(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has condemned a government assault on press freedom that has led to the ban or harassment of three media outlets over the course of several weeks – the daily “Tuoi Tre” (“Youth”), http://www.tintucvietnam.com and http://www.vnexpress.net. The organisation also deplored the launch of legal action against Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, a journalist with […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has condemned a government assault on press freedom that has led to the ban or harassment of three media outlets over the course of several weeks – the daily “Tuoi Tre” (“Youth”), http://www.tintucvietnam.com and http://www.vnexpress.net. The organisation also deplored the launch of legal action against Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, a journalist with “Tuoi Tre”.
“The Vietnamese authorities view the media as propaganda vehicles. With less than a year to go until the next Communist Party Congress, they particularly fear websites, even official ones, since they are a sounding board for popular discontent. We need to support this young generation of journalists who want to report on the news as it is and not be used as mouthpieces for the regime,” RSF said.
On 5 January 2005, Nguyen Thi Lan Anh was charged with posting two briefs quoting a note from the health minister classified as a “state secret”. In the note, the minister called for an investigation into the abnormally high prices set by pharmaceutical company Zuellig Pharma VN. “Tuoi Tre”, one of Vietnam’s rare investigative publications, has been targeted by the government for several years.
On 8 November 2004, Prime Minister Pham Van Khai called for disciplinary action against the online news agency http://www.vnexpress.net. The website is operated by the state-owned Internet service provider FTP. The prime minister’s intervention was sought by the Culture and Information Ministry over allegedly “erroneous” articles published by the news agency. The offending articles reported on the government’s purchase of 78 Mercedes for the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) held in October. They unleashed a wave of readers’ letters denouncing the import of the luxury vehicles. Vnexpress posted some of the letters, which appeared to provoke the government’s ire. The agency’s editor-in-chief and journalists involved in the story were reportedly subjected to disciplinary action.
The website http://www.tintucvietnam.com (Vietnam News) was closed around 10 January 2005, on the Culture and Information Ministry’s orders. The site chiefly dealt with cultural and economic issues. As in the case of http://www.vnexpress.net, it posted readers’ letters that are believed to have prompted the ban.
This clampdown on the media has been orchestrated by Nguyen Khoa Diem, who heads the Communist Party Central Committee’s Ideology and Culture Commission. In recent months he has publicly insisted, on several occasions, on the need to bring into line a press that “chased after sensationalism and profit,” rather than confining itself to distributing government ideology.
