Twenty professors and educational doctors from Israel write a private petition demanding the release of teacher-prisoner of conscience Nguyen Nang Tinh

October 4, 2020

To:
MK Benjamin Gantz
Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister

For decades, Vietnam has been governed by a dictatorial regime of the “Communist Party of Vietnam”(CPV). Citizens who dare to criticize the CPV are attacked by security forces, arrested, severely tortured, some prosecuted for draconian criminal offenses, some executed during torture and some executed in legal proceedings; Some citizens are held in unofficial detentions that the regime refuses to admit, so they are defined as “disappeared”; Those who are not arrested but suspected of hostility to the regime are under constant surveillance and severe restrictions are placed on their freedom of occupation and freedom of movement.

On May 29, 2019, Mr. Nguyen Nang Tinh, a music teacher was arrested. Tinh was born in 1976 in Nghe Tinh province in central Vietnam. He acquired his academic education at the Academy of Music in the city of Hue and from 2013-2019 taught music theory and keyboard harmony at the College of Culture and Art of Nghe An.

He was indicted for “spreading propaganda against the state” under section 117 of the Vietnamese Penal Code, due to critical posts about the regime on Facebook (Tinh denied that the Facebook page was his). Despite his clear knowledge of the price he might pay Tinh used to express to his students his views on human rights violations and the severe harm to the environment caused by the communist regime, as well as the violation of Vietnam’s sovereignty by China with the CPV turning a blind eye. Tinh even presented in his classes music composed by dissidents of the regime.

On November 15, 2019, Tinh was convicted in an expedited legal proceeding that did not meet
international standards. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison and another 5 years on probation. On April 20, 2020, the Supreme Court in the capital Hanoi rejected Tinh’s appeal.

In October 2018, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense signed a security understanding agreement, and representatives of the Israeli defense establishment are meeting on a regular basis with senior CPV officials. According to evidence and various reports in Vietnam in recent years the State of Israel has been a major supplier of weapons and surveillance systems to Vietnam.

We, the undersigned educators in music and musicology studies throughout the State of Israel, ask you to use the close ties between the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the communist regime in Vietnam and request the immediate release of our colleague, political detainee Nguyen Nang Tinh.

Music and freedom are inextricably linked, as illustrated by Leonard Bernstein on December 25, 1989, when he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as part of the celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the “Ode to Joy,” Bernstein changed Friedrich Schiller’s original lyrics, replacing the word joy with the word freedom.

Tinh is also entitled to freedom, and we ask you to convey this message without delay to your
counterparts in Vietnam.

Prof. Veronika Cohen
Dr