Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has ordered those responsible for three “slanderous” blogs, which have publicised a recent string of high-level corruption scandals, be “seriously punished”.
The hugely-popular Vietnamese-language websites Dan Lam Bao — or Citizen Journalists — and Quan Lam Bao have been running a series of articles detailing an intensifying factional battle within the communist country’s ruling elite.
They have “slandered the country’s leadership, fabricated and distorted information, agitated against the party and the state, and caused suspicion and mistrust in society,” a report on the government website said late Wednesday.
The blogs are “villainous ploys of hostile forces,” the report, quoting the Prime Minister, said, calling for “serious punishment” for those behind the sites and ordering civil servants not to read them.
Vietnam, which does not allow private media and where all newspapers and television channels are state-run, routinely uses charges of spreading anti-state propaganda to prosecute dissidents.
The rise of online blogs has vexed censors and prompted repeated crackdowns on bloggers, at least 19 of whom are currently languishing in jail, according to Reporters Without Borders.
But political blogs remain a hugely-popular news source in the heavily-censored country, providing an alternative to state-run media which rarely deviates from the official line and often ignores sensitive stories.
Dan Lam Bao said their site received a record 32,000 hits in the hour after the Prime Minister’s comments aired on state television.
Over the last three months, the sites, in particular Quan Lam Bao — which translates as “Senior Officials working as Journalists” — published highly-sensitive information about political infighting.
They ran detailed, first-hand accounts of the August arrest of one of Vietnam’s top banking tycoons, flamboyant multi-millionaire Nguyen Duc Kien, and the detention of the ex-head of the bank he founded.
Kien is seen as an ally of the prime minister and became the subject of intense speculation on the blogs over his business dealings with Dung’s daughter.
The crackdown on web freedom shows Prime Minister Dung is “trying to protect himself by whatever measure he can take,” one Vietnamese blogger, who has been arrested several times told AFP, requesting anonymity.
It was also a signal that authorities were “going to get tough”, the blogger said, but he questioned whether they would be able to identify those behind Quan Lam Bao.
Both sites have vowed to continue publishing despite the threats.
