Vietnam activists barred from Obama talk
President: Economy growing but still ‘significant concerns’
HANOI, Vietnam — President Barack Obama won enthusiastic applause in Vietnam on Tuesday with a supportive reference to Vietnam’s disputes with China, saying in a speech that “big nations should not bully smaller ones.”
But several activists who had been scheduled to meet with him before the speech were prevented from doing so, underscoring the gulf with Hanoi on human rights.
The White House had requested the meeting as a signal to Vietnam’s Communist government that the United States cares about human rights here. Obama spent more than his allotted time with the six Vietnamese civil society leaders who did attend the meeting at a JW Marriott hotel, but he said that several others had been prevented from coming.
“Vietnam has made remarkable strides, the economy is growing quickly, the Internet is booming, and there’s a growing confidence here,” Obama said when a group of reporters were briefly allowed into the meeting. “But as I indicated yesterday, there’s still areas of significant concerns in terms of areas of free speech, freedom of assembly, accountability with respect to government.”
The activists kept from the meeting included Nguyen Quang A, 69, a businessman who had tried to run this year as an independent candidate for Parliament but was disqualified by the government.
He had been detained by plainclothes security officers, he said later by telephone. They shoved him into a car outside his home in Hanoi at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, confiscated his cellphone and then drove him 50 miles east of Hanoi.
“I was taken on a touristic tour,” he said. The men declined to say why they were driving him around for seven hours, just saying to him, “You know why we have to do this.”
A prominent blogger and journalist, Pham Doan Trang, who had flown to the Vietnamese capital from Ho Chi Minh City on Monday, was also barred from attending. He had not been heard from since landing in Hanoi, according to Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch.
Ha Huy Son, a lawyer who specializes in defending dissidents in court, was also kept from the meeting. “Security people have been guarding me at my home for the last two days,” he told Agence France-Presse.
The use of security forces to keep the activists from an event that the Vietnamese government had agreed to suggests that the government may have been divided over the meeting. It is unusual for a government, even one with a poor record on human rights, to allow such a gathering with a U.S. president to proceed and then prevent some guests from attending.
Benjamin Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, said that administration officials became aware Monday night that the government was preventing some activists from attending and that U.S. officials had objected.