What is this all about?
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| The Vietnamese will always remember what VietCong did - including the massacre in Hue 1968 |
| As VCs violated the peace agreement and forced their way to Saigon in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled the country due to fear of prosecution ... |
 
| They became known to the world as the Boat People |
| They risked everything including their lives ... |
| ... in hope of a better future for their children |
| For many years, they endured the hardship in the refugee camps waiting to re-settle in free, democratic countries like Australia. |
| Since then, the Vietnamese Australians have settled well in their new homeland. But they continue to voice their opposition to the totalitarian regime in Vietnam. |
| The latter is a corrupt, mafia-like gang of VietCongs, which after 30 years of mismanagement, has made Vietnam one of the poorest countries in the region and one with the worst human right violation. |
| Priests and monks were jailed without trials, doctors and students were prosecuted for exercising their freedom of speech. |
 
| The totalitarian regime in Vietnam (being one of the very few remaining communist regimes) also relentlessly and shamelessly pushes its propaganda machine - on one hand to cover up their failures and crimes, and on the other to gloss up the Communist Party. They would do this in the full knowledge that the public would not believe any of it. Nobody with a sound mind would watch or listen to this sort of distorted information pumped out by this government. |
 
| On Oct 06 2003, the management of SBS TV - a tax-funded TV station in Australia - thoughtlessly decided to broadcast this propaganda machine (under the guise of news program "Thoi Su - VTV4") into the homes of those Vietnamese boatpeople, without first consulting this ethnic community. |
| This caused a series of massive protests from the Vietnamese community. Complaints flooded telephone lines, tens of thousands protest signatures, thousands of emails, and huge demonstrations in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne - the largest was on Dec 02 2003 with 12,000 people gathered outside SBS station in Sydney. Australian Federal government also showed support to the Vietnamese community and their cause. |
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On Dec 06 2003, after it was on air for 2 months, Thoi Su was suspended.
This was a major victory
and a devastating blow to the Communist government in Hanoi.
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| Any comments? | |