Vietnamese media fights against graft

Vietnamese media fights against graft

By Russell Heng

Gone are the days when a Cabinet Minister or a Provincial
Party Secretary would be brought to book through the pages of the
press.

SINGAPORE: In keeping with political and economic reforms,
Vietnam has also liberalized its mass media.

Observers often point to the frequent exposes of official
corruption by the country's newspapers as one of the prominent
features of such a less-controlled press. Vietnam's journalists
can point to a few outstanding examples of having brought down
leaders as senior as a Provincial Party Secretary of Central
Committee rank and a Cabinet minister.

The concerted media effort to fight corruption, like most
other reform efforts, was given a fillip by the 1986 Sixth
Congress of the ruling Vietnam Communist Party when it officially
endorsed doi moi, the liberal line calling for renovation
throughout the system. To strengthen editors' prerogative to
investigate and publicize official impropriety, the Party
Secretariat issued Resolution 15 in 1987, a decree which had as
its title "Strengthening the leadership of the Party with the
purpose of better utilizing the press in the struggle against
negativism."

Negativism, or tieu cuc in Vietnamese, is the codeword for
many things that are wrong with the Vietnamese system with
corruption being one of them. The wording also underlined the
fact that fighting corruption should be seen within the context
of a Marxist-Leninist political culture, where, like so many
other endeavors for a better socialist future, it was regarded as
a political struggle and, like all such struggles, it had to come
under the leadership of the party.

That being the case, party leadership would, on occasion,
praise newspapers for performing their duty of fighting
corruption adequately, or reprimand them for not doing enough. In
other words, this has become a formal (some would say
formalistic) yardstick by which a newspaper can be measured. The
media too accepts that this task is to be carried out within the
framework of an official policy.

For example, at the opening of last year's October session of
the National Assembly which highlighted the gravity of the
corruption problem, two journalists from the Thanh Nien paper
proposed in an interview with Party General Secretary Do Muoi
that the party/state should co-ordinate more with the media to
combat corruption.

Furthermore, call it a Vietnamese cultural trait or a
requirement of the system or whatever, but there is a certain
attitude on the part of the media that opposing corruption should
not be too confrontational and sometimes, editors/journalists
make a special effort to settle things out of the pages of the
press.

An example would be the Petechim scandal of 1993. Petechim was
a Ministry of Trade company whose director, that year, rejected a
cheaper contract to buy oil equipment for another deal which cost
US$5 million more. A year later in May, the influential Quan Doi
Nhan Dan (People's Army Daily) got wind of it and ran an article
without naming names as a warning. Meanwhile the writer got in
touch with officials of the Trade Ministry but on finally
learning that the Minister would not do anything to stop the
contract, he wrote the full story in June.

In the terminology of Western political science, the
Vietnamese media has been co-opted by officialdom in the latter's
bid to be seen to solve its corruption problem or risk losing
legitimacy. This begs the question: is it all a stage-managed
show? To believe so would be unfair to editors and journalists
who have faced great political pressure and risked career or
even personal safety to write stories about "negativism". If it
were all for show, editors/journalists would not get into trouble
for what they publicized but the fact is they had.

In terms of the motives of the Establishment, allowing the
media to point a finger at erring officials does help to promote
the image that the party wants to fight corruption but there is
also a practical need to involve the press. This is because the
party could not trust its own internal system to deliver prompt
and honest reports about dishonest cadres. A network of interests
at many levels of the party frequently blocks internal
investigation into irregularities and media publicity is one way
to overcome such cover-ups.

However, through the years, the media effort itself has also
been compromised by such vested interests within the
Establishment. There is a definite sense that corruption is
increasing rapidly and the press unable to stop it. The rumor
mill in Vietnam has many stories of people too powerful or well-
connected for the media to take on. Furthermore, as the party
becomes more circumspect in its enthusiasm for liberal reforms
post-1989 and the collapse of many socialist regimes in Eastern
Europe, media space for aggressive reporting also constricted
and, with that, the scope for investigative probes into official
misbehavior.

A very senior journalist, Tuan Minh, writing in 1990 observed
that officials would use the following tactics to intimidate the
media:

* Accuse the media of highlighting errors and deficiencies to
slander the regime and negate its revolutionary experience;

* Argue that "negativism" is everywhere and so why just focus
on those involving cadres and party members, thereby creating
opportunities for hostile powers to attack the Party and
government;

* Stability is the most necessary thing for present-day
Vietnam and opposing "negativism" can cause instability and
incite a mentality of opposition.

The arithmetic also makes the task of building confidence in
the media "corruption-fighting" effort seem rather daunting.
Newspapers get hundreds of letters about grievances suffered at
the hands of corrupt officials, of which only a handful can be
investigated.

In 1993, a journalist writing in the professional magazine of
the Vietnam Journalist Association lamented that some 80 to 90
percent of press exposes resulted in prolonged shilly-shallying
with no clear conclusion and action taken. He wrote that it was
no wonder that in a readers' survey by the association, the
results showed that many have lost confidence in anti- corruption
stories and they ranked sixth in popularity behind other kinds
of stories.

Journalists, too, have spoken of fatigue or have turned
cynical but it must be added that the conduct of some journalists
(being bribed by or blackmailing the guilty) has also contributed
to the loss of credibility of the media campaign.

Whither the future? The official anti-negativism campaign will
continue and the media will always contribute a certain profile
to it. Some good will come out of the stories uncovered by the
press. Here and there, grievances will be assuaged. A tough anti-
corruption law is in place. But the prevailing wisdom, as of now,
is that gone are the days when a Cabinet Minister or a Provincial
Party Secretary would be brought to book through the pages of the
press.

Russell Heng is a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, Singapore.