VIETNAM

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 Earlier in 1995, he had written an essay in which he called Marxism-Leninism an outdated relic that was harmful to the country's economic reforms.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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