Vietnam’s Blogosphere: The Battleground for Rival Factions of the Ruling Communists

Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party is not looking back on a good year. The country’s economy is in trouble; the authoritarian leadership is split; and what appear to be rival Communist Party factions, seeking to rouse the dissenting voices of social media for their own ends, have unleashed a wave of online protests that has become increasingly difficult to contain.

Over the last year, blogs purporting to feature insider dirt on Vietnam’s ruling elite have caused an avalanche of criticism against those close to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. One blog, Quanlambao (Officials Doing Journalism), appeared in the spring, publishing allegations of murky ties between big business and members of the Prime Minister’s family. Quanlambao alleged, for example, that the Prime Minister’s 34-year-old daughter Nguyen Thanh Phuong, an investment manager with a Swiss university degree, was bidding for contracts with disgraced tycoon Nguyen Duc Kien, who was arrested on corruption charges in August. Phuong vehemently denies any impropriety, and the attacks have been so virulent that Tuong Vu, associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon, speculates they must have been “launched by a faction or some interests who want the Prime Minister to go away.”

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By September, the Prime Minister had had enough of Quanlambao and signed an administrative order No. 7169, instructing officials to clamp down on the publication of such blogs and, paradoxically, not to read them in the firstplace. A month later, Quanlambao had gone quiet, but its brazen style had already inspired journalists to establish other anonymous blogs featuring stories that they could not report on in government-controlled media. “Rival factions in the party have tried to use online blogs to counter other factions,” says Vu. “But now the blogosphere has gone out of the control of the government.”

According to Carlyle A. Thayer, emeritus professor of political science at the University of New South Wales in Canberra and a longtime Vietnam watcher, the new blogs have set “the house on fire and are being read by everyone.” Danlambao (People Doing Journalism) is one of the most popular blogs. It notched up half a million page views on Sept. 12 — the day of the Prime Minister’s antiblogging decree — according to an open letter by its anonymous editorial team. “Our contributors include not only independent newsgatherers and freelancers, but also reporters from mainstream media and informants from within the government,” the letter said. Danlambao, along with similar blogs like Cau Nhat Tan and Xuandienhannom, has covered dissident trials, forced relocations, official waste and graft, the country’s struggling real estatemarket and Vietnam’s territorial disputes with China.

The world of social media is also becoming a forum for dissent. Facebook is booming in the Southeast Asian nation. Almost a million Vietnamese joined the network each month over the past half-year, making Vietnam the country with the highest growth rate in Facebook users globally, according to the social-media analysts at Socialbakers. Over the year, the total number of users, who are mostly young, urban and educated, doubled to 10 million — a ninth of the population — prompting some of the country’s most outspoken journalists to move from blogging to publishing on Facebook. One of these is San Truong, better known as Huy Duc, who is currently a Nieman fellow at Harvard University. He has some 5,000 friends and 13,000 followers on Facebook, where he regularly publishes articles commenting on the latest conflicts between the Prime Minister and political rival President Truong Tan Sang. “People like me won’t have to go back to official media as long as we can debate online,” he says.

Poor economic performance has exacerbated social dissatisfaction. The country fell from 112th in 2011 to 123rd place this year in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. High-profile corruption has dominated the news throughout the year and made appearances in popular culture too. The hit television series Dan Troi (Heaven’s Altar) portrayed the lives of a corrupt provincial party secretary, a businessman and a corruption TV station director, bribing their way up to higher positions and greater wealth — a fictional tale that seemed all too real to many Vietnamese. In April, Pham Thanh Binh, chief executive of state-owned Vinashin, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for bringing the country’s largest shipbuilding company to the brink of bankruptcy. In August, Nguyen Duc Kien, a banking and soccer tycoon, was arrested for “illegal business.” Weeks later, police in neighboring Cambodia arrested Duong Chi Dung, chairman of Vietnam’s largest shipping line Vinalines, who went on the run after the company defaulted on more than $2 billion in debt, according to official media reports.

Prime Minister Dung has meanwhile been overseeing a period of high inflation, with consumer prices up 9.4% on average every month this year compared with last, according to official figures. Government economic strategy, heavily reliant on propping up large state-owned companies, seems to be flagging. On Dec. 24, the country’s General Statistics Office reported the lowest economic-growth rate in 13 years — the lowest among its Southeast Asian neighbors. Foreign investment pledges fell by 14% this year, Moody’s has downgraded the country’s government bonds (citing “a high degree of macroeconomic instability”), and the country’s benchmark VN Index was Asia’s worst performing stock index last year.

To be sure, while Vietnam’s woes are providing plenty of material for dissenting voices, dissenters don’t have a free pass just yet. On Nov. 20, a court upheld a six-year prison sentence against soldier turned blogger Dinh Dang Dinh, aprominent democracy advocate. The decision came two months after three leading representatives of the dissident group Free Journalists Club were convicted of “conducting propaganda against the state.” The most prominent of them, blogger Nguyen Van Hai, also known as Dieu Cay, was sentenced to 12 years in prison and 5 years of house arrest. Fellow blogger Ta Phong Tan was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 5 years of house arrest. Tan’s mother died after setting herself on fire in July to protest her daughter’s detention.

