me, jaded by the hypocrisy laid on top of our basic values, it is a shock to be reminded of the sweet virtues of political freedom.
PEN International and the Norwegian Writers in Prison Committee urged the Vietnamese authorities to drop all charges against prominent dissident and journalist Pham Doan Trang.
President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam
PEN International and The Norwegian Writers in Prison Committee hereby urge Vietnamese authorities to immediately drop all charges against author, journalist and activist Pham Doan Trang.
Trang’s apartment was raided and Trang was arrested on October 6th 2020, detained without access to her family or legal representation. The arrest took place just hours after the 2020 U.S.-Vietnam Human Rights Dialogue concluded.
Pham Doan Trang has fought to promote human rights and democracy through her writing and social media. After Trang’s arrest in October she was charged under Art. 177 of the Vietnamese Penal Code and accused of “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the State of Socialist Republic of Vietnam”. Trang, like many before her, has used her platforms and her voice to spread awareness about human rights issues in Vietnam. She is one of several activists who have been detained for this.
PEN International and the Norwegian Writers in Prison Committee strongly urge Vietnamese authorities to:
immediately release Pham Doan Trang from detainment
drop all charges made against her under the Vietnamese Penal Code
provide Trang with immediate and unimpeded access to her family and legal representative; and
end crackdown on bloggers, writers and free speech activists in Vietnam
Yours sincerely,
Mari Moen Holsve Member of Writers in Prison Committee PEN Norway
Pham Doan Trang has earned awards for her activism and is known as one of Vietnam’s prolific writers. In this rare interview with SBS Tiếng Việt, we are given a glimpse of Pham Doan Trang as a daughter sharing her thoughts on her mother, about herself and her causes that she is determined to fight for.
Pham Doan Trang, as many people know, is a sharp writer, a human rights figure for freedom and democracy for Vietnam.
She is the author of a series of works that are among the favorites of Freedom Publishing House, such as Popular Politics, Prison Raising Manual, Non-Violent Resistance, Politics of A Police State, and several other titles. Other books she co-authored include Learning Public Policy Through SEZ Law.
She is also the co-founder of Luat Khoa Magazine – one of the prestigious independent newspapers in Vietnam and Tu Do Publishing House.
In 2017, Pham Doan Trang was awarded the Homo Homini Prize by People In Need.
In 2019, she continued to receive the Press Freedom Award of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), in the category of Influence (Impact).
In 2020, Freedom Publishing House – was awarded the Voltaire Prize for human rights voices.
Pham Doan Trang’s parents are both teachers.
Her mother Bui Thi Thien Can – a stout, petite high school teacher, could not have imagined that the good and good things she taught her son had brought him to become a thorn in the side of the authorities.
From an outstanding and promising journalist of the state press, Pham Doan Trang has stepped out of the red world of party media to speak with a different voice from the authorities: the voice of those who are marginalized. unjustly died in prison, the voice of the people who lost their land, the voice of patriots before the sea and islands were invaded, the voice fighting for territorial integrity, human rights and justice in society.
She used her pen to speak and she was hunted and attacked.
From a healthy girl, during an anti-China protest in 2014 she was cut off by plainclothes security, causing her knee pain and permanent injury to have to fight to get around.
And yet, the authorities isolated her and made it difficult for anyone to contact or help her.
For the past two years, she has had to leave her family in Hanoi to avoid her mother’s constant surveillance and uninvited government visits to their home.
She has to move to many places
In each place, she had to move several times to avoid government loans and difficulties related to the books she wrote.
Since mid-2019 alone, she has had to relocate nearly 50 times.
However, all of this she said she can overcome.
The thing that bothered her the most was thinking about her mother, at an uncertain age, but still had to look forward to her children every day.
In the Vu Lan season, Mai Hoa talked to Pham Doan Trang about her mother.
If you run to your mother now, what’s the first thing you’ll do?
I have thought about this a lot, so there is always an immediate answer: If I could run back to my mother right now, the first thing I would do is hug her. Then I sat down and listened to my mother’s stories, happily talking about all kinds of things, I just kept quiet and listened. Mother is an old woman, but when she is happy, she also has the features of a child, very loving.
The memory of her mother is full, but what is the most prominent mark about her when recalling to see that you love her the most?
