Police arrested six petitioners seeking justice in land rights disputes, and detained several others on Tuesday in Hanoi and Ben Tre province, according to a family member of one of the petitioners.
Four of 22 people protesting in front of the National Assembly building in Hanoi were hauled away after the group attempted to ask politicians for help resolving disputes over land, a daughter of one of the petitioners told RFA’s Vietnamese Service.
“Congressmen arrived in cars, so we rushed toward them and asked for justice,” said the woman who declined to give her name. “They then called the police to deal with us. Four people were forced into a police car and taken to a police station on Ngo Thi Nham Street.”
Among those arrested were a woman named Hai, a woman in her 70s named Hoa, a man named Nguyen Dinh Tu and a petitioner from Daknong province in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, she said.
Police in south Vietnam’s Ben Tre province harassed petitioners and detained two of them, said Tran Thi Oi, one of the petitioners.
“They hauled them into the vehicle like pigs,” she said.
People gather almost daily outside various government offices in the capital Hanoi and elsewhere around the country, hoping to get a chance to talk or submit letters to petition officials about homes or farmland they have lost in illegal confiscations.
Others raise the cases of relatives who have been wrongly imprisoned in the authoritarian, one-party state.
Reported by An Nguyen for RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Ninh Pham. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.