Urgent Letter to Mr. Bill Gates who is visiting Vietnam

 

 

Vietnam Human Rights Network

April 22, 2006

 

At the invitation of the Vietnamese Prime Minister, Bill Gates the Co-founder and Chairman of Microsoft Company arrived to Vietnam for a business visit on April 21. Since Vietnamese Internet users are under severe government restriction, many of them have been arrested and jailed, Mr. Bui Tin, a former Assistant Editor in Chief of Nhan Dan newspaper reminds Bill Gates not to turn his back to Vietnamese Government crackdown on internet users.

 

Following is the letter:

 

Dear Mr. Bill Gates,

 

While you are visiting Vietnam and see that Vietnamese youths admire you largely and deeply, I would like to let you know that a Vietnamese woman and her two young children are very bitter and distressed because her husband has been imprisoned since March, 2002, only because he used a computer and the Internet, that you had helped to develop, to receive and send a document named “What is Democracy” that the webpage of the United States Embassy in Vietnam displayed.

 

The man’s name is Doctor Pham Hong Son.

 

I wish You and Your Wife a successful trip and hope that you could send some reassuring message to  “the democratic man who used a computer” sitting in prison, and to his wife and children, who count each day for the eternity that separates them unjustly.

Sincerely,

 

Paris 22/4/2006

 

Bùi Tín

A free Vietnamese journalist living in Paris since 1990

(former Assistant Editor in Chief of Nhan Dan newspaper, Editor in Chief of Nhan Dan Sunday weekly magazine of the Vietnamese Communist Party)

 

[Translation to English by Thuan Do]

 

 

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