Despite these setbacks, a culture of protest is growing. For now, nationalist demonstrations against neighboring China’s investments in Vietnam and its territorial claims in the South China Sea outnumber protests against official corruption or in favor of democracy. But the tendency is for young nationalists to form united fronts with other dissenting groups, including democracy activists. “You can see that the links have become stronger,” says Vu. “Now they have started to link to farmers protesting against land grabs, they have started to link to Christians who contest government religious politics.” While many still believe that antigovernment blogs are tolerated because their existence suits certain factions of the Communist Party, it is safe to assume that the deepening of ties between opposition groups was never the intention of any apparatchik — and that may make 2013 an even more difficult year for the Vietnamese government than 2012.

Read more: http://world.time.com/2012/12/27/vietnams-blogosphere-the-battleground-for-rival-factions-of-the-ruling-communists/#ixzz2GNfXm9A3

The evolution of perceived threats: Communism, terrorism and intolerance

I’m not sure whether the commander of Military District IV/Diponegoro, Maj. Gen. Hardiono Saroso, was joking when earlier this month he warned the long defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) not to revive or he would “steadfastly annihilate” them. Gen. Saroso observed that recently there had been public statements trying to reframe the history of the PKI uprising in 1965.

From his sources, Gen. Saroso indicated that former PKI members were trying to revitalize the ideology despite it not having the strength to exist as a public movement (Solo Pos, Dec. 17, 2012).

Gen. Saroso’s antipathy was justified 30 years ago when there was a bipolar world system: the western, United States-led, democratic capitalist bloc against the communist bloc under the Soviet Union.

However, by now his hostility should be in a museum of the Cold War. An irrational fear of communism after the collapse of the Soviet Union is a hangover from another world.

However, as official policy and perhaps to control the public, Indonesia’s phobia of communism is still very much alive, more than 20 years after the Berlin Wall crumbled.

Here, communism is depicted as brutal and atheistic, rather than what it purports to be: An ideology that claims to stand for common ownership and a classless society.

If the Indonesian people agree with the Constitution’s Article 3 (2) “Sectors of production which are important for the country and affect the life of the people shall be under the powers of the State” and Article 3 (3) “The land, water and natural resources within shall be under the powers of the State and shall be used to the greatest benefit of the people” they could be regarded as to some extent agreeing with communists.

 If they support the fuel subsidy and minimum wage then they share inherently communist views, or at least a rejection of unbridled free-market, competitive capitalism.

Yet they do not believe they agree in any way with communists because communism is something to be feared.

We have never been more suspicious and threatened by a bag left unattended as we are today.

There is a reason why public fear exists. Public fear is used to control a society to get it to behave in a certain way. Edward Ross in his book, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundation of Order (1901, reprinted 2009) illustrated that there were three elements that worked together in shaping social control: the doer, the sufferer and the
spectator (p. 61-3).

In the rhetoric of defending against the latent threat of communism the doer is one who warns of the threat; the sufferer is the person flagged as a communist while their family is immediately tainted and even if they denounce the ideology they are still stigmatized; and the spectator is the general public who might swing for or against the ideology.

In the contemporary post 9/11 era, public fear is projected against terrorism. The tightening of security at airports and public buildings, special police and military units to counterterrorism, and public announcements warning of the threat of terrorism.

We have never been more suspicious and threatened by a bag left unattended as we are today. The bag’s contents might vary from old unwanted clothes, a stash of bribe money or a ticking bomb, but how real does the fear feel?

Fear feels so real that people agree to pay to avoid it.

To contain communism, the United States spent US$13 billion (1948-1951) and to counter terrorism it spent another $1.3 trillion (2001-2011, US Congressional Research Service data). Whether higher costs are correlated with higher safety is still debatable, one thing is for sure, spending money on a cause erases the guilty feeling of not doing anything.

Yet, it is also necessary to understand that not every country or entity has such disposable funds. What are readily available are disposable counterthreats to repel the source of the threat before it manifests itself. Gen. Saroso showed this by his act of threatening those who plan to revive the PKI.

What he did is similar to the warning on cigarette packaging; this is called the “deterrence effort”. Again the effectiveness of deploying threats is impossible to measure but at least there is the feel-good effect of doing something.

The feel-good effect of doing something might also be the background of intolerance. Groups such as the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) and several other conservative groups are now more vocal in presenting their antipathy to those having different beliefs or to those acting in a manner of which they disapprove.

These groups use the perceived threat that those who are different from them will have a bad influence on society. Their disapproval is manifested both in verbal threats and acts of violence.

According to a Setara Institute report released on Dec. 17, 2012, the number of incidents of religious intolerance is increasing, from 135 cases in 2007 to 264 cases this year.

This doubling shows us that the Indonesian population is learning from the cowboy acts of security actors and the impunity they possess, to escape punishment or even an obligatory apology for discriminatory remarks or actions they made in the past.

If this situation is not handled, other parts of society will feel threatened by the ultra-conservative groups and create their own ultras.

Of course it is natural to demand that the President do something about this situation as he is regarded as looking on impassively. Although, to the contrary, according to the Setara report, government officials have made statements that encourage violence and have issued discriminatory policies.

The cycle of violent threats should end somewhere. Maybe this is the time that we should be brave enough to follow the example of former president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid who acknowledged that the mass killings of 1966 victimized PKI members, their families and innocent people.

Gus Dur also offered his controversial public apology via state television TVRI in March 2000. As a country why is it that, after a decade, Indonesia can so easily fall back to anger and away from forgiveness? Fitri Bintang Timur, Singapore associate research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Australian travellers to Bali urged to take care

The Australian Medical Association has issued a warning to travellers and party goers about one of Australia's top holiday destinations, Bali.

The Association says it's seeing an increasing number of illnesses and injuries in those returning from the Indonesian island.

The Association is calling on visitors to avoid cocktails that might be spiked with methanol-- and it's advising them not to get a tattoo.

Correspondent: David Weber
Speaker: Doctor Michael Gannon, Vice-President, Australian Medical Association, Western Australia

GANNON: Look, I think that people in, in Western Australia in many ways regard Bali as an extension of their state and I guess because they see it as such a close place to go, such an easy place to get, they don't think that you are actually travelling to an international country where the rules aren't the same.

People seem to make decisions that might appear a bit strange in terms of not taking the precautions that you might take. So for example there are situations where people will decide to get a tattoo done when they're in Bali. There are not the same legal protections there to reduce the risk of an infection being obtained from having a tattoo.

WEBER: This comes a year after the publicity about someone who had contracted HIV from a tatooist's needle.

GANNON: Contracting a virus as serious as HIV or hepatitis C can be a life changing or a lethal mistake for someone to make. There's a lot of skin disease from henna type tattooes and things like that. If you get a blood-borne infection from a dirty needle giving you something like HIV, that can change the rest of your life.

WEBER: There's been a lot of recent publicity about cocktails spiked with methanol, indeed reports of serious illness and even death. Is it safe to assume that the problem is more widespread than we know?

GANNON: Look, it's difficult to know. Certainly there would be great dangers in having a drink spiked with methanoyl, that can cause blindness after even a relatively small dosage. It is the kind of thing that has been out of methylated spirits for example in Australia for some time and we would have great concerns if we thought that was common place. Again its not the same standard as we would expect in Australia in terms of there being laws and when you purchase alcoholic beverage in a hotel in Australia you are getting what they say you are getting.

WEBBER: GPs are seeing an increasing number of people coming back from Bali with illnesses. Dr Gannon

GANNON: Well, probably the most common presentation to a GP when someone returns to Bali would be gastroenteritis or some form of food poisoning but when we're talking more serious infections like salmonella, a serious infection like salmonella, there's a requirement for the doctor in Australia to report the infection. It is a notifiable infection so the Health Department needs to track those cases.

Polio has been virtually eradicated in countries like Australia but there are parts of Indonesia, not so much part of Bali, where there are pockets of polio. There are certain areas of the Indonesian archipelago where you might still be at high risk of catching rabies and there is a specific vaccine for that. People travelling to Bali should be very careful about being around wild animals, think twice before going to the monkey forest because there are reports of people catching rabies in that context. Radio Australia

F-35: Still on Asia’s Radar?

Several Asian countries are interested in the American F-35 JSF. But Canada’s U-turn on buying the jet won’t encourage Asian partners to sign up any time soon. Will the program survive?

For a stealth plane, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) certainly attracts a lot of criticism.

It was the future weapon system that promised so much — enough for the United States and its allies to draw up wide-eyed plans for over 3,100 JSFs while the plane was still little more than an idea. The JSF was going to guarantee air superiority for the U.S. and its partners well into the middle of this century. But ever since rising costs, technical complexities, and missed deadlines have badly hurt the machine’s credibility, to the point where some critics advocate freighting the F-35 straight to the museum before it ever enters active service.

Of all the program’s setbacks, this month’s announcement that Canada was hitting the “reset” button on its procurement of 65 aircraft is probably the most serious. Ottawa, one of eight international partners working with the U.S. on the program, had been staunchly pro-JSF until an independent audit found that the fleet would cost $45.8bn over its 42-year life span — almost double initial government estimates. The reset doesn’t mean that Canada has dumped the F-35 entirely, but it would now look politically clumsy for the government to do another 180 degree turn and buy the jet after all. At any rate, Ottawa is examining cheaper alternatives.

Other partner nations are also wavering, but the biggest threat to the program could be in the U.S. itself, where up to $500 billion may need to be shed from the defense budget over the coming decade, in addition to cuts already agreed too. As the Pentagon’s most expensive program — currently pegged at $396bn for basic procurement and $1.45 trillion for total through-life costs — it is hard to see how the JSF could emerge unscathed, and for the U.S. to buy the 2,400 models the military desires, if huge savings from the defense budget must be found. The Diplomat. Photo Credit: Flickr (MultiplyLeadership)