I love my mother the most, especially when she rushes to do something for me, or when the police come to the house, she ruffles her feathers like a mother chicken protects her child (but she can’t). My mother is originally from Hanoi, she is a high school teacher, so she has a very gentle and pedantic personality. The mother is small again, the older she gets, the more shriveled she becomes. But when the police came, a thin, gray-haired old woman, unable to speak, kept glaring angrily at the police in order to protect her child, guilty?
Mother also often goes online to read current news (mainly from people who are called “reactionaries” by this government). When the network was cut or the firewall couldn’t get in, my mother was still depressed, struggling not knowing what to do, looking extremely hurt.
My biggest regret is that I have never and certainly will never give my mother peaceful years, as long as this one-party dictatorship exists.
For me, the most beautiful mother is when she is happy, she feels happy. Which… that I could never do for my mother, in this situation.
I haven’t been home for a long time, is life convenient for me to call my mother, what do mother and daughter say to each other?
I can only call my mom online (can’t use a normal phone), but if so, I can only call her when she’s online. So usually, I don’t call, just wait until my mother is online, then she will call me. Every time my mother called, usually she was also chatting with me, I just listened, kept quiet, and tried to comfort her if she had something to worry about.
When I sit back and think about the furthest childhood I can remember, what is the image of Trang and her mother? What was the mother like when she was a girl? How does mother love in father’s love?
When I was a child, my mother taught all day, every day went to class from morning to evening, but at that time Vietnam did not have a Saturday holiday, so I was less close to my mother than my father. But I really miss the image of my mother taking me by bike to go out somewhere, for example, once taking me to West Lake to play on the occasion of early summer, June 1 (International Children’s). Mother and daughter sat under the shade of a very cool green tree and heard the sound of cicadas. My mother bought me a ripe pink whip (the Southern people call it plum). She also remembers the books her mother bought for her, mainly children’s stories, such as the novel “No Family” by Hector Marlot, or the play “The Blue Bird” by Maurice Maeterlinck. Both are books that greatly influenced my childhood thinking.
My father and mother attended the University of Education together, and have been in love since college. Thinking about my parents’ love and the years they spent together – from falling in love to getting married and struggling with the difficult life of the subsidy period to raise three children – I just feel overwhelmed. sadness and love for parents.
When she was young, her mother did not know how to dress, only wearing black pants, a shirt and often had long hair because she did not have money to do her hair. When I was old, my hair fell out, my mother also began to “know” to curl and get her hair done, but her clothes were still mediocre. It took 5-7 years to buy a new set of clothes. How much money do you have to save to raise your children and give it all to the world? My father is the same, saving his last pocket money to give to poor students… but he understands that his kindness can’t save the whole society?
That feeling of sadness and love for my parents is a great motivation for me to join the fight with the desire to change the country. I don’t want to forever have couples like my parents, gentle, honest, poor, struggling with a life of hardship and full of money and deception to raise good children. A good society is a society where honest people must live properly and do not have to suffer with the question: Is it right for me to raise my children to be such good people? ?
What dish do you remember most from your mother’s cooking? What’s your favorite song, or the song that your mother used to hum when you were young, or the song that I remember most now, from my mother?
I miss the shrimp dish (also known as moi) braised with green star fruit, every time my mother makes it, I eat 3 bowls of rice.
When she was young, her mother sang very well, until the middle years she lost her voice, due to the sequelae of pharyngitis – an occupational disease of teachers. Her mother’s musical taste is high and varied, and has influenced her greatly; I must say that I would not have been able to play or sing without the influence of my mother’s love of music. Mother sang, she lulled me with many classical songs, by professional vocalists, such as Beauty of Petal, The Song of Solveig, Then a bird flew (Polish folk song), Willow, Volga River, Bengawan Solo (Indonesian folk song)… There are verses that my mother sang that to me, became a classic, imprinted in my mind from 4-5 years old until now, never to be forgotten, such as:
“The day they took him away, was when the couple separated. My parents want to advise me to end my love for you.”
Or: “The Volga, dreamy nights! Time, please don’t pass.”
Did your mother ever get angry with you or regret that you weren’t ‘better’ than a fool?
She’s not mad at me, but she certainly is, and regrets that I didn’t get wiser, didn’t live a less stormy life.
Does your mother know that you are sad about her and this makes you suffer a lot?
I don’t know if my mother knows.
