May 8, 2012
Police and security guards beat two Vietnamese state radio reporters who were watching them evict farmers from their land to make way for a privately built housing development, state media reported Tuesday.
A video posted on YouTube showed police and guards beating and kicking two men who wore helmets and hitting them with sticks during the high-profile eviction last month. Nguyen Ngoc Nam, head of the political and economic news division of the Radio Voice of Vietnam and staff reporter Han Phi Long confirmed to Thanh Nien newspaper that they were the two men in the video clip.
The newspaper said Nam was handcuffed and taken in a car to a district prosecutor’s office while Long presented himself to local police to report the beating.
The two reporters have sent a petition and the national radio station has sent a letter to Hung Yen provincial authority asking for clarification, it said. The local government has yet to respond.
The two reporters and Hung Yen provincial government officials were not available for comment Tuesday.
More than 1,000 villagers were overpowered by some 3,000 police and militiamen, many of them in full riot gear, during the eviction on April 24 in Hung Yen province near Hanoi, witnesses have said.
The eviction involved 5.8 hectares (14 acres) of 166 families, part of the 72.6 hectares (180 acres) in the second phase of the housing project.
The Ecopark project was awarded to Viet Hung Co. Ltd., a private company, in 2004 to develop a satellite city in Hung Yen province that would cover 500 hectares (1,235 acres) in three villages about 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of the capital, Hanoi, officials have said. More than 4,000 families will lose their farmland.
The farmers have protested periodically in Hanoi to demand higher compensation or cancel the project altogether.
Authorities detained 20 villagers during the eviction, and five remain in custody.
State media quoted Nguyen Khac Hao, vice governor of Hung Yen province as telling an online government conference chaired by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung last week, that the provincial government has done every right in the case and blamed hostile elements for describing the incident in bad light.
“There was a close coordination between the hostile elements from both inside and outside the country … fake video clips were created to slander and smear the government,” Hao was quoted by Nong Nghiep newspaper as telling the conference.
Source: The Seattle Times
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