Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Obama presses Vietnam on human rights
Nation criticized for efforts to keep some advocates away
HANOI, Vietnam — President Barack Obama on Tuesday pressed Vietnam to allow greater freedoms for its citizens, arguing that better human rights would improve the communist country’s economy, stability and regional power.
On his second full day in the southeast Asian nation, Obama met with activists, including pastors and advocates for the disabled and sexual minorities, to underscore U.S. support for improved rights. Yet a handful of others were prevented from meeting with Obama, prompting the White House to protest to Vietnam’s government.
Obama took note of those denied access to the meeting, but said that while “there are still areas of significant concern,” the country has made “remarkable strides in many ways.”
His visit to Vietnam included the lifting of one of the last vestiges of Vietnam War-era antagonism: a fivedecades-old arms sale embargo. In a speech to about 2,300 Vietnamese at the National Convention Center, Obama sought to balance a desire for a stronger relationship with Vietnam with efforts to hold its leadership to account over what activists call an abysmal treatment of government critics.
Nations are more successful when people can freely express themselves, assemble without harassment and access the Internet and social media, Obama said.
“Upholding these rights is not a threat to stability but actually reinforces stability and is the foundation of progress,” Obama told the audience of more than 2,000, including government officials and students from five universities across the Hanoi area. “Vietnam will do it differently than the United States does. … But there are these basic principles that I think we all have to try to work on and improve.”
Freedom of expression is where new ideas happen, Obama said. “That’s how a Facebook starts. That’s how some of our greatest companies began.”
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told reporters that a number of activists set to meet with Obama were either prevented from doing so or made to feel uncomfortable attending, “using a variety of different methods.” He said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and White House officials raised the issue with Vietnam, adding that the U.S. would follow up to ensure those activists are free and aren’t being punished.
“Clearly this was something that was the source of significant discomfort for the government,” Rhodes said of Obama’s meeting with activists.
Human-rights advocates, who criticized Obama on Monday for lifting the arms embargo against Vietnam without obtaining concessions on human rights, said that Vietnam’s actions on Tuesday proved their point.
“Vietnam has demonstrated itself that it doesn’t deserve the closer ties the U.S. is offering,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch. “Detaining or preventing civil society from meeting President Obama is not just an insult to the president, it’s also a human-rights abuse in itself, a deprivation of the right to freedom of expression and freedom of movement.”
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, preventing him from contacting his family, 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.”
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, saying he had been told he could go anywhere but to the embassy.
In his speech, Obama also said that journalists and bloggers can “shine a light on injustice or abuse” when they are allowed to operate free of government interference or intimidation. He said stability is encouraged when voters get to choose their leaders in free and fair elections “because citizens know that their voices count and that peaceful change is possible.”
The president also traced the transformation of the U.S.-Vietnamese relationship from wartime enemies to cooperation. He said the governments are working more closely together than ever before on a range of issues.
“Now we can say something that was once unimaginable: Today, Vietnam and the United States are partners,” he said, adding that their experience was teaching the world that “hearts can change.”
He referred in the speech to China’s growing aggression in the region, something that worries many in Vietnam, which has territorial disputes in the South China Sea with its neighbor.