Have you ever put yourself in the situation of a mother with a child, how do you think you will be?
If I had a child like… I would be very sorry, and most likely I would prevent him from going down the road of struggle. So I really sympathize with parents who try to prevent their children from “getting involved in reactionaries”. Because it’s really a struggle, but which parent doesn’t love their child, pity their child. That’s why I’m lucky I don’t have to go to jail.
What do you think can help your mother be as strong and secure as possible when thinking about her child? In other words, if you could do something for your child, what do you think your mother would do?
I think mom is only at ease when I’m safe and happy. And that’s what my mother and I can’t do. If she could do anything for me, I’m sure my mother would try her best to make me go abroad to live, giving up all the way to struggle.
And if you could give your mother a hug or do something for her now, what would you do? Why?
I just want to be with my mother and be with her forever.
What is the last thing you want your mother to think of you?
That I love my mother and always try my best, desperately, to fulfill a part of the responsibility of a child to her mother. I know I’m an unfilial child, I can’t make my parents happy, but I hope they know that I’ve tried a lot.
The last thing that comes to mind is my mother – even if the days fade, even if time erases the image, what is it?
I always know and always remember that my mother is a wonderful mother who has sacrificed her whole life for her children: Sacrificing her youth years, teaching, working to raise her children to adulthood, and sacrificing peace love of the old years so that their children can safely follow the path they choose, never blame them, a love and support them unconditionally.
Does Pham Doan Trang Club actually exist? Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper published an article that says it does. But activists and independent journalists say it is old propaganda method of the State which is afraid of opposing voices.
Many people in the community of social activities and relatives of journalist Pham Doan Trang believe that Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper is trying to deter and distort the truth about an “object” who unfortunately caught their eye in the article. Recent news about Pham Doan Trang Club. They told RFA that they were not even aware of the existence of this club.
On November 3, 2020, the People’s Public Security website online had an article titled “Against the Peaceful Evolution, the farce of calling for the establishment of Pham Doan Trang Club”.
At the beginning of the article, please read verbatim: “The so-called “Pham Doan Trang Club” is just a trick to entice and gather people who go against the interests of the nation and nation, and sabotage the interests of the nation. stability and development of the country that this whole nation is building and cultivating day by day and hour by hour.
With 3 main questions, one is the truth behind the calls for Pham Doan Trang’s release, the second is to know who Pham Doan Trang is, and the third is the provisions of Vietnamese law for the establishment of Pham Doan Trang. The People’s Public Security Association and website continued to inform that: ” After the subject Pham Thi Doan Trang, also known as Pham Doan Trang, was arrested for the crime of “propaganda against the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” according to Article 88 Penal Code 1999 and the crime of “Making, storing, distributing or propagating information, documents and items aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 117 of the 2015 Penal Code, certain subjects cried out in cyberspace, demanding the establishment of the so-called “Pham Doan Trang Club”, also known as “The Women’s Club for Human Rights”, led by Pham Le Thuy. ”
Radio Free Asia tried to contact Pham Le Thuy as well as the Women’s Human Rights Club. Unfortunately, there is no sign that the telephony line is connected to the right person for the right job.
What is special to admit is that when any dissident is arrested, in addition to the legal proceedings, the Vietnamese communist press agencies are very involved, they put the whole system in place. politics to destroy people fighting for freedom and democracy for Vietnam. – Pham Thanh Nghien
Even a source closest to the incident refused to answer, saying that he was afraid of being harassed and arrested by the police when the case was unclear.
Such fear is understandable, as former political prisoner, blogger Pham Thanh Nghien said:
“ I don’t know who called Pham Doan Trang Club. A few months ago, there was also a group calling for the establishment of the Independent Trade Union, and someone asked me, I always affirm that now being persecuted like this, there is no real struggle organization or people. Which struggle calls for the establishment of a group. After Pham Doan Trang was arrested, I and some friends who loved Pham Doan Trang did not or did not think about setting up a group or organization, specifically the Pham Doan Trang Club.
And it is not strange if the Pham Doan Trang Club is considered a trick, a hostile intention to destroy in the eyes of the Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper, the powerful media agency in the village on the right side. The next opinion of blogger Pham Thanh Nghien:
Any independent civil society group or organization that has the goal of promoting human rights is heavily criticized, criticized and slandered by the police and the State. convicted again”.
