One day last May in Hanoi, Vietnamese police launched a
sudden raid into the house and business of a long-famous blogger, Nguyen Huu
Vinh, better known as Anh Ba Sam (meaning Brother Gossiper). Vinh and his
assistant Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, a mother of seven-year-old twin children, were
detained immediately.
The sudden raid and arrests apparently caught Vinh by
surprise. The very high-traffic Ba Sam
News at basam.info, however, stayed out of police control and kept on running.
In fact, just five days after Vinh and Thuy’s arrest, his colleagues published
a defiant statement, “Nguyen Huu Vinh was arrested, yes, but Anh Ba Sam will
never be.” The statement carried implications of an even more powerful blogging
and writing movement for change in Vietnam.
The arrest prompted a huge outcry among dissidents. The
Vietnam Path Movement, a civil society organization that works to promote human
rights inside of Vietnam, released a statement on May 7, stating, “By depriving
Mr. Nguyen Huu Vinh, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, and other activists’ rights to
freedom of expression, the Vietnam government adamantly refuses all
contributions from the people toward building a stronger nation.”
The government hit back. Using media owned by the police
and the army, the government accused Vinh and Thuy of “publishing online
articles with bad contents and misleading information to lower the prestige and
create public distrust of government offices, social organizations and
citizens” under Article 258 of the Vietnamese Penal Code.
In one particular colorful posting, the police-owned
newspaper accused Vinh of “reporting and commenting on current social and
political issues of Vietnam with a deliberately critical tone”, “trying to make
Vietnam look as bad and ugly as he is.”
Somewhere in the crowd, there was always him - the citizen journalist.
Photo courtesy of No-U Hanoi.
The man who wanted to light the candle
Nguyen Huu Vinh was not always the darling of the
democracy movement. A former public security officer himself, Vinh was
mistrusted at first. Born in 1956 to a high-ranking communist official, he had
all the good reasons to himself become a high-ranking official, too, in the
hierarchy of the communist state.
Right when Vinh was arrested, bloggers looked up his
family background to be reminded that his father, Nguyen Huu Khieu, was twice
the Vietnamese ambassador to the Soviet Union. As the Soviets were Vietnam’s
“Big Brother” in the Cold War, being ambassador there was an enormous
privilege, and as Vinh himself admitted in a short memoir in 2012, he and his
family led a life that all the other parts of the society then could just dream
of.
The house where he grew up is now the residence of the
prime minister. “While butter, milk and the like were still unknown to people
in Northern Vietnam, I just needed to take half a mile walk to number 2 Hoang
Dieu street [a store dedicated to the upper echelon of the VCP] to get hot
fresh milk, butter, pâté and bread.”
Vinh even met Ho Chi Minh once as a child of five,
considered a special favor for Vietnamese in the North.
Most importantly, thanks to his family origin, he
benefited from books that were totally inaccessible to ordinary people. One of
such things, referred to as “special documents for reference,” were selected
articles from foreign media translated by the Vietnam News Agency into
Vietnamese. Vinh wrote:
“In the 1960s, these documents were labeled as
‘Confidential. No circulation,’ and only officials from ministerial level
upward could access them. They would later on be provided also for lower
administrative levels, and be sold at the end of the 1990s. No matter what,
these documents helped to change me substantially during my years of ‘following
the Party.’”
It was from those documents that he learned about the
brutality of Mao’s China, which, ironically, was the ideal that the Vietnamese
government at that time was trying to reach.
The Vietnam War escalated, and Vinh was evacuated to the
countryside, where he saw the poverty for people in the lower rungs of the
social. But his belief in the communist ideology only truly turned upside-down
after the war ended in 1975, and he was able to view the deep rift between the
“capitalist South” and the “communist North” of Vietnam. It did not take him
much time to conclude that life in a capitalist system, with all its faults,
was much more prosperous than and different from the one described in communist
propaganda materials.
“My eyes were opened,” wrote Vinh, “and more than that, I
ventured to spend a lot of time and money learning English and computer skills
right from the days those things were strange to most people.”
To build a fire
“He was always determined, enthusiastic, and brave,” said
Pham Xuan Can, a former classmate of Vinh’s at the Academy of Public Security
who joined the public outcry online following Vinh’s arrest. Can recalled how
Vinh became a student at the Academy, then became a public security officer
before working at the Department of the Overseas Vietnamese. His experience of
working with Vietnamese intellectuals in foreign countries, some almost in
exile since 1975, added up with his past knowledge of “the capital South” to
keep him obsessed by an idea, “how much social capital were wasted as a result
of bad policies.”
In 1999, almost immediately after Vietnam’s adoption of
the Enterprise Law, Vinh quit his government position and set up his own
business, VPI, the very first private detective agency in Vietnam. Vinh’s business went well and its profits were enough for him to pursue other
interests.
In 2005, when Yahoo!’s now extinct 360 blogging platform
arrived, Vinh found blogging like any Vietnamese teenager. He created his Anh
Ba Sam Yahoo blog in 2007 and initially filled it with articles he wrote for
the state-owned media, until he realized the demand of Vietnamese people who
want to know “what the world is thinking of us.”
