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.