“For me, this is nothing special. What is special to admit is that when any dissident is arrested, in addition to the legal proceedings, the Vietnamese communist press agencies are very involved, they put the whole system in place. politics to destroy people fighting for freedom and democracy for Vietnam. Even though the person himself has been captured, that means there is no chance or ability to defend himself anymore. This is very familiar, which means that it is not strange, but it is not that we accept such familiar things . “
Former reporter of Communist Magazine, now independent journalist Nguyen Vu Binh, explains why the call to establish Pham Doan Trang Club caught the eye of Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper:
“This information is quite new but if that is the case then it is also what every civil society establishes its own Clubs and groups. It’s the right of the people.”
“The authorities are always vigilant about this, the People’s Public Security newspaper talking about Pham Doan Trang Club, and then calling for Pham Doan Trang’s release is a trick, smearing the people fighting here. Ms. Pham Doan Trang can be a preemptive preemptive blow. I think using the word preemptively is the norm. Against peaceful evolution is a familiar article in the mainstream press.
“Many people do not know that the article has given it like that, people will go to find out who Pham Doan Trang is, unintentionally stimulating the curiosity of bystanders. It also has this side and the other side” .
With the question “First of all, it is necessary to find out who Pham Doan Trang is, is Pham Doan Trang a person, event or event, raised by the Cong An Nhan Dan online newspaper and then answered that “Pham Doan Trang is not in the list. the list of “contributing to the socio-economic development of the country”.
Illustration. Journalist Pham Doan Trang and her books
Still according to the Cong An Nhan newspaper, Pham Doan Trang, 42 years old, was arrested for activities infringing on national security and against the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, who used to go abroad illegally and was arrested. Disciplinary governing body forced to quit, then “changed color”, joined and established and operated many illegal associations and groups, wrote for websites of enemies who were anti-national and anti-national. , the nation, used to be the representative face of the so-called “free publishing house”, spreading many materials with propaganda content, distorting the democracy and human rights situation in Vietnam, opposing the Party, The State and the regime and smear the leaders of the Party and State, incite the overthrow of the political regime in our country.
From the position that “many people dream of” ie born into a basic family, graduated from Hanoi – Amsterdam School and Faculty of Economics, Hanoi Foreign Trade University, Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper continued, Pham Doan Trang became a lawbreaker. The acts that the subject has committed need to be dealt with strictly according to Vietnamese law.
Reviewer, former political prisoner and blogger Pham Thanh Nghien argued:
“I don’t want to be someone who is too proud of my friend. Pham Doan Trang, like some other women, dreams of a normal life in a country with good politics.
“In terms of fighting, I affirm that Pham Doan Trang is very brave. Trang is a person with aspiration, honesty, frankness, simplicity and affection. With her qualifications, Trang can lead a well-off economically and mentally comfortable. If she hadn’t become a fighter for democracy in a society without freedom of expression like in Vietnam, Trang would have lived differently. But if that was the case, there wouldn’t be a Pham Doan Trang today.”
“The failure of the authorities is to arrest a person who has planned for himself the worst path on the path of struggle. Capture or not, for Pham Doan Trang, this is first of all a victory over himself, a victory over fear, a symbol of the aspiration for freedom for Vietnam.”
The decision of Vietnamese law on the establishment of the Association is the third title of the article against the peaceful evolution by calling for the establishment of the Pham Doan Trang Club. The article asserts that “Vietnam already has Decree 45/2010/ND-CP, Decree 33/2012/ND-CP and Circular 03/2013/TT-BNV, all of which are legal documents and regulations. establishment of an association.
The establishment of an association is voluntary, the article emphasizes, but must contribute to the country’s socio-economic development, and must be organized and operated in compliance with the Constitution, laws and association charters.
For independent researcher Nguyen Quang A, who knows a lot about democracy writer and is also the voice of Freelance Publishing House Pham Doan Trang, invokes so many regulations to justify each prohibition against success. The establishment of Pham Doan Trang Club is an old propaganda method of the State which is afraid of opposing voices:
“I didn’t know there was a call for the establishment of the Pham Doan Trang Club, nor did I read the Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper and was not surprised at all about the argument that it was boring in Vietnam.”
“Anyone who doesn’t shut up and doesn’t say what they want will be considered a peaceful development, an argument that has been repeated for decades. Sometimes they raise it themselves to thwart the call.”
Speaking against peaceful developments, criticizing the call to establish Pham Doan Trang Club is a farce, showing the poor professionalism of a newspaper that often has to obey the communist party. This is the opinion of former journalist Le Phu Khai of the Voice of Vietnam, the author of the book “The Word Ai Article” accused of being anti-party, causing him many difficulties like the present activist Pham Doan Trang:
“In the past, the state-owned press was still the same, so in China a very famous general, Mr. Liao Huazhou, said, “In China, the most lack of information is the press.” It’s the same with Vietnam, especially the state-owned press is lacking in information.”
“Miss Doan Trang is not guilty at all. The Constitution of Vietnam clearly states the right to freedom of publication, freedom of thought and freedom of the press. She only writes books peacefully, expresses her opinions, her thoughts, but imprisoning her like that is a violation of human rights.”
“The Vietnamese Constitution recognizes the right to form associations, but those who propagate the Constitution are arrested and imprisoned.”
According to Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper, the so-called “Pham Doan Trang Club” does not fully guarantee all elements and does not comply with the provisions of Vietnamese law.
This conclusion of Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper was considered by a group of independent journalists in the country as heavy on performance but empty in meaning.
Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-director Trinh Huu Long was quoted on the 2018 Cyber-Security Law for FromGrassroots Activism to Disinformation by Dien Luong.
Commentators often equate Vietnam’s internet freedom as similar to China. Indeed, the West regularly includes Vietnam on its “state enemies of the internet” list, as it does for China, Iran, or Syria (Deutsche Welle 2013). There is some truth to the concerns of Vietnam looking towards China as a model, given how ideologically, politically and economically aligned Hanoi is with Beijing. Vietnam is embracing Chinese hardware and packages of security software to increase its technical and infrastructural capabilities for information controls (Sherman 2019). A prominent example to justify this observation is Vietnam’s passage and enforcement of the 2018 Cyber-Security Law, which bears striking resemblances to a similar Chinese law (Trinh Huu Long 2017) which gives the government carte blanche to strictly police the internet, scrutinize personal information, censor online discussion, and punish or even jail dissidents.
Vietnam’s restrictive policy on press, free speech and expression makes Facebook the best alternative platform for citizens to let their voices be heard. Recently, Facebook blocked and suspended accounts criticizing the government, but Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder, Trinh Huu Long said much as he dislikes Facebook, he will have to stick with them.
In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village outside Hanoi where residents were fighting authorities’ plans to seize farmland to build a factory.
Facebook, whose site was translated into Vietnamese in 2008, now counts more than half the country’s people among its account holders. The popular platform has enabled government critics and pro-democracy activists — in both Vietnam and the United States — to bypass the communist system’s strict controls on the media.
But in the last several years, the company has repeatedly censored dissent in Vietnam, trying to placate a repressive government that has threatened to shut Facebook down if it does not comply, The Times found.
In interviews, dozens of Vietnamese activists, human rights advocates and former Facebook officials say the company has blocked posts by hundreds of users, often with little explanation.
Facebook has also barred Hanoi’s critics — including a Southern California-based opposition group — from buying ads to boost readership and has failed to stop pro-government trolls from swamping the platform to get dissidents’ posts removed.
Instead of using its leverage as Vietnam’s biggest media platform to hold the line against censorship, Facebook has, in effect, become an accomplice in the government’s intensifying repression of pro-democracy voices, critics say.
Facebook usually restricts posts and users for one of two reasons — violations of its “community standards,” which are rules the company says apply to users worldwide, or “local laws.” Posts in the latter category are blocked in the country where they are illegal but remain accessible elsewhere.
Access Now, a digital rights group that assists users who believe their Facebook access has been improperly restricted, said the company rarely explains its decisions to block or restore accounts — except to say they violated community standards.
Trinh Huu Long, a Hanoi critic who lives in Taiwan and runs a nonprofit online magazine called Luat Khoa, said he began exploring other modes of distribution after Facebook repeatedly blocked articles that had nothing to do with Vietnam. But he determined that abandoning the platform would drastically shrink his readership.
“Facebook is the king in Vietnam,” he said. “Content has to go through Facebook to reach an audience. So, much as I dislike Facebook, I have to stick with them.”
