During a visit to his friend in California 11 years ago, Truong Huy San, one of Vietnam’s most influential journalists and historians, debated whether to stay in the United States or return to Vietnam, concerned he would one day be imprisoned for his work.
“No free man would ever choose prison. But, in some cases, to defend a right to freedom, prison cannot be avoided,” San told Peter Zinoman, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on Vietnam. “If everybody avoids prison, we will never achieve freedom.”
Soon after that interview, which Zinoman recorded, San left the United States for Vietnam.
Authorities in the Communist country with little media independence allowed San, known by his pen name, Huy Duc, to publish political commentary on Facebook for more than a decade after he returned to Vietnam, during which time he secured his reputation as a blunt critic of the country’s government.
San’s connections and support from high-ranking government officials, some dating back to his military service more than 30 years ago, helped shield him from the persecution suffered by other journalists, said Vietnam experts.
But then, on June 1, he was arrested on charges of “abusing democratic freedoms.” Days before his arrest, San had published a post on Facebook to his 350,000 followers saying the country could not successfully develop if Vietnam’s new leader, To Lam, used security forces to create an atmosphere of fear.
His friends and colleagues have not heard from San since.
Zinoman said San, 62, is awaiting trial in Vietnam’s Detention Center No.1 in Hanoi. He faces two to seven years in prison.
The Embassy of Vietnam did not respond to requests for comment.
San’s arrest after 10 years of openly criticizing the government indicates a further tightening of press freedom that closely followed the rise in the role of the country’s police and military forces under the new leader, To Lam, a former minister of internal security.
“With the rise of To Lam … there’s a broad crackdown on civil society in general,” Zinoman said. “Journalism kind of gets caught up in that.”
Lam has installed army and police generals into nearly all of the nation’s top political positions, according to Bill Hayton, a senior associate at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and an expert on Vietnam.
“You’re seeing a real kind of security takeover of the top roles in the Communist Party, and that does seem to suggest that they’re going to be much more hardline about things like freedom of speech,” Hayton said.
As of December 2023, 19 reporters are in custody according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“There’s no such thing as an independent journalist in Vietnam,” Hayton said. “You either are an official journalist or you’re illegal.”
Vietnam’s Communist Party and military control or own nearly all media outlets.
Still, many individual journalists and bloggers, like San, remain independent and use Facebook and other social media platforms to publish their work without government approval.
Facebook, by far the most popular social media platform in Vietnam, is also the only means of online communications for many citizens.
The ‘Bob Woodward’ of Saigon
San began his journalistic work in the late 1980s after serving in the Vietnamese Army for eight years as a senior lieutenant during the wars with China and Cambodia. In the late 80s and 90s, he wrote for leading newspapers in Vietnam.
“He’s kind of like the Bob Woodward of Saigon journalism at that time,” said Zinoman.
He covered corruption in the military, government and businesses, said Zinoman, and was continuously harassed by the government.
“[San] gets put under surveillance, he gets followed, he gets threatened, he gets intimidated,” Zinoman said.
Although he was never jailed during that period, the government would often not renew San’s official press card, which allows journalists to attend government press conferences and events. To operate without one can be dangerous, Zinoman said.
San’s freedom to criticize the post-war Communist government during this decade reflected the 1986 Doi Moi reforms which transformed and opened up the economy to global influence. The reforms also created flexibility in the Vietnamese press as newspapers expanded and began to cover local politics, Zinoman said.
During this time, which lasted about a decade, Western reporters were first welcomed into the country.
Murray Hiebert, a senior associate of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., reported in Hanoi from 1990 to 1994 with the Far Eastern Economic Review. He was one of the first two non-Communist journalists allowed to report inside Vietnam.
Hiebert remembers being heavily monitored and sometimes threatened by government officials.
“Several times I was called in. Once I had a new editor, and he came to Hanoi, and we met the deputy foreign minister,” Hiebert said. “At the end of the meeting, he said to my editor, ‘Murray is writing about things that are a little bit sensitive, and you might discourage him from keeping doing that or we’ll have other consequences.’ ”
Hiebert was also given a government assistant who reported on his whereabouts to officials every week. Despite officials following him, threatening him and sometimes falsely announcing that everything he wrote was lies, Hiebert said these interactions did not ruin his friendships with his Vietnamese sources.
San shifts his attention away from Vietnam
In 2005, San received a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship to study at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism for one year. This program, which no longer exists at Merrill, provided advanced training to experienced foreign professionals.
After returning to Vietnam, San journalism until that was not an option. In August 2009, after the Communist Party’s Propaganda and Education Commission complained to San’s employers about approximately 100 of San’s blog posts, he was fired.
At the same time San published a blog called on blogosin.org, which was ranked as the most popular blog in Vietnam until it was shut down by authorities in 2010.
Practically blacklisted from official journalism, San went back to the United States in 2013 for a year as a Harvard University Nieman Fellow, a prestigious fellowship for mid-career journalists.
While there, San published a book titled “The Winning Side,” which detailed the domestic aftermath of the Vietnam War.
The book included ground-breaking accounts of Hanoi’s persecution of the country’s ethnic minorities and individuals from the previous U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government. Its retributions included imprisoning former soldiers and the middle class in reeducation camps with extreme living conditions.
The precise number of people who died in these camps due to malnourishment, disease or execution is unknown, but historians estimate the number to be between tens of thousands and almost 200,000.
The book, self-published in November 2012, faced immediate government condemnation.
The book “is actually probably the best history of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam after the Vietnam War period,” said Cody Billock, a Vietnam War historian at Ohio University.
Zinoman said the book also included unflattering portrayals of some of the nation’s most important figures. For example, San revealed that Vo Nguyen Giap, a general regarded as a national hero, was not liked by his peers and was attacked internally until he was stripped of his power.
The book was never sold in Vietnam.
After publication, and after careful debate and discussion with Zinoman and others, San returned home to Vietnam in the summer of 2013.
Days before his arrest this year, San posted multiple times on Facebook criticizing Nguyen Phu Trong,who was general secretary at the time.
San said that corruption needed to be eliminated through institutions instead of forcing the resignation of high-ranking officials. San also criticized Lam, who was president at the time but had not yet been elevated to party leader, for his connections with the ministry of public security, arguing that Vietnam could not develop in a climate of fear.
On June 1, San was on his way to a meeting of “Saturday Coffee,” an informal discussion group in Hanoi. But he never showed up.
Days later, following panic among the journalists’ friends and colleagues, state news media confirmed that the authorities had taken him into custody and that the ministry of public security was investigating him for his Facebook posts.
“That was a shock that [San] got arrested when he did,” Hiebert said.