BANGKOK — The outspoken Vietnamese journalist and activist Pham Doan Trang knew it was solely a matter of time earlier than the police got here for her.
She wrote a letter final yr and gave it to an American good friend with instructions to release it upon her arrest. Within the letter, she requested that her associates not simply marketing campaign for her freedom however use her incarceration to combat at no cost elections and an finish to single-party rule in Vietnam.
“I don’t need freedom for simply myself; that’s too straightforward,” wrote Ms. Pham, 42, who has walked with issue since a police beating in 2015. “I would like one thing higher: freedom for Vietnam.”
Shortly earlier than midnight on Oct. 6, the police raided her condominium in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis and arrested her on expenses of constructing and disseminating propaganda towards the Vietnamese state. She faces as much as 20 years in jail.
Ms. Pham is without doubt one of the most distinguished critics to have been arrested in recent times by Vietnam’s Communist regime, which has lengthy made a follow of harassing, beating and imprisoning outspoken activists.
The widespread use of smartphones and the web in Vietnam has meant that daring activists and journalists like Ms. Pham can independently publish tales by which they uncover corruption or expose malfeasance. However that additionally places an enormous goal on their backs.
“She is the form of prolific author and thinker the Vietnamese authorities doesn’t need to be free,” mentioned Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “They’ll throw the e book at her and she or he just isn’t going to compromise.”
The Communist Occasion has lengthy feared that free speech would undermine its maintain on energy, and it has constructed a big equipment to stifle dissent. Activists say Ms. Pham’s arrest was probably prompted by the celebration’s upcoming congress in January, which happens each 5 years.
At a time when Vietnam has repositioned itself as a strategic American ally and vital international manufacturing hub, the authorities are newly emboldened to crack down on dissent with little worry of repercussions. They’ve additionally been invigorated by a U.S. administration that has broadly ignored human rights abuses.
Human Rights Watch estimates that Vietnam has jailed no less than 130 political prisoners, greater than every other nation in Southeast Asia.
Simply 4 years in the past, then-President Barack Obama made human rights in Vietnam a precedence. Throughout a 2016 go to, he invited Ms. Pham and different dissidents to fulfill with him publicly. However the police kept her from attending by detaining her.
However the Trump administration has not prioritized human rights in Vietnam in the identical approach. Certainly, the police arrested Ms. Pham hours after the 2 governments held their 24th annual “Human Rights Dialogue.”
After Amnesty Worldwide, the Committee to Defend Journalists and different teams referred to as for her launch, the State Division pressed Vietnam on Saturday to set Ms. Pham free.
“America condemns the arrest of author, democracy, and human rights activist Pham Doan Trang,” Robert A. Destro, the assistant secretary of state for human rights, mentioned in a statement. “We urge the Authorities of Vietnam to right away launch her and drop all expenses.”
Ms. Pham started her profession as a journalist, however in a rustic the place most media is state-controlled, she chafed on the restrictions.
In her 2019 e book “Politics of a Police State,” she wrote in regards to the continuous harassment she had suffered for a decade as a author and activist.
The police as soon as put glue in her condominium door lock so she couldn’t go away, she wrote. They positioned her beneath home arrest, publicly posted intimate images taken from her pc and stole her id playing cards.
She left the nation in 2013, however she was not glad in exile.
“It’s actually onerous to observe from outdoors what occurs in Vietnam,” she mentioned on the time. “It makes me really feel helpless.”
She returned to Vietnam in 2015, and lived in hiding since 2017.
Ms. Pham’s arrest might also have been prompted by a report she co-wrote final month difficult the official account of a lethal police raid close to Hanoi.
In Vietnam, all land is owned by the state, and officers have the facility to grab prime parcels and provides them to their cronies or international firms, a follow that fuels corruption. Such land grabs are a delicate situation, and a few vital activists have been imprisoned.
The dispute in Dong Tam village started when officers transferred 145 acres to the nation’s largest telecommunications firm, the government-owned Viettel Corp., however residents refused to surrender their land. Throughout a confrontation in 2017, villagers held 19 police and safety officers captive for a week.
In January of this yr, about 3,000 officers raided the village. The 84-year-old village head, Le Dinh Kinh, a lifelong Communist Occasion member who had led the opposition to the land seizure, was shot and killed by the police. Three cops additionally died.
Of their report, Ms. Pham and her co-author challenged the official declare that Mr. Le had been holding a hand grenade when the police shot him. In truth, they wrote, he had been holding a cane.
For the reason that report’s launch, three contributors have been arrested, activists mentioned. The opposite creator, the American activist Will Nguyen, was deported from Vietnam in 2018 after being compelled to make a televised confession.
It was Mr. Nguyen who launched Ms. Pham’s letter final week foretelling her arrest.
“Trang has been a thorn within the authorities’s aspect for a very long time, and the authorities have been searching her down since 2017,” Mr. Nguyen mentioned through electronic mail.
“At coronary heart, she has an acute sense of justice and a profound love for Vietnam,” he mentioned. “She needs for it to be higher, even when it means sacrificing her freedom and herself.”
Ms. Pham additionally reported on a 2016 environmental catastrophe brought about when a Taiwanese-owned metal manufacturing facility discharged poisonous waste into the ocean alongside a stretch of Vietnam’s central coast.
Different activists who wrote in regards to the catastrophe landed in jail, together with Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, a blogger higher often known as Mom Mushroom.
In a 2016 interview with The New York Occasions, Ms. Pham predicted that the authorities’ try to intimidate activists by imprisoning Mom Mushroom would fail.
“She has a number of supporters,” Ms. Pham mentioned. “A lot of them will substitute her or comply with in her path.”
Maybe she was already considering forward to the chance of her personal incarceration.
In her letter, titled “Simply in case I’m imprisoned,” she instructed associates to not imagine the police in the event that they claimed she had confessed.
She requested for a motion to not “free Trang,” however to “free Trang and guarantee free and honest elections.”
“Nobody desires to sit down in jail,” she wrote. “But when jail is inevitable for freedom fighters, if jail can serve a predetermined goal, then we should always fortunately settle for it.”
