Interviews with Doan View Hoat

For the Internet, now this is the tool for both the dictators and the defenders of human rights and democracies now. Because it’s free for all. Of course, the government in Vietnam and in China, they have a special department to watch the Internet and to watch the traffic, online traffic, and then to follow very closely the dissidents’ emails or even websites or blogs.

Yes, they do that, yeah. Yet, the people who are against the government, they are also very, very well trained, especially young people, in how to overcome firewall, how to overcome the hackers – they even hack the government’s website. So I think this is a very interesting struggle. Of course, the government has a stronger hand because they have more money, more expertise, et cetera.

Doan Viet Hoat is a writer, scholar and former longtime prisoner of conscience from Vietnam. He has been called “the Sakharov of Vietnam,” a reference to Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov. Hoat protested the South Vietnamese government’s suppression of certain Buddhist religious leaders in the 1960s while still a student.

In April 1975, when North Vietnam took over South Vietnam, Hoat remained in Vietnam. He was imprisoned in 1976 when the Communist government embarked on mass arrests of South Vietnamese intellectuals.

He spent the next 12 years in a cramped cell shared with 40 other prisoners.

Upon his release, Hoat began publishing an underground magazine entitled Freedom Forum (Dien Dan Tu Do). After a few months, he was arrested and detained without trial for two years. In March 1993, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for “attempting to overthrow the people’s government.” Throughout his imprisonment, Hoat continued to issue statements on democracy and to offer criticisms of the regime that were smuggled out of prison. He was then sent to a labor camp in a remote part of the country where he spent four and a half years in solitary confinement.

In 1998, after intense international pressure, Hoat was released and sent into exile. He now lives in the United States and continues his activities to promote human rights and democratic reforms in Vietnam.