title

Vietnam sentences reporter to 2 years in prison

Washington Post
By Tim Johnston
Wednesday, October 15, 2008

BANGKOK, Oct. 15 -- A court in Vietnam on Wednesday sentenced a journalist to two years in prison after he exposed a scandal involving Transportation Ministry officials siphoning off aid money, in part to bet on European soccer matches.

Nguyen Viet Chien, who worked for the Thanh Nien daily newspaper, was convicted of "abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state." One of his sources, Lt. Col. Dinh Van Huynh, 50, was given a one-year sentence for "deliberately revealing state secrets."

Chien was unrepentant during the trial.

"With my journalist conscience, I can say I never have any other purpose in mind when writing my reports but exposing wrongdoing and fighting corruption," he told the court.

Another journalist, Nguyen Van Hai, who had admitted some errors, was also found guilty and given a two-year suspended sentence. The police officer who headed the corruption inquiry, Gen. Pham Xuan Quac, now retired, was given an official reprimand.

"It was a political trial, it was a trial of the liberal media," said Vincent Brossel, Asia director for Reporters Without Borders.

The original corruption case was deeply embarrassing for the government. In a series of articles in 2006, Chien and Hai exposed a unit in the Transportation Ministry where officials had been embezzling funds meant for infrastructure development, much of which had been donated by the World Bank and Japan.

The minister of transportation resigned and a deputy minister was charged in connection with the case. However, the charges against the deputy minister were dropped last March, and the two journalists were arrested six weeks later.

Nine members of the unit have so far been convicted in connection with the case.

The government has made the fight against corruption one of its core aims, but Brossel said the verdicts call that effort into question.

"They are victims of top officials in the Communist Party who are in trouble over this case," he said.

"There is a fight against corruption, but when this case put a deputy minister in jail, that was going too far for this government."

The case, which Chien and Hai were instrumental in bringing to public attention, marked a highpoint in media transparency in Vietnam, but after allowing a number of stories to appear, the government clamped down.

Two deputy editors, one at Chien's Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper and one at Hai's Tuoi Tre (Youth), were dismissed, and several other journalists had their credentials revoked.

Although there was a brief three-day flurry of outrage in the Vietnamese press in the immediate aftermath of the Chien and Hai's arrests, the government came down hard, and little about the case has appeared recently.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101501106.html