Bolsavik.com

(Photo by Chitose Suzuki, AP)

When the USS Lassen made its official port call to Da Nang, Vietnam, earlier today, it marked the first time that a Vietnamese-American U.S. warship commander came back on Vietnamese shore.

Cmdr. Hung Le (in Vietnamese: Lê Bá Hùng) was just 5 years old when communist forces overran South Vietnam. The commander’s father, himself an officer in the South Vietnamese navy, took his family on a boat and headed out to sea. They were picked up by the USS Barbour County, a tank landing ship of approximately the same size as the destroyer Cmdr. Le now helms.

Cmdr. Le is a native of Huế in central Vietnam. A friend of the family told the Bolsavik that the commander’s grandfather was Lê Bá Hà, ward chief of Phú Cát in the city. The family friend confirmed that the commander comes from the city’s illustrious ”Lê Bá” family.

A few hours before entering Vietnam, Cmdr. Le corresponded by email with a reporter of Nguoi Viet Daily News. (No, not the Bolsavik.) The interview is published here, in Vietnamese.

Some excerpts:

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The lawyer who wrote the bar association’s proclamation, asserting Vietnamese sovereignty over disputed islands off the country’s central coast, has been arrested by Vietnam’s government.

OK so this is not strictly a Vietnamese-American issue, but I felt compelled to speak out. This is, after all, my blog. (Note also that I’m not speaking in the third person.)

On Saturday, the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, acting under what it called an “urgency,” arrested attorney Le Cong Dinh (Lê Công Định in Vietnamese spelling). The purported reason was for “acts against the State” and “libel of the Prime Minister and other comrades in the leadership of the Party and State.”

A closer reading of the news of his arrest, however, shows that the Vietnamese government could not even adequately allege, let alone prove, any of the charges. The same, almost identical “news story” appeared throughout the country’s media, all of which are owned directly or indirectly by the state. Here’s one sample.

Successful professional

Educated in Ha Noi, Saigon, and at Tulane University - Columbia, the 39-year-old Dinh is highly successful and wealthy. He owns a house in the exclusive Saigon South new development, and has his solo practice in the high-rent District 1 area. (It’s the Vietnamese equivalent of living in Westchester and working in Manhattan.)

Dinh is married to one of the prettiest and smartest women of Vietnam, beauty queen Ngọc Khánh. (That’s Dinh and his wife in the photo above.) In a country where most positions of prominence go to older men and women over 50, Dinh was elected the Vice-President of the Bar Association of Ho Chi Minh City, the umbrella organization for all lawyers in the 9-million-people metropolis.

And yet, he’s taking risks that a wealth-maximizing rational being would not take. In the restrictive and risky environment that is communist Vietnam, Dinh has dared gone against the grain, representing clients that other lawyers would not touch, and speaking out on issues that many others, lawyers or not, would not speak.

These taboo issues include the assertion of Vietnamese sovereignty over the Spratlys and Paracels, and also issues of human rights and religious freedom.

Represented activists

Among clients represented by Dinh are his colleagues Nguyen Van Dai and (Ms.) Le Thi Cong Nhan. Both are attorneys based in Hanoi, and they were most prominent as lawyers specializing in human rights, representing Christians, mostly Protestants, seeking the right to practice their faith. In the picture is Dai in suit in front and Cong Nhan in red behind him.

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