By An Nguyen, RFA
Authorities in Vietnam brutally beat several dissident bloggers on Human Rights Day after they publicly distributed documents promoting rights and explaining the country’s obligations as a signatory to an international convention on torture, according to sources Wednesday.
A street vendor walks past a Vietnamese Communist Party poster in downtown Hanoi, Feb. 3, 2013. AFP
Members of the VN Blogger Network were beaten by plainclothes police and unknown assailants in Saigon and Da Nang in separate incidents on Tuesday, the sources said, while many rights campaigners were commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In the first incident, blogger Me Nam said she, her young son and An Do Nguyen—known by her online pseudonym as Hoang Vi—were walking near Nguyen’s home in Saigon when plainclothes police approached them and took away a teddy bear they were holding.
“I shouted ‘robbers, robbers!’ at which point they cornered us and seriously beat us, forcing us back inside the house and locking the door,” Nam told RFA’s Vietnamese Service.
“They even took my son out of my arms,” she said. “When our friends came to rescue us, [the police] attacked them and blogger Hoang Van Dung was injured in the eye.”
Another blogger, Tran Hoang Han, was reportedly beaten on the same day in Saigon while a meeting of a women’s human rights group in the city’s Gia Hoa pagoda was also disrupted by police, Nam said. She did not provide details of the two incidents.
Nguyen said the bloggers would not be intimidated into silence.
“Crackdowns and suppression only increase the strength and maturity of Vietnam’s bloggers,” she said on Facebook on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, VN Blogger member Nguyen Van Thanh told RFA that he and another blogger named Thanh Hoang were beaten by unknown assailants outside the Hoa Minh commune police station in Da Nang when they arrived to assist fellow online dissidents Le Anh Hung and Thi Phuong Anh, who were demanding that authorities return confiscated belongings.
Thanh said that Hoang had been “seriously injured” in the attack.
“They hit me really badly and I now have to take painkillers and other medication because I have hemophilia,” he said.
“I think the police and thugs are cooperating to attack people. It happened in the past in Hanoi to [bloggers] Nguyen Chi Duc and Binh Nhi in Saigon and now in Da Nang. It’s horrible.”
Read the full story by An Nguyen from RFA.
