BANGKOK (AP) — Three well-known freedom-of-expression organizations have appealed to the Vietnamese authorities to release veteran journalist and historian Truong Huy San, a well-known government critic who reportedly was detained last week in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.
The Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders on Friday issued a call for San’s release, noting he was “reportedly taken away by state security agents just a few days after publishing articles on the country’s current political turmoil.”
Its appeal came a day after the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN America, both headquartered in New York, expressed similar concern over San’s situation.
“We are concerned Truong Huy San may be targeted for his writings, which have been critical of the Vietnamese government, PEN America said in a post on the social platform X. “We urge the Vietnamese authorities to be transparent about his apprehension. Charges must not be brought against Truong Huy San for his free expression.”″
There has been no official confirmation of San’s detention, which became known on June 1. On Thursday, replying to a news conference question about his situation, Vietnam Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang said that his agency did not have “relevant information” about the arrest.
News of San’s detention initially came from the tight-knit community of Vietnamese online dissidents. San had been due to attend a small public event in Hanoi, but failed to turn up, leading his friends to discover that police had been to his home and taken him away. They spread the news on social networks.
Content on his Facebook page, which had more than 350,000 followers, disappeared on June 2, with no explanation.
Several days before his disappearance, San had posted essays critical of the government led by Communist Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong, the country’s top leader.
Widely known by the pen name Huy Duc, San has long been one of Vietnam’s most popular social commentators and a frequent critic of the country’s communist government. Now in his early sixties, he has been an independent journalist since 2009 when he was fired from a newspaper job because of his political opinions.
He is also the author of “The Winning Side,′ a well-regarded two-volume study of post-war Vietnam and its reunification.
The 2024 World Press Freedom Index issued by Reporters Without Borders ranks Vietnam at an abysmal 174th out of 180 countries and territories, two places worse than China but ahead of notoriously repressive states such as Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.
The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Vietnam “the fifth worst jailer of journalists worldwide,” with at least 19 reporters locked up as of December last year.
Late last month, Public Security Minister To Lam was promoted to become president, after his predecessor resigned, in what some analysts believe was part of a series of shakeups related to who may eventually become the new party general secretary, succeeding the 80-year-old Trong, who is expected to relinquish the post by 2026.
Prior to becoming a journalist, San was an officer in the Vietnamese Army for eight years, serving in the brief 1979 border war against China and also in Cambodia, which Vietnam invaded in late 1978 to oust the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.
He held a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship at the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism in 2005-2006 and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2012-2013. He was featured in an on-camera interview in Ken Burns’ 2017 documentary “The Vietnam War.”
