What it’s like to wage a lover’s war
Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real. ~ James Baldwin
On October 6, 2020, the Vietnamese police gathered at Ho Chi Minh City and arrested journalist and author Pham Doan Trang. The arresting officers arrived but mere hours after the 24th Annual United States-Vietnam Human Rights Dialogue held on the same day.
She knew the police were closing in on her and that she didn’t have much time. This wasn’t the first time she had close brushes with Vietnamese cops. Pham Doan Trang has been the target of State harassment — and beatings — for years.
After her arrest, the 42-year-old journalist and blogger was charged with disseminating ‘anti-government’ propaganda which, if proven, could land her in jail for the next 20 years.
Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières or RSF), however, felt that the real reason for her arrest “was her work as founder of the dissident online magazine Luât Khoa and editor of The Vietnamese — two publications that help Vietnamese citizens to understand the country’s laws, defend their rights and resist the Vietnamese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule.”
One Vietnamese activist, in an interview with BBC News, explained Pham Doan Trang’s uncompromising position even in the face of persecution and even beatings: “Looking at the range and depth of Doan Trang’s activities in the past years, it is totally predictable that she would be detained. Trang was prepared mentally to go to prison."
According to Frontline Defenders, “Pham Doan Trang has come under frequent harassment, persecution, and physical assault by Vietnamese authorities in recent years. She walks with a pronounced and permanent limp caused by an injury she suffered when attacked by security forces during an environmental protest in Hanoi in April 2015. More recently, she was arrested in November 2017 after meeting the EU delegation in Hanoi and was again detained and beaten in August 2018.”
A day after her arrest, Oct. 7, fellow democracy activist Will Nguyen (阮英惟) posted on Twitter a letter by Pham Doan Trang which the journalist wanted published upon her arrest.
The letter spoke of several key points, including personal ones. But the most unmistakable would be Pham Doan Trang’s reason for writing it: to finally launch “a comprehensive social movement” not only to free her, but other jailed activists as well.
This also comes with the hope that her incarceration may be used to craft better laws, adopt new ideas, and eventually free Vietnam from the clutches of Vietnam’s communist government by forming and electing members of a National Assembly.
It is interesting to note that in her most controversial book, published clandestinely in Vietnam, Politics of a Police State, blurbs praising her books (she also clandestinely published Politics for the Common People and A Handbook for Families of Prisoners) and those denouncing them appear in the very same pages. This proves Pham Doan Trang’s fearlessness even in the face of her foes.
In her book, the 42-year-old Vietnamese author wrote, “The more knowledgeable you are as a citizen, the more fearless you are of the state, and the less likely you will live under a tyrannical regime.”
Today, we are seeing an unprecedented move by tyrannical governments to silence journalists, writers, poets and activists.
In Myanmar, a protest March held in Monywa, Saggaing Division on March 3, 2021 against the recent military junta saw the deaths of Myanmar poets Myint Myint Zin and Kay Za Win in the hands of the military.
On March 9, poet Maung Yu Py was arrested, beaten and charged under Article 505 in Myeik, Tannintharyi Division. His lawyer, who also wrote as a poet, was also arrested. Twelve other poets had been arrested after Maung Yu Py.
Filipino writers and journalists are no strangers to state brutality under the Duterte regime. Frenchiemae Quimpo, a correspondent for the Eastern Vista, continues to languish in jail after her arrest by combined forces of police and military personnel. Lady Ann Salem, editor of Manila Today, who was arrested on Dec. 10, 2020 (the celebration of the International Day of Human Rights) under Duterte’s anti-communist campaign was freed in March 2021.
Sen. Leila de Lima, herself an author of books, has remained in jail since her arrest in Feb. 17, 2017 under trumped-up drug-related charges. Three years later, she was acquitted of one out of three of these charges. The persecution and harassment of Rappler’s chief executive officer and distinguished author and journalist Maria Ressa continue to haunt her to this very day.
Under the incumbent administration whose primary policy revolves around the drug war (a little over 30,000 murdered as of this writing), more than 20 journalists have already been killed. Duterte’s red-tagging campaign has placed many journalists on the hit list of both state forces and assassins, endangering their lives and the family’s.
The International Federation of Journalists said, “This incident demonstrates the continuing baseless accusations and vilification of media workers in the Philippines which poses a real and present risk to journalists. The IFJ condemns the alarming dissemination of misinformation from the AFP and calls for greater measures to safeguard the rights of journalists in the Philippines.”
Award-winning journalist Inday Espina-Varona, herself a target of the State’s red-tagging campaign even years before Duterte’s rise to power, spoke of her recent brush with red-tagging online trolls in an article in the Asia Pacific Report titled “Silence would be a surrender to tyranny”:
“Old hag, menopausal bitch, a person ‘of confused sexuality’ — I’ve been called all that on social media. Trolls routinely call for my arrest as a communist.
“But the attack on 4 June 2020 was different. The anonymous right-wing Facebook page charged me with terrorism, of using access and coverage to pass sensitive, confidential military information to rebels.
“That night, dinner stopped at two spoonsful. My stomach felt like a sack with a dozen stones churning around a malignant current. All my collection of Zen music, hours of staring at the stars, and no amount of calming oil could bring sleep […]
“I’m 57 years old, a cancer survivor with a chronic bad back. I don’t sneak around at night. I don’t do countryside treks. I don’t even cover the military.”
This is what it’s like to wage a “lover’s war” with society. A society largely apathetic to calls for real reform, a public lost, however wittingly and unwittingly, in the maze of State-sanctioned disinformation.
Regardless of the insouciance displayed by many of their countrymen, these journalists, writers and artists soldier on, winning hearts and minds despite operating on a wing and a prayer, with the oftentimes frail hope that one day their words would turn the tide of tyranny around.
All because to wage a lover’s war is to fight the good fight under the possibility of losing. Of sharing love away sans conditions and rewards, if only for the beloved to one day see the light.
It’s a grueling testament to the human spirit, to the power of words and ideas which no amount of brutality could erase. And most of all of human empathy and compassion, for to love is to give one’s self beyond all human expectations.
It is a tale many of us will be hearing time and again as these warriors of the heart risk arrest or murder to save their nation from the clutches of monsters one soul at a time.
Know their stories.
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Joel Pablo Salud is the author of several books of fiction and political nonfiction. He sits as chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of the Philippine Center for International PEN. He now saddles his pen as opinion writer for LiCAS News Philippines and PhilSTAR Life.
