From Radio Free Asia
Vietnamese authorities have ramped up their harassment of dissident rights lawyer and former political prisoner Nguyen Bac Truyen, stationing a large group of security agents in plain clothes outside his rented house on Wednesday and threatening his landlady with a knife, according to sources.
Vietnamese government agents outside the house of former political prisoner Pham Minh Hoang in Saigon, Nov. 5, 2014. Photo courtesy of VRNs.
Truyen, who provides free legal assistance to victims of land grabs and has campaigned for multiparty democracy in one-party communist Vietnam, was released on probation from prison in May 2010 after serving three and a half years for “conducting propaganda against the state.”
He now lives in a house in southern Vietnam’s Saigon rented from another former prisoner, Pham Minh Hoang, a blogger and former mathematics teacher serving a period of probation after his own release from prison in January 2012.
“To them [the police], Nguyen Bac Truyen is a very dangerous man, so they guard him all the time,” Hoang told RFA’s Vietnamese Service on Wednesday.
“They have assigned people to sit in front of the house and block him from leaving,” Hoang said.
“They sit in front of that house 24 hours a day,” Hoang’s wife, surnamed Oanh, said. “I don’t know what they do at night, but they follow Truyen wherever he goes.”
On Nov. 5, harassment intensified when the group was joined by another group “disguised as ordinary people,” though Oanh said she recognized one as a policeman because of his uniform socks.
“They brought food and drinks to have a party right in front of my house,” she said.
‘Rude attitude’
When Hoang and Oanh approached the men, “they displayed a very rude attitude and even threatened my wife with a knife because she told them not to sit there,” Hoang said.
Calls for help to the local police brought no result, so Hoang—who holds French citizenship—and his wife appealed for assistance to the French consulate, they said.
“At the beginning, we did not want to do it, and we only called the local police,” said Oanh, “But they refused to come, saying they were busy in a meeting.”
“As there was no one who would protect us, we had to call the consulate. My husband is a French citizen, so he comes under their protection,” she said.
Reached by phone by RFA on Wednesday, the French consulate in Saigon declined to comment on the case.
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