[vnforum] Vietnam pays up after forced labour row sullies Ho Chi Minh
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[vnforum] - Mesg from ken...@webmail.netimages.com
Vietnam pays up after forced labour row sullies Ho Chi Minh Trail
HANOI, Oct 16 (AFP) -
Vietnam has begun paying citizens required to work on a new highway
along the route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail after accusations of forced
labour threatened to sully the name of the famous wartime supply route.
A minimum wage of 15,000 dong (a dollar) a day is now being paid to all
non-contracted staff who work on the prestige project, be their
conscripts or volunteers, labour ministry official Bui Viet Bao told AFP
Monday.
The government is also paying the national insurance contributions of
all
workers on the road under the new regulations which went into force on
Friday, Bao said.
The payments will even be made to those performing the statutory
10-days-a-year community service required under a controversial new law
that went into force in January.
It is the first time that Vietnam has waived the requirement that the
community service be performed unpaid by all adult men below the age of
45 and all women below 35.
The labour ministry ordered the payments in a circular issued on
September 28, just a month after the emigre Vietnam Committee for the
Defence of Human Rights said the use of community service conscripts on
the highway amounted to forced labour and a breach of international law.
At the time the foreign ministry angrily dismissed the accusation as
a "distortion," insisting that statutory community service was permitted
under the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The sheer scale of the Ho Chi Minh highway project has forced the
cash-strapped government to mobilize all the manpower they can drawn on,
including a team of engineers from communist ally Cuba as well as
Vietnamese conscripts.
The government finally launched the long-mooted project as part of
celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in
April after earlier schemes had been rejected as too expensive.
Under the plan approved by Prime Minister Phan Van Khai, the government
hopes to complete the first 347 kilometres (215 miles) of the
1,690-kilometre highway by 2003 at a cost of 378 million dollars.
The authorities intend to use the new highway as a relief road for the
coastal Route One which is currently the country's only north-south
trunk road and is regularly cut by seasonal flooding.
But foreign diplomats say the money would be better spent on upgrading
the
existing highway than on trying to revive memories of military triumphs
now more than a quarter of a century old.
During the war, US planes dropped thousands of tonnes of munitions on
the
16,000-kilometre (9,930-mile) network of trails, tunnels and canals that
the communists built to transport supplies from north to south without
ever completely cutting it.
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Tran Dinh Hoanh
[ Viet Search Engine on VietGATE http://www.vietgate.net ]
[vnforum] - Mesg from Tran Dinh Hoanh <hoa...@erols.com>
Dear All,
This AFP article is deceptive. Unprofessional news reporting. I hope that
you guys at AFP will start to clean up your act or find other jobs. I
recognize that many AFP news articles for the last several months carry the
unfair bias elements. I don't know if the AFP big bosses know about this.
But if you guys on the field do not clean up your act and start to learn to
be fair and truthful, and knowledgeable about complex issues of our nation,
we will make sure that your bosses have a very good understanding of your
performance and do something about that.
1. First, this is not forced labor. "Forced labor" has a very specific
meaning. It usually connotes a human right violation. When you are drafted
(forced) to go into military service for your country, it is not "forced
labor," it is military service. Drafted services is not forced labor
(unless some human-rights violating elements are involved). And news
reporting is supposed to be fair, neutral and non-judgmental.
2. Second, the Vietnamese government from the beginning has had a plan to
pay for drafted labor. The sentense "Vietnam has begun paying citizens
required to work on a new highway along the route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail
after accusations of forced labour threatened to sully the name of the
famous wartime supply route" is misleading and deceptive (unless you want
to ca?i cha^`y ca?i co^'i and don't care about the truth).
3. The sentence that "the labour ministry ordered the payments in a circular
issued on September 28, just a month after the emigre Vietnam Committee for
the Defence of Human Rights said the use of community service conscripts on
the highway mounted to forced labour and a breach of international law" is
misleading in implied causal relationship.
If AFP doesn't get up to international standards of fair and truthful
reporting, we won't put up with the crap. You guys have three months to
clean up.
Have a great day, everyone!
Hoanh
Vinh Dam
Tran Dinh Hoanh wrote:
> [ Viet Search Engine on VietGATE http://www.vietgate.net ]
>
> [vnforum] - Mesg from Tran Dinh Hoanh <hoa...@erols.com>
>
> Dear All,
>
> This AFP article is deceptive. Unprofessional news reporting. I hope that
> you guys at AFP will start to clean up your act or find other jobs. I
> recognize that many AFP news articles for the last several months carry the
> unfair bias elements. I don't know if the AFP big bosses know about this.
> But if you guys on the field do not clean up your act and start to learn to
> be fair and truthful, and knowledgeable about complex issues of our nation,
> we will make sure that your bosses have a very good understanding of your
> performance and do something about that.
>
> 1. First, this is not forced labor. "Forced labor" has a very specific
> meaning. It usually connotes a human right violation. When you are drafted
> (forced) to go into military service for your country, it is not "forced
> labor," it is military service. Drafted services is not forced labor
> (unless some human-rights violating elements are involved). And news
> reporting is supposed to be fair, neutral and non-judgmental.
Forced labor: mandatory labor WITHOUT pay
Drafted for military service: mandatory military service WITH pay
> 2. Second, the Vietnamese government from the beginning has had a plan to
> pay for drafted labor.
You were very luch not to be forced for labor service without pay. Even I as a
pupil still was forced to "lao ddo^.ng" without pay. My dad was in the same
shoe. For him, it was a month of forced, unpaid labor per year then, in the
80's. For me, just a morning every week. Yes, I still remember turning up the
mud in collective rice fields in those days. No pay. No food. No drink. We
had to bring our own meals and drinks.
Oh yes, I am interested to see an official source that mentions the "has had a
plan to pay for drafted labor".
> The sentense "Vietnam has begun paying citizens
> required to work on a new highway along the route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail
> after accusations of forced labour threatened to sully the name of the
> famous wartime supply route" is misleading and deceptive (unless you want
> to ca?i cha^`y ca?i co^'i and don't care about the truth).
>
> 3. The sentence that "the labour ministry ordered the payments in a circular
> issued on September 28, just a month after the emigre Vietnam Committee for
> the Defence of Human Rights said the use of community service conscripts on
> the highway mounted to forced labour and a breach of international law" is
> misleading in implied causal relationship.
The fact remains that they did not pay the drafted laborers in the beginning.
-dqv-