Jean Libby, editor                                                                           

VietAm Review

             650-618-8603  fax

Palo Alto, CA 94301                                                                          editor@vietamreview.net

Attention:  The Honorable Deputy Secretary John D. Negroponte

U. S. State Department   

This is a plea for inquiry into the conditions of imprisonment of Le Thi Cong Nhan, a 28-year old female attorney in Vietnam.  Her political charge is that of using words including “democracy” on Internet communications.

She was first placed under house arrest in early November 2006, just before the APEC summit in Hanoi attended by President Bush.  She was arrested in March 2007 soon after Vietnam was admitted to the World Trade Organization, tried and found guilty of “spreading propaganda intended to undermine Vietnam’s Communist government.”  Her sentence is four years in prison, plus indeterminate future house arrest. 

Recently Ms. Nhan, who went on a hunger strike in December 27, 2007, was moved on January 3, 2008 from Hanoi to province Thanh-Hoa. On the way to the notorious prison T – 5 that is part of Ho Chi Minh’s “reeducation camp” system begun in 1961, she became unconscious. The Bible which the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) handed her on their visit in the Hanoi prison in October 2007, was confiscated by the prison guard after her arrival.  She is in the new prison room in Thanh-Hoa together with about 60 criminal prisoners and sleeps on the hard ground without bed and mattress.

I am a retired United States history teacher with a blog about Vietnamese American issues that has been in continuous publication since 2004.  The average daily readership is 1200 hits, plus an international email list of 190 journalists, organizations, teachers and students who ask to receive my postings.   I am monolingual English-language, and linked by the Asian American Studies curriculum at the University of Maryland.   

While teaching I met a Vietnamese immigrant student who was imprisoned by the Communists with her mother when she was four years old, in 1988.  She remembers the experience because she was shot while attempting to leave Vietnam on a boat.  The captain was killed and many passengers injured.  Untreated, she still carries the bullet in her leg.  Other women friends have told me their experiences being imprisoned for attempting to leave Communist Vietnam.  The conditions were particularly negligent in sanitation and gender-specific in brutality.  The term of imprisonment for Boat People caught trying to leave was six months without trial. 

Le Thi Cong Nhan, in fragile health, is being harassed by common-law prisoners with the encouragement of the regime.   She is not receiving medical treatment.  Clearly she is in an immediate life-threatening situation.

My request to you, Secretary Negroponte, is to inquire about her condition in the spirit of improvement of human relations as articulated by the U.S. government during your meetings with government officials in Vietnam this week. 

Jean Libby

Editor, VietAm Review

http://vietamreview.blogharbor.com