As Myanmar releases, Vietnam represses

TThe following was written by a colleague of Ric Saludo, Roger Mitton. WO weeks ago, the Myanmar government released 651 detainees, many of them political prisoners. Days earlier, Vietnam dumped yet another political activist, Bui Thi Minh Hang, in a labor camp for two years. Without trial, of course.

Western countries praised Myanmar, and the United States announced that it would restore full diplomatic ties with the government in Naypyidaw, the country’s capital under the 2008 Constitution.

Little was said about the rulers in Hanoi. Indeed, it is hard to know what to say.

Week after week, lawyers, academics and journalists who advocate political reform are thrown in the slammer. Whether there are now as many political detainees in Vietnam as in Myanmar is a moot point, but there are a hell of a lot.

In November, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally summoned enough courage to decry Hanoi’s brutally repressive policies. She said, “We have made it clear that if we are to develop a strategic partnership, as both nations desire, Vietnam must do more to respect and protect its citizens’ rights.”

Don’t hold your breath, Madame Secretary. As noted Vietnam analyst Carl Thayer said, “How many stern warnings over human rights abuses does the US have to issue before it applies some real pressure on Hanoi?”

Of course, besides human rights for the Vietnamese, Washington also has to weigh its geopolitical interests in Asia, especially the value of having allies on both sides of the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea)—the Philippines and Vietnam—willing to partner with the US Seventh Fleet in containing Beijing’s blueocean ambitions.

Even with Washington’s hesitation in pressing Hanoi, there is something that may, in fact, be more effective in prodding the Vietnamese leadership, and that is the way Myanmar is releasing political activists almost as fast as Vietnam is arresting them.

Naypyidaw is freeing pretty significant figures at that. The January prisoner release list included former Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, and top Shan leader Hkun Htun Oo, both of whom were serving long jail terms.

Khin Nyunt was regarded as the former junta’s “liberal”, but when I last interviewed him a decade ago, he seemed, if anything, more hardline than his fellow generals. As head of military intelligence, he was often referred to as the “prince of darkness.”

Yet personal impressions of him vary widely. A Western ambassador in Yangon once gushed to me that Khin Nyunt was “charming and perfectly courteous.”

The opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi told me: “You can call Khin Nyunt all sorts of things, but expressions like the ‘ prince of darkness’ are rather too dramatic.”

But really, the key figure released was Hkun Htun OO—I use the Shan name he prefers, not the bastardized version, Khun Tun Oo, given in many news reports. “We are Shan, not Burmese,” he told me.

As head of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, he won Shan State’s Hsipaw constituency in the 1990 general elections, but was never allowed to take his seat, like the rest of the opposition in the one relatively fair polls under the junta.

When I first met him in April 2000, in his tiny office near the law courts in the former capital of Yangon, he was, as now, a rather podgy, bespectacled man, whose physical presence did not inspire confidence.

But when he spoke, he was forthright. “The country has gone to the dogs,” he said. “The economy is hopeless and the education system is a shambles.” It was the kind of comment that landed him in the junta’s jail.

He became chairman of the United Nationalities Alliance, a coalition of all the pro-democracy ethnic parties, and if he can actively resume that post now, there will be a chance for Myanmar to really take off.

In doing so, it will be able to show Hanoi that releasing political reformists is far more productive than jailing them. And it won’t bring down the government.

Sadly, that’s one lesson that Vietnamese leaders simply refuse to learn. Last year, more than 60 activists were added to the hundreds already in Vietnam’s Gulag, which still includes famous figures like revered octogenarian Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do and legal scholar Cu Huy Ha Vu, who was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in April.

Indeed, if Hkun Htun Oo or any of Myanmar’s Generation-88 leaders had been Vietnamese, they would still be imprisoned, if not dead.

The anti- corruption campaigner Nguyen Huu Cau, for instance, has spent 34 years in prison, and last month Ms. Ho Thi Bich Khuong received five years for remarks to overseas media deemed as “opposing the State.”

There are scores more democracy activists incarcerated under terrible conditions in Vietnam, so let us please bear them in mind when rightly calling for Myanmar to release every political detainee. Roger Mitton is a former senior correspondent for Asiaweek magazine and former bureau chief in Washington and Hanoi for The Straits Times of Singapore.