When talking about trendy countries, it can be said that Vietnam is definitely getting a lot of attention.
Known in the past for being quietly hidden in the strategic shadows, with leadership almost unknown to the rest of the world, Vietnam is now being courted by everyone.
Both US President Joe Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping visited the country last year.
The US raised its relationship with Vietnam to the highest possible level, that of “broad strategic partner”.
Vietnam has agreed to enter into 18 existing or planned free trade agreements.
Their collaboration is required on issues of climate change, supply chain resilience or pandemic preparedness, among others.
The country is seen as a vital regional piece in the growing rivalry between China and the US; in the South China Sea, where claims to a group of islands are disputed; and as the best alternative to China for outsourced manufacturing.
But what has not changed is the iron fist with which the Communist Party maintains power and controls all forms of political expression.
Suspicion of outside influence
Vietnam is one of the five remaining communist and one-party countries in the world.
No political opposition is allowed. Dissidents are routinely jailed and repression has become even harsher in recent years.
Political decisions at the highest levels of the party are shrouded in secrecy.
Nevertheless, an internal document leaked a few weeks ago from the Politburo of the Central CommitteeVietnam’s highest legislative body, gave a glimpse of what the party’s top leaders think about all these ties with international partners.
The document, known as Directive 24, was obtained by Project88, a human rights organization focusing on Vietnam. References to it in various party publications suggest it is genuine.
It was issued by the Politburo last July and contains stark warnings about the threat to national security from “hostile and reactionary forces” introduced into Vietnam through its growing international ties.
According to Directive 24, they “will increase their activities of sabotage and internal political transformation… forming alliances and networks with ‘civil society’, ‘independent unions’, creating the argument for the formation of internal political opposition groups.”
The document urges party officials at all levels to be rigorous in their defense against these influences..
It warns that, despite all of Vietnam’s apparent economic successes, “economic security, finance, currency, foreign investment, energy, employment” are not strong, and there is a latent risk of foreign dependency, manipulation and seizure of certain “areas.” sensitive.”
These are alarmist words.
In none of its public statements has the Vietnamese government sounded so insecure.
What does this mean then?
Greater surveillance
Ben Swanton, co-director of Project88, has no doubt that Directive 24 predicts the beginning of an even more severe campaign against activists of human rights and civil society groups.
He cites nine orders that the document ultimately gives to party officials, including monitoring social media to counter “false propaganda,” “not allowing the formation of independent political organizations,” and being alert to people who take advantage of the increasing contact with international institutions to provoke “color revolutions” and “street revolutions.”
“They have taken off the mask,” says Ben Swanton. ““Vietnam leaders are communicating that they intend to violate human rights as a political matter.”.
Not everyone agrees with that interpretation.
“Directive 24 is not so much a sign of a new wave of internal repression against civil society and pro-democracy activists, but more of the same. That is, the continued repression of these activists,” says Carlyle Thayer, professor emeritus of Politics at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and a renowned expert on Vietnam.
Thayer points to the timing of the directive’s release, just after the US and Vietnam agreed to a higher-level alliance, and just two months before President Biden’s visit.
It was a momentous decision, he says, motivated by the party’s fear that the impact of the Covid pandemic and the economic slowdown in China could prevent Vietnam from achieving its goal of being a developed, high-income country by 2045.
It needed closer ties with the US to take its growing economy to the next level..
Hardline elements within the party fear that the US will inevitably encourage pro-democratic sentiment in Vietnam and threaten the party’s monopoly on power.
Thayer believes the combative language used in Directive 24 is intended to assure hardliners that this will not happen.
The professor thinks that the decision to have the personal signature of General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, not only the most powerful political figure in Vietnam but a well-known communist ideologue, had that same intention.
The leaders’ dilemma
What Directive 24 clearly illustrates is the dilemma facing Vietnam’s communist leaders. as your country becomes a global powerhouse in manufacturing and commerce.
Vietnam is not large enough to do what China has done: hermetically isolate itself within its own “great firewall.”
Social media platforms like Facebook are easily accessible there. Vietnam needs foreign investment and technology to continue growing rapidly and cannot afford to disengage.
Some of the free trade agreements that Vietnam has committed to, such as the one it sealed with the EU in 2020, come with human and labor rights clauses included.
Vietnam also ratified some of the International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions, although notably not the one requiring freedom of assembly.
But Directive 24 suggests a reluctance to respect such clauses.
In it, the party demands explicit limits on how independent unions can operate, ordering its officials to “strictly guide the establishment of labor organizations; take initiatives when participating in ILO conventions that protect freedom of association and the right to organize, ensuring the continuity of party leadership, party cell leadership and government administration at all levels”.
In other words, a “yes” to cooperation with the ILO, and a firm “no” to any union that is not controlled by the party.
Ben Swanton argues that Directive 24 signals to Vietnam’s potential Western partners that its agreements on human and labor rights are nothing more than a fig leaf, timidly covering up agreements they have made with a political system incapable of respecting rights. individual.
And the question is: what civil society groups will be allowed to monitor these free trade agreements, when Six environmental and climate activists have already been imprisoned under false pretexts at the same time that Vietnam had just signed a huge energy transition alliance with Western governments?
There was a time, several decades ago, when there were those who thought that one-party Marxist-Leninist states would be the future, they would bring modernity, progress and economic justice to the poorest societies in the world.
Today, however, they are a historical anomaly.
Until China is the political model of very fewdespite the admiration aroused by its economic successes.
Vietnam’s leaders hope to achieve something akin to a magic trick: maintaining the tight control they have long exercised over the lives of their people, while at the same time exposing them to ideas and inspirations coming from outside, with the hope that they can keep the economy expanding.
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