Vietnamese president known for rights crackdown dies
HANOI, VIETNAM— Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, the country’s No. 2 after the ruling Communist Party’s leader, died Friday after a serious illness, the government said. He was 61.
Quang passed away despite “utmost efforts to treat him by Vietnamese and foreign professors and doctors and care by the party and state leaders,” the statement said. It said Quang died at a military hospital in Hanoi but did not elaborate on his illness.
The state-run online newspaper Vn Express quoted a former health minister and the head of a national committee in charge of leaders’ health, Nguyen Quoc Trieu, as saying that Quang had contracted a rare and toxic virus since July last year and had travelled to Japan six times for treatment.
Trieu said the president lapsed into a deep coma hours after being admitted to hospital on Thursday.
“Japanese professors and doctors treated him and helped consolidate the president’s health for about a year,” Trieu said. “However, there are no medicines in the world that can cure the illness completely, instead it only could prevent and push it back for some time.”
Quang hosted U.S. President Donald Trump during his first state visit to the communist country last year.
Phil Roberston, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said Quang would be remembered for “a multi-year crackdown on human rights and putting more political prisoners behind bars in Vietnam than any time in recent memory.”
Some 97 activists have been jailed as of April this year, according to Amnesty International.
Quang’s last public appearance was at a Politburo meeting of the ruling Communist Party and a reception for a Chinese delegation on Wednesday. He looked frail on the state-run Vietnam Television broadcast.
A career security officer and four-star general, Quang was elected president in April 2016 by the Communist Party-dominated National Assembly, effectively becoming the secondmost powerful man in the country after General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.