By Matt Steinglass Oct 7, 2009, 14:36 GMT
Hanoi - 'It was eleven o'clock at night when they came,' said Nguyen Thi Huyen Trang. 'They didn't have any papers or anything. I asked, why are you taking away my husband in the middle of the night? They said, 'we'll explain it to you later'.'
Trang, 30, is a pleasant woman in unassuming small-town clothes. Since her husband Pham Van Troi, 40, was arrested in September 2008, she has seen him three times. She says he is in good health and that prison authorities seem to be treating him well.
On Thursday Troi, a building engineer, will go on trial in Hanoi on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Troi is accused of associating with democracy activists and writing internet posts criticizing government policies and calling for a multi-party democratic system.
Troi is one of nine democracy activists and bloggers facing trial in Hanoi and Haiphong this week. On Tuesday in Hanoi, poet Tran Duc Thach, 57, was sentenced to three years in prison on charges similar to those Troi faces.
On Wednesday, high school teacher Vu Van Hung, 43, was also sentenced to three years in prison. In August 2008, Hung suspended a banner from a Hanoi overpass denouncing corruption and inflation, calling for the defence of Vietnamese waters in the South China Sea, and demanding multi-party elections.
The trials of the bloggers and democracy activists are the latest episodes in a gradual tightening of controls over freedom of expression and association carried out by Vietnam's government since early 2007.
In the spring of 2006, a group of intellectuals and activists issued a manifesto calling for greater freedom and multi-party democracy. They called themselves Bloc 8406. For months, the government tolerated them, anxious to showcase its liberal credentials as it applied to join the World Trade Organization.
But shortly after gaining admission to the WTO in January 2007, Vietnam began arresting the activists. A pair of human rights lawyers and an activist Catholic priest were sentenced to multi-year jail terms. By late 2007, many of the activists were in prison, and political activism ground to a halt.
But even as the government cracked down on activists, new avenues of political expression were opening up to Vietnamese: blogs.
Bloggers like the French-trained computer science graduate Nguyen Tien Trung, 26, and those who went by the names Dieu Cay, Osin, and Nguoi Buon Gio (or 'Wind Trader') took on controversial political topics - though usually staying within the limits of what they thought authorities would tolerate.
Most recently, the bloggers took up causes that dovetailed with widespread anti-Chinese sentiment. Starting in 2008 they attacked Chinese claims to sovereignty over much of the South China Sea, implying subtly that Vietnam's government was failing to defend its own maritime territorial claims in the face of Chinese pressure.
At the beginning of 2009 they began attacking new Chinese-operated bauxite mines in Vietnam's central highlands. Respected scientists and military figures had criticized the mines on environmental and national security grounds, and the bloggers assumed Hanoi would find it hard to arrest anyone for patriotic anti-Chinese sentiments.
Their hopes were disappointed. Nguyen Tien Trung was first drafted into the army, and then, this summer, expelled from the army and arrested. Dieu Cay has been in jail since 2008.
In March the government passed a new law effectively barring bloggers from discussing politics. Over the summer Osin and Wind Trader were both arrested and told to stop blogging. Other democracy advocates, including the American-trained lawyer Le Cong Dinh, have been arrested as well.
The number of dissidents and political bloggers in Vietnam is vanishingly small. Most Vietnamese are more interested in economic issues than in abstract questions like democracy. And Vietnamese generally know the limits of acceptable political discourse in their country are tight.
So what drives some of them to test those limits? Why run the risk of ending up as Trang's husband Troi has, with his wife trying to support their two small children on her low earnings in a silk handicrafts village?
Trang said Troi was frustrated with his inability to find a permanent job after graduating with his engineering degree. Troi chalked his situation up to his lack of powerful connections and Vietnam's widespread corruption.
He does not seem to have tried hard to hide his activities. Trang said he knew several of the other democracy activists going on trial this week, and that they had visited his house. One might think he was a bit naive about the likely consequences of such actions.
But Trang said they always knew what was likely to happen.
'In Vietnam, people like Troi, who speak their minds and talk about democracy - very often the state wants to shut them down,' Trang said. 'We always knew he might be arrested.'
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