Fighting Pollution in Viet Nam.

AuthorMalin Roodman, David

A third of the world's people live under regimes that have little tolerance for NGOs, but many of them still find ways to take action in defense of their environment. How they do so may vary widely, however, in accordance with the kind of environment they have - and with the ways in which they have traditionally related to that environment and to each other.

I came from the beautiful water to Vietnam, and lived there from October 1998 to June 1999. While I was there, a quiet war simmered between the government and its domestic critics.

Around the time I arrived, the government put the former editor of a Ho Chi Minh City financial newspaper on trial for "abusing freedom and democratic rights to violate the interests of the State" - that is, publishing evidence of corruption among customs officials. In January, the Communist Party expelled elder statesman General Tran Do for slipping pro-democracy manifestos to foreign reporters. Then the Venerable Thich Quang Do was detained and questioned after he met with fellow monks of the banned United Buddhist Church. He had been released from his latest jail term just before I arrived, but the government still held as many as 56 prisoners of conscience at the start of 1999, according to Amnesty International. The Vietnamese media either ignored these events or firmly sided with the government and attacked those who were fomenting "peaceful evolution" - that is, change without bloodshed.

I was curious about what Vietnamese thought about these events, but didn't feel that it would be safe to ask. To do so would have been to risk a quick expulsion from the country, and trouble for my Vietnamese relatives. My wife Mai was born in Saigon.

But it turned out that there was another quiet war underway in Vietnam. And this one I could investigate. Each year, I learned, thousands of Vietnamese citizens file complaints against factories for polluting . near their homes. Some organize and take their protests straight to the factory gates. They complain about government cement plants that belch soot into the country air, and about home-based welding operations that send noise ricocheting through tight urban alleyways. Muckraking journalists have joined the fray, writing name-naming articles. And in response, government environmental inspectors devote much of their time to visiting factory operators and pressing them to cut emissions.

As in most developing countries, and many industrial ones, factories in Vietnam commonly violate national pollution standards - which in this country were established only five years ago and therefore are less established than many of the plants they apply to. The country is of course industrializing headlong. In such a growth-fevered environment, public criticism, widespread though it is, has often not had much effect on factories. But in those cases where companies have improved compliance, public pressure has frequently played a role. "Bottom-up" pressure from neighbors and journalists, in other words, appears to be affecting industrial polluters at least as much as conventional, "top-down" regulation from government agencies. Studies suggest that public criticism of polluters is also widespread in Indonesia and China.

The strength of public criticism in Vietnam seems remarkable under a government that does not blink at jailing people for saying what they think. Repressive regimes tend to quash activist groups of the sort that have proliferated in more democratic countries, and that we normally think of as the "civil society" or "NGO" (nongovernmental organization) sector (see "Action on the Front Lines," page 12). Yet, judging by the results, public pressure is performing functions in Vietnam that are performed in many countries by NGOs.

But what's most significant about this upwelling of public criticism may not be its modest successes to date so much as where it could lead. Reactive criticism of government and corporate decision making today could become proactive participation a decade or so from now. The result would be a much more powerful force for protecting people from pollution. That possibility, I believe, can best be understood as a product of Vietnam's history.

Since far back in the mists of time, according to Vietnamese mythology, the monsoon god has thundered against the mountain god in an endless battle over the beautiful daughter of King Hong Vuong. Every year the monsoon rains eroded the mountains and fed the rivers that washed the mountain's minerals down to the sea. Near the coast, where the river branches flattened and slowed, the sediment settled out, gradually filling the channels. As each branch rose over the years, decades, or centuries, it pressed against its banks, until one day it burst through and found a new route to the sea. Thus did the mountains and the monsoons cooperate to feather sediment across a vast, fiat expanse, what is now the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.

Some 4,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern Vietnamese brought a brand of rice farming to the Delta. Bit by bit, like all successful farming peoples, they industrialized nature. Harnessing water buffalo and irrigation, they cleared the Red River Delta of its natural biota in order to mass-produce rice. In the most recent millennium, the rice farmers and their communities spread south, first along the narrow strip of flat land between the Central Highlands and the South China Sea, and then into the bounteous Mekong Delta, giving the nation its modern shape, like two rice baskets hanging from a shoulder pole.

The day I glimpsed where it all began was cold. My wife's parents had returned to Vietnam, making it their first time back since the family fled in a cargo plane a week before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Together, the four of us physically retraced the family's past. First we stayed in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), where Mai's parents had arrived independently in 1954 as the country was partitioned in the wake of the French withdrawal. Then we traveled to Hanoi and to the northern countryside, where her parents were born.

It was here that I was privileged with my closest glimpse of the traditional heart of Vietnam, in the village of my father-in-law's birth. The driver of the minivan in which Mai and I were riding with several of our...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT