Vietnamese journalist gets 2 1/2 years in prison for Facebook posts

Boston Globe

01-03-2025

San's family was not allowed into the courtroom.
San's case has been closely watched by international human rights groups and journalists, in part to better understand the direction of a rising regional power and one-party state that has often signaled it wants to be seen as more open to the world and innovation -- while frequently cracking down on speech and civil society organizations.
At least one of the posts from San that led to the charges involved arguments against heavy-handed policing. A screenshot of a deleted post from San last year that was preserved by the 88 Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit that focuses on human rights issues in Vietnam, declared: "A COUNTRY CANNOT DEVELOP BASED ON FEAR."
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By that point, his Facebook page had about 370,000 followers.
Shawn Crispin, the senior Southeast Asia representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said San "was convicted and sentenced for gathering and publishing independent news, which Vietnam treats as a criminal offense."
"San and all independent journalists wrongfully held behind bars in Vietnam should be freed immediately and unconditionally," Crispin said.
Vietnam currently has at least 16 reporters in custody, according to CPJ's latest global prison census -- many of them held for posting on social media, which the government has tried to strictly regulate. Vietnam is the seventh worst jailer of journalists worldwide, based on the CPJ tally, tied with Iran and Eritrea.
According to state media, San, 63, told authorities he did not intend to oppose the Communist Party or the state, but admitted that some content infringed upon the state's interests "for which he said he was 'very sorry.'"
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San grew up in a staunch revolutionary family, on a state-run collective farm in central Vietnam, where he has said he excelled more at math than at literature.
In 10th grade, he volunteered for the Vietnamese army, calling in strikes with an artillery unit during a brutal border war with China that began in 1979.
Later, as a military journalist, he went on to cover Vietnam's war against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Starting in the late '80s, he was known as a corruption-busting investigative reporter for Ho Chi Minh City's popular newspaper, Tuoi Tre, where he often broke news with help from his military connections. His reporting frequently challenged Vietnam's political culture during a period of fierce internal policy debates between conservatives and reformists.
There was more openness to diverging voices then, he later said, and in 2005, he left Vietnam to study at the University of Maryland on a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship, which connects people addressing critical global challenges.
When he returned to Vietnam in 2006, he started a blog that became popular for its social and political commentaries. Vietnamese authorities shut it down in 2010.
His achievements also included a year at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship in 2012. While there, he finished writing a two-volume book, "The Winning Side," a journalistic tour de force that quickly became the definitive account of Vietnamese history and politics from around the end of the war in 1975 through the '90s.
Officially, the book is banned in Vietnam. But it has also been widely read online and in hard copies passed among friends. San has said that he was simply hoping the book, as with his other writing, would provide an honest account of the country's complex dynamics.
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"All it does is try to relate what happened after 1975 and to explain why it happened the way that it did," San said in an interview in 2013. "That's all. I try not to accuse anyone of anything."
In recent years, he had moved his commentary to Facebook. Many of his friends, in posts there this week, expressed gratitude that his sentence was not longer. Some promised to brew the best homemade liquor possible to celebrate when he is released.
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