Asia Times: It's graft as normal as Vietnam ends campaign


	April 6, 2000	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

It's graft as normal as Vietnam ends campaign
By Nguyen Nam Phuong

HANOI - ''We felt it went smoothly.'' Bon, a high ranking official in Vietnam's Ha Tinh Provincial People's Committee is describing the process of ''criticism and self-criticism'' that he and fellow officials have just completed. ''With negative phenomena actively addressed and resolved, we believe that things should soon return to normal.''

''Normal'', many would argue, was the problem in the first place. Indeed, Bon's rigid choice of vocabulary reflects the reluctance of Vietnam's Communist Party to adapt to the country's needs and - crucially - to root out the endemic problem of corruption.

The party's criticism and self-criticism campaign, launched nearly two years ago and set to wind up at the end of April, was intended to restore the public's faith in Vietnam's guiding force. ''If we don't make a serious effort to solve these problems (of corruption) our regime, our independence and our nation will be at stake,'' Le Kha Phieu, General Secretary of the Communist Party announced during the early stage of the campaign.

While the party has not delivered anything approaching a purging of its ranks, observers claim it has made officials act more cautiously and often resort to more sophisticated methods of graft.

The public, it seems, has not been fooled. ''Nobody in Hanoi really believed that the campaign would seriously clean up the party,'' says a university lecturer who prefers not to be named. Vietnam was last year listed as the third most corrupt country in Asia, after Pakistan and Indonesia, by Transparency International. To address the issue, party members, who number nearly two and a half million people nationwide and dominate positions at all levels of government as well as directorships of state-owned enterprises, were obvious targets.

However, the process of criticism and self-criticism, conducted from the higher echelons down, has all the hallmarks of a ritual to which lip service must be paid. Party officials take turns to admit their mistakes to one another behind closed doors. Without public accountability, the party serves the combined roles of defendant, prosecution, judge and jury.

Punishment is rarely any more severe than a reprimand or at worst, expulsion from the party. Observers point out that the only officials who have faced criminal charges - notably in scandals in which millions of dollars have gone missing - have, due to the scale and blatancy of their crimes, given the authorities no choice but to act. Others claim that such figures serve as sacrificial lambs, intended to placate a disgruntled populace.

An example of the campaign in practice was provided by Sai Gon Giai Phong newspaper in January. A self-criticism campaign in Ho Chi Minh City involved 84,196 party members. Of those, 82,648, or 98 percent, were deemed ''appropriate'' while 1,512 ''were not able to meet moral requirements''. A total of 737 were punished, mainly with verbal warnings and only 139 were expelled.

For a party which makes all decisions in secret and prides itself with observing unity at all times, punishment of its own is a painful issue best avoided. Secretary Phieu therefore has the duplicitous task of appearing to live up to his pledge to get tough without rocking the boat in the party ranks.

His public statements made during the course of the campaign reflect the uneasy balance. ''Party members who have been violating the law must be seriously and justly punished,'' he told a meeting of the Central Committee late last year. But in February this year, on a visit to a trouble spot in Thai Binh province where villagers listed at least five counts on which local cadres had cheated them, Phieu offered a more soothing response. ''If party members and officials sincerely explain to the public their mistakes I am sure that the people will be ready to forgive them,'' he said.

Perhaps the strongest test of the campaign came late last year when Ngo Xuan Loc, one of five deputy prime ministers, was implicated in a scandal in which state land in Hanoi was illegally sold to private developers at grossly inflated prices. The minister was dismissed from his post following a vote by the Central Committee. However, no criminal charges were brought and no investigation into his activities was made public. What's more, he was believed to have retained both his party membership and his seat on the committee that called for his sacking.

If the campaign has not seriously tackled the problem it was meant to address, it has at least given the tightly controlled press some freedom to bring cases of corruption to light. ''Two years ago they did not report many cases,'' says a Vietnamese journalist working in Hanoi. ''But since the beginning of the campaign, Phieu has encouraged the press to denounce corruption.'' Although newspapers usually steer clear of naming names unless disciplinary proceedings are underway and restrict themselves to civil areas, there is a new-found willingness to rail against graft.

But while the subject of corruption is therefore no longer taboo, it is difficult to discern a high degree of popular indignation towards it. ''I know there are a number of honest party members and officials who have the public interest at heart but people usually think they are stupid,'' admits the university lecturer.

In a poor country where enterprise has long been supressed and the legal environment remains murky, financial gift horses - whether legal or otherwise - are rarely looked in the mouth. What's more, despite the deserved Vietnamese reputation for defying foreign domination, persistent Confucian social mores are still reflected in a deference to - and to some extent a fear of - home-grown authority.

Thai Binh is a notable exception. Over the last few years the northern province has become synonymous with protests against local cadres who had levied extortionate taxes, pocketed funds for infrastructure projects and illegally used or sold public land. In one unprecedented display of public anger, farmers in one commune held 23 police officers hostage for five days in November 1997.

The incident, observers claim, sent shock waves through the Party and prompted the criticism and self-criticism campaign itself. Those involved were stiffly punished, at least 62 receiving prison sentences.

Rather than inspire protest elsewhere, Thai Binh, where rumbles of discontent can still be heard, appears to have been viewed with bemusement by Vietnamese outside the province. ''The same situation is happening all over Vietnam, but no one kicks up a fuss,'' says a finance student in Hanoi.

''Most people in Vietnam said that the people in Thai Binh were stupid to cause trouble. We have a saying we use when we talk about the police or the government: 'Fight, and you will have nowhere to hide'.''

(Inter Press Service)

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