As Vietnam tightens leash on criticism, scores are jailed and exiled

Story by Rebecca Tan 

14/8/2024

As Vietnam tightens leash on criticism, scores are jailed and exiled © Jenny Vaughan/AFP/Getty Images

SINGAPORE — Vietnam’s government has been carrying out its most intense crackdown on critics in decades, jailing droves of activists, lawyers and journalists and driving even more into exile, according to human rights groups and security analysts. 

This heightened repression comes as the United States elevates relations with Vietnam to the highest levels since the two countries ended their war in the 1970s, with the Biden administration providing hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance and American companies ramping up investment in Vietnam’s tech and manufacturing sectors. 

Now, rights activists say they fear the repression could grow even worse with the ascension this summer of To Lam, the security chief who presided over much of the crackdown, to the post of general secretary of the Communist Party, the country’s most powerful position. 

In the 11 months since Vietnam and the United States upgraded bilateral ties last September, Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party has arrested more than two dozen of the country’s most prominent labor rights advocates, environmentalists and journalists. 

Most of those targeted were not directly critical of the party and had been working to effect change through government or were part of government themselves. Many also had ties to international or Western organizations that had been seen in the past as protection against overt persecution.

The director of an energy policy think tank who had worked with the World Bank and was helping international agencies evaluate Vietnam’s plan to wean itself off fossil fuels was arrested on allegations of “appropriating documents.” 

A labor official who had been working with the United Nations in seeking Vietnam’s ratification of an international agreement allowing trade unions to form without prior approval was taken in by police on accusations of revealing state secrets. 

A journalist once enrolled as a Nieman fellow at Harvard University was detained for “abusing democratic freedoms” in posts he had made on Facebook. 

Activists who were charged with subversion stand trial in Ho Chi Minh City in October 2018. © Vietnam News Agency/AFP/Getty Images

Rights activists said these arrests showed how the authorities have been casting a wider net than before. Vietnam as of August has detained nearly 200 political prisoners, putting away about as many in the first half of 2024 as it did in all of 2023, according to the 88 Project, a watchdog group. 

In news conferences, Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry has denied that the government has been carrying out a crackdown and has pushed back on external criticism as “interference in Vietnam’s internal activities.” The ministry did not respond to questions for this story. 

Vietnam experienced a period of political liberalization in the 2000s but has grown more repressive with the rise of hard-liners in the Communist Party, Vietnam analysts say. The party has further tightened its grip amid an internal power struggle in recent months that has resulted in To Lam rising to the top of the party.

Organizations that developed over the past three decades to support free speech and hold the government accountable have been “completely decimated,” said Ben Swanton, director of the 88 Project. Independent publishing houses, journalist associations, think tanks and nonprofits have closed in quick succession, outlawed by the government or shuttered by leaders fearing arrest. 

“There’s no one left inside able to put up any organized resistance,” Swanton said. Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Amnesty International have sounded similar alarms. 

Party propaganda and official documents suggest that while Vietnam’s leaders have sought to benefit from greater integration into the international economy, this increased exposure has made them more sensitive to political threats domestically, said Nguyen Khac Giang, who studies Vietnamese politics at the Singapore-based ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute. 

The government has faced — and expects to face — little pushback from Washington and other foreign capitals because of Vietnam’s growing importance as a buffer against China, Giang said. Vietnam shares a long land border with China and has mounted a direct challenge to Beijing’s attempts to dominate the strategic South China Sea. 

To court Vietnam, the Biden administration has not made Hanoi’s repression of civil society a priority during high-level diplomatic meetings or conditioned new agreements on an improvement of human rights, said three former State Department officials who worked on ties with Vietnam. 

In June, the United States upgraded Vietnam’s ranking in the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report despite opposition from rights groups, which said Vietnam had been covering up trafficking cases. 

Kelley Currie, who served as the acting deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2018 and then as U.S. ambassador at large for global women’s issues from 2020 to 2021, said that by staying quiet about human rights while increasing assistance to Vietnam, the Biden administration has enabled the government’s continued repression. She said it is misguided to think that Hanoi could be persuaded to take sides against China, because Vietnam “is not interested in being part of any Western-led, anti-China alliance.” 

Another former State Department official who served in the Biden administration and spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions from his time in government said that with Vietnam, the United States has not used many of the tools it typically uses to exert pressure on other countries. “We’ve provided a decent amount of security assistance and clearly could have conditioned that assistance on improvement of human rights. But we haven’t,” said the official. When Washington was preparing to upgrade relations with Vietnam last year, there was little discussion over the question of its worsening human rights record, the official added. The upgrade, he said, “was not up for debate.” 

A State Department spokesperson denied that the administration has reduced the pressure on Vietnam over its human rights record, saying that officials “engage with our Vietnamese government counterparts in candid conversations on human rights concerns at all levels.” Daniel Kritenbrink, U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, raised human rights during a visit to Hanoi in June, the spokesperson said. 

Rights groups and activists have been pushing to tie Vietnam’s human rights record to other priorities in the U.S.-Vietnam relationship. 

At the start of this year, Vietnam asked the Commerce Department to change its designation from a nonmarket to a market economy, which would lower tariffs on Vietnamese imports into the United States, its biggest export market. Vietnam had made reforms to satisfy U.S. criteria for a market-driven economy, officials said, including opening the country to foreign investment and reducing government control over resources. 

But rights groups and American manufacturers that opposed the proposed change argued that Vietnam still functioned as a planned economy shaped in large part by the Communist Party and that it did not meet the labor standards of a market economy given its repression of trade unions. 

The Commerce Department announced earlier this month that it would not change the designation. The department said the decision was made based on a “fact-intensive analysis” of Vietnam’s economy, but some security analysts and rights activists said it was an indication that the Biden administration was taking Vietnam’s human rights record into greater consideration. Vietnam will ask Commerce again for the designation to be changed, its Trade Ministry said. 

Based on the technicalities, Vietnam should have been granted the change, said Ted Osius, president of the US-ASEAN business council. But Osius, who served as U.S. ambassador to Vietnam from 2014 to 2017, also said Vietnam’s erosion of civil liberties has reached a point where it poses a “quandary” for the U.S.-Vietnamese relationship. 

“What’s happening in Vietnam doesn’t conform to our preferred narrative, that’s for sure, he said.

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