The Mundane Steps That Keep Vietnam’s Dissidents Quiet

On a rainy morning in September 2018, in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, I arranged to meet with Nguyen Quang A, an outspoken Vietnamese dissident intellectual. We chose a coffee shop on Dien Bien Phu Street, close to the Vietnam Military History Museum, where we spoke for an hour and a half about his journey from party membership to political dissidence, and his views of Vietnam’s anguished relationship with China.

That evening, six hours after taking my leave of Quang A, the 71-year-old sent me a text message telling me that just moments after leaving the café, he had been picked up by plainclothes state security officials, who detained him for several hours before releasing him. When I expressed concern that I – a foreign journalist – had thrust him onto the radar of state security, he told me not to worry: As far as he could determine, the authorities feared he was planning to fly to Brussels to testify against the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement that was eventually signed the next year.

It apparently wasn’t the first time he had faced similar pressure. During our discussion, Quang A told me he had been detained on 19 other occasions in order to prevent him from attending an event or traveling to a foreign country. On one occasion he was kidnapped by public security officials and driven around the city in order to prevent him from taking up a U.S. Embassy invitation to meet U.S. President Barack Obama during his visit to Vietnam in May 2016.

“They try to keep me away from some events – that's all. Like meeting with Obama,” he told me. “They simply prevent me to go over there, or to go meet somebody else, or to meet a journalist, or to meet a foreigner like you."

Nguyen Quang A’s treatment is consistent with the findings of a new report from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW), which documents the Vietnamese government’s “routine violation of the right to freedom of movement and other basic rights” of activists, human rights defenders, and other dissenters.

According to the 65-page report, which was released on February 17, these restrictions, which range from house arrest to harassment and other forms of short-term detention, are usually designed to prevent dissidents from attending protests and traveling abroad. As the report notes, these types of quotidian violations “are often overlooked in conventional rights reporting, which often focuses on larger-stake issues such as the prosecution and long-term imprisonment of dissidents, land and labor rights violations, and the suppression of fundamental liberties by Vietnam’s one-party state.”

According to HRW, such restrictions are particularly common during important dates on the national calendar, including national and religious holidays, the anniversaries of past conflicts between Vietnam and China, and high-profile international events such as visits by Western leaders and one-offs such as the U.S.-North Korea summit in February 2019.

Another highly sensitive period in the calendar is the five-yearly Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) Congress, which often sees the authorities tighten their control over, and sometimes preemptively detain, known activists and dissidents. In January 2021, during the VCP’s 13th Congress, HRW writes, security agents put a number of activists in the capital under house arrest for the entirety of the congress. Among them were Nguyen Thuy Hanh, a retired Hanoi businesswoman-turned-dissident who was prevented, along with her husband Huynh Ngoc Chenh, from leaving her home for 10 days. She told the rights group, “They brazenly robbed us, citizens who did not violate any law, of our rights to freedom of movement.”

One method employed by Vietnam’s securocrats is a crude form of house arrest in which the authorities station plainclothes police outside dissidents’ homes, affix external padlocks to their doors, or even superglue their locks closed, in order to prevent them from leaving the premises. For instance, in February 2019, on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 border war between Vietnam and China, the authorities prevented Nguyen Thuy Hanh from leaving her house to take part in an unofficial commemoration of the Vietnamese soldiers killed in the conflict.

Sometimes more forceful methods are used to prevent activists from attending meetings or politically sensitive events. HRW cites the case of Vo Van Tao, who on one evening in May 4, 2019 was forced onto a motorbike by plainclothes police officers, who took him to police headquarters and confiscated his mobile phone and identity card. The reason, they said, was to stop him from welcoming home Nguyen Huu Vinh, a dissident who had just completed a five-year prison sentence and was due to be released the next day. According to HRW, of the 15 pro-democracy activists and dissidents who were invited to meet Obama in 2016, only six actually attended.

As the case of Nguyen Quang A suggests, another common goal is to prevent dissidents from traveling abroad to take part in human rights conferences and other sensitive dialogues. In its report, HRW claims that it has identified more than 170 people banned from leaving or entering the country since 2004, “including by stopping them at airports and border gates, and denying passports or other documents that would allow them to leave or enter the country.” In many instances, the targets of such efforts are often unaware of why exactly they are being blocked from traveling, and the authorities are under no legal obligation to enlighten them.

The HRW report is a reminder that while high-profile convictions of Vietnamese dissidents attract most of the international media attention, opponents of the VCP party-state face a host of more mundane daily restrictions. In the end, these may well be more effective at discouraging people from rowing against the party’s current.