So Vinh began translating foreign news stories about
Vietnam, and his readership grew. Anh Ba Sam’s blog also provided source
materials about China-Vietnam relations, which even until this day remains a
politically sensitive issue.
Though Ba Sam won a relatively large readership for a
political website, Vinh did not stop there. He went further in the cause of
“enlightening the people” with the initiative of publishing a daily digest of
the most important news items. Vinh also added his own comments, a mix of
profound intellectual thoughts with cute, witty humor, and the comments became
the characteristic of Ba Sam, winning the attention of hundreds of thousands
Vietnamese speakers around the world. This was a quite high number, especially
when the widely circulated Tuoi Tre Daily could only reach 200,000 copies or
so.
“It’s up with the news 24/7. As might be expected, the
blog has given particular emphasis to the stories that Vietnam’s
state-supervised media has been unable to report. Its daily digest is the hook
that has caught the attention of 100,000-plus regular readers,” David Brown, a
former U.S. diplomat and an author whose articles were often translated and
posted by Ba Sam, wrote on Asia Sentinel about the site in March 2013 when it
was under a serious attack by “pro-government” hackers.
“Being on time, adhering to ethical codes of accuracy,
neutrality and confidentiality of sources, and respecting copyrights, those are
the principles that we kept to during the recent years,” said Dinh Ngoc Thu,
now the main editor of Basam.info. Thu joined with Vinh in “news reviewing” in
2009, and the only reason why she was not arrested with Vinh and Thuy was
because she lives in California.
Vinh’s connections with some people in the state
apparatus, resulting from his previous positions in public offices, were also
helpful news sources. However, at the same time, they raised suspicions about
him being an “undercover police”. A haunting question for many was why Nguyen
Huu Vinh was not arrested after such a long time? How could he “survive” many
police suppressions of bloggers?
Now the answer is clear: It was just a matter of time.
Photo courtesy of No-U Hanoi, early 2014.
Police came in
The Vietnamese government, with mostly old faces, may not
have noticed the power of the Internet, but its police machinery did so
quickly. Anyone blogging about political issues will sooner or later found
him/herself in trouble with the extensive network of police in Vietnam. So it
was understandable that Ba Sam was identified very soon by the police as a
rallying point of “anti-state” forces.
And it was a well-founded belief, anyway. Every dissident
site in Vietnam, or in Vietnamese to be exact, has its own loyal readers. Ba
Sam’s readers, as he described, incorporated many intellectuals and members of
the Communist Party. A large proportion of them may still be loyal to the
obsolete ideology of communism, and what they need is “fact as it is”, neutral
and accurate without any state censorship.
Readers made up a close-knit community indeed, and
readers themselves had readers – there were people who accessed Ba Sam mostly
to read the comments by Vinh and other bloggers below each post. Many of such
online commentators became famous to the “great family” of Ba Sam’s readers.
With only a small team in charge of both content
providing and security ensuring, the site was subject to continuous attacks.
Brown, the diplomat, wrote in sympathy:
“… on March 8, when the Ba Sam blog was thoroughly
hacked. Several years’ reportage and commentary were deleted. The e-mail
accounts of the blog’s editorial team were also compromised. The Ba Sam team
has so far been unable to regain control of anhbasam.wordpress.com. That’s a
manageable tragedy, however. All but a few days’ content was backed up on
offshore servers.”
“… A naive reader might conclude that the Anh Ba Sam team
are in fact renegades and grudge-bearing reactionaries based in the United
States and dedicated to the overthrow of the Hanoi regime.”
The truth was that Vinh and his colleagues did not receive any financial assistance from anybody. In fact, as the economy went south, Vinh’s private detective agency also floundered and was almost on the brink of bankruptcy when Vinh and Thuy were detained.
One reader who met Vinh several times related her
conversation with Vinh. Suspicious, the reader asked Vinh, “Why do you keep
doing all these things?”
He replied, “Because I’m in a better position to do this
than anyone else. So if I don’t do, I’ll feel guilty”.
And he explained, “Because I meet three conditions.
First, my financial conditions are good enough. With VPI, I am not indigent.
Second, I have Internet knowledge; and third, most importantly, I know them –
the police – well. I was among them and I understand them.”
Yet, it seems he lost the battle in the end. The former
public security officer did not expect his former colleagues to arrest him and
was caught off-guard.
The sentence against him is expected to be harsh, as the
police-dominated courts are always tough on those considered to have “betrayed”
of their Communist Party origins. Cu Huy Ha Vu, another son of a cabinet-level
Communist leader, was sentenced up to seven years of imprisonment in 2011. Vu,
however, was released early and arrived in the U.S. in April, a month before
Vinh’s arrest.
Optimistically, is it not a time for him to rest? He has
worked too hard, struggled for too long in the past seven years, and exhausted
himself as well as his colleagues. Despite the many readers he had, in the end,
it was basically a fight in solitude.
But he kept blogging.
California, July 4, 2014
