Mideast uprisings lesson for Vietnam: freed dissident

 Uprisings in the Middle East should serve as a lesson to Vietnam's ruling Communist Party, a prominent dissident said Monday, calling for democracy the day after his release from four years in prison.

"I think what has been happening in the Middle East is a very good lesson for Vietnamese people at this moment," Nguyen Van Dai, a 42-year-old human rights lawyer, told AFP by telephone in Hanoi.
"And it's also a good lesson for the Communist Party because they should democratise my country before Vietnamese people go to the streets to ask them," he said, after completing his sentence for spreading propaganda against the state.
He and another lawyer were arrested on March 6, 2007 for writing and distributing texts critical of the government, responding to questions from foreign news media and using their positions as lawyers to voice their views.
Dai said he was able to follow news of the Middle East uprisings from the prison cell near Hanoi where he was held with about 45 other people. They received a newspaper and had a television with sound but no picture, he said.
"I think it's very good for the people in the Middle East" that some governments have heeded the voices of their people, Dai said.
Popular uprisings this year have shaken governments throughout the Arab world, toppling long-ruling regimes in Egypt and Tunisia and creating jitters among authoritarian governments further afield, including in China.
In the interview, Dai reiterated his support for a multi-party system -- which Vietnamese authorities re-affirmed in January they are "determined" not to allow.
"I think the multi-party system is better for my country," Dai told AFP.
He said he was not worried about speaking out in the one-party state: "The Vietnamese constitution gives me the right."
Last week veteran Vietnamese dissident Nguyen Dan Que was arrested, official media reported, after he called for a Middle East-style uprising.
At the time, a foreign diplomat said that, apart from Que's appeal, there has been "nothing really" in the way of calls in Vietnam for popular unrest inspired by the Middle East turmoil.
Under his sentence, Dai is restricted from leaving his neighbourhood without official permission even though he is free from prison.
Amnesty International says more than 20 activists in Vietnam have been jailed over the last 12 months. 
Source: MSN News

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