Walking on eggshells at Hanoi meet

Pravit Rojanaphruk, The Nation, Asia News Network, Bangkok

True to one of the slogans in the competition for readers of Vietnam's Economic Times newspaper to describe the country, last week's Fifth Asia-Europe People's Forum (ASEM V) held in Hanoi, was "beyond expectations".

It began with the timing of the three-day meeting of more than 500 participants, including at least 150 from various NGOs and people's organizations throughout Asia and Europe.

Unlike previous ASEMs in Copenhagen and Seoul, or the first one in Bangkok in 1996, the one that concluded last week in Hanoi was held a month earlier than the ASEM Leader's Summit itself. One member of the International Organizing Committee (IOC) admitted that Vietnam's National Organizing Committee had insisted that the forum not be held parallel to the Leader's Summit. Demonstrations and possible political embarrassment were reasons cited, while the hosts claimed it was too much of a logistical challenge to handle too many large forums simultaneously in Vietnam.

No special workshop on Myanmar or Tibet and no putting any ASEM country, such as Myanmar or China, on trial, please.

To make matters worse, on the first day of a workshop called "Dialogue of Civilizations, Cultures and Religions in Europe and Asia", participants were treated to a utopian version of the current situation in Tibet, where human-rights violations and the forced assimilation of Tibetans by the Han Chinese are non- existent.

"The situation is totally different from that reported by the foreign media, thank you," was the reply by a Chinese-backed young Tibetan monk when asked by this writer about the reality of today's Tibet.

While any Chinese-backed Tibetan has the right to have their version of reality presented, the other side, the free-Tibet movement, was nowhere to be found, because it had not been invited to Hanoi.

The same with Myanmar. Arguably the region's most brutal and repressive regime, one that uses bullets and rape as weapons against all who oppose it, Myanmar was also a participant at the ASEM Leader's Summit.

On the third and final day, when the final statement of the ASEM V was being formulated and revised, one participant suggested that the three-page statement should include a condemnation of Myanmar's participation in the ASEM process.

To which the loud and immediate response from a Vietnamese representative was: "No! We're not going to permit any inconvenience for our government," followed by loud applause from what must have been every one of the Vietnamese participants, who referred to themselves as belonging to the "civil sector". Later, Sameer Dossani, the poor chap who had raised the Burmese issue only to be shot down in mid-air, lamented that he wasn't even a "Free Myanmar" activist himself, but instead felt someone had to speak out.

Ironically, the ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. government over Agent Orange use during the Vietnam War was included in the statement, which was just and right, but would it have been included if America were a partner in ASEM?

In the end, the issue of Myanmar was left out of the official statement of the People's Forum, while some hard-core sympathizers to the Burmese cause vowed to release an alternative statement -- making a mockery of the fact that the forum itself was supposed to already be an "alternative meeting" in which a social dimension was infused into the Leader's Summit.

Be that as it may, on a few occasions the Vietnamese hosts found themselves on the receiving end, as well. Most foreign journalists (except those from ASEAN nations who were hastily converted into participants) were barred from covering the forum until key foreign participants finally, on the last day, said that "something big" would happen if the Vietnamese didn't allow them in.

While overly burdensome logistical reasons were cited, one suspects that the hosts simply didn't want foreign journalists to know too much about the real Vietnam. Who knows? The reality might truly be "beyond expectations".