Authorities Detain Vietnamese Blogger in Hanoi Airport
RFA
– 05/18/2015
Authorities in Vietnam briefly detained a prominent blogger shortly after his
return to the capital Hanoi from Singapore, where he had attended a workshop on
the use of a new mobile tool to promote citizen journalism, his daughter said
Monday.
Dung Mai was arrested Monday shortly after deplaning at the Noi Bai
International Airport at around 6:00 p.m., his daughter Thao Teresa told RFA’s
Vietnamese Service.
“My father sent me only one text, saying 'security officers in Noi Bai have
arrested me’,” Thao said from the airport, where she was waiting to receive Mai
along with two of her friends.
“We tried to speak with different [security] departments, but they have avoided
telling us who was responsible [for his arrest]. I still don't know where my
father is.”
Thao said she had traveled to the airport along with her friends Bui Tien Hung
and Nguyen Van De, and that authorities had “sent two thugs to beat [them].”
Around four hours after her father’s plane landed in Hanoi, Thao was told that
authorities had escorted him home, she said, adding that his phone had been
turned off at the time of his detention.
Thao’s friend Hung told RFA that she displayed a sign which read that her father
had been taken into police custody after receiving his text message, prompting
authorities to confront them in the airport’s main terminal.
“Thao raised banners protesting the arrest and they sent thugs to take the
banners away,” he said.
“I wasn’t holding a banner, but a security officer ordered me to come to him.
Then, two other people beat me right there in the main terminal of the airport
with hundreds of people looking on.”
Hung did not elaborate on his condition after the assault.
Land activist
An active blogger, Mai has worked to assist victims of land disputes in Hanoi by
providing them with food and other supplies.
During the May 15-17 workshop in Singapore, Mai and 19 other netizens from
Vietnam received training from RFA, the Saigon Broadcasting Television Network
and Viet Tan—a U.S.-based pro-democracy organization banned by the Vietnamese
government—on how to use a recently launched Vietnamese version of the
StoryMaker mobile application.
The open source app, which is available for Android mobile devices, allows users
to produce and publish news in a safe and secure manner.
In a statement issued at the end of the three-day launch and training event, Mai
called StoryMaker “a powerful platform to spread the truth, to report on the
challenges of Vietnamese victims of corruption and to provide a picture of
today’s Vietnam.”
The program concluded with a roundtable between attendees and international
human rights nongovernmental organizations who discussed the challenges of
Vietnam’s media environment and ideas for protecting free expression.
Last month, independent U.S. monitor group The Committee to Protect Journalists
(CPJ) ranked Vietnam as the world’s sixth most censored country in its annual
list based on analysis of media suppression tactics such as imprisonment or
harassment of journalists, repressive laws and restrictions on the Internet.
The report said independent bloggers who report on sensitive issues in one-party
communist Vietnam—which it called one of the world’s worst jailers of
journalists—have faced persecution through street-level attacks, arbitrary
arrests, surveillance, and harsh prison sentences for anti-state charges.
Reported by Mac Lam for RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Ninh Pham.
Written in English by Joshua Lipes.