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Imprisoned
March 9
Ly Chandara, Tu Do, IMPRISONED
Chandara, the editor of Tu Do (Freedom), an anti-Communist Vietnamese-language newspaper published in Phnom Penh, was expelled by Cambodian authorities to Vietnam. He was among several dozen ethnic Vietnamese opponents of Hanoi--very loosely affiliated with one another, and collectively termed the "Tu Do Movement"--whom the Cambodian government expelled or threatened with expulsion between December 1995 and December 1996. Chandara was taken into custody at the Vietnamese border and incarcerated in Vietnam for seven months. He was released on Oct. 10 and immediately repatriated to Cambodia, after promising Vietnamese officials that he would not conspire against Vietnam or engage in any other political activity. However, Chandara said in late January 1997 that he was seeking permission from the Cambodian government to relaunch Tu Do. Human rights activists in Phnom Penh had questioned Cambodia's authority to expel Chandara, citing as evidence of his Cambodian citizenship a voter registration card in his name for Cambodia's U.N.-supervised elections in 1993.
August 22
Nguyen Xuan Tu (Ha Si Phu), Free-lancer, IMPRISONED, LEGAL ACTION
A Hanoi court imposed a one-year prison sentence on Tu, a biologist and dissident writer whose pen name is Ha Si Phu, for violating Article 92 of the Criminal Code, a national security provision that outlaws possessing or divulging "state secrets." Tu received credit for time already served, and was released in December 1996. Police had arrested Tu at his home in Dalat on Dec. 5, 1995. Two days later, they searched his house and confiscated thousands of pages of documents and manuscripts, including two issues of Thien Chi, a monthly Vietnamese-language journal published in Germany that had reprinted some of Tu's essays. Earlier in 1995, he had written an essay in which he called Marxism-Leninism an outdated relic that was harmful to the country's economic reforms. In a Dec. 4, 1995, radio interview on a California station, he called on Vietnamese-Americans to lobby the United States to withhold most-favored-nation trading status for Vietnam until that country's democracy was "well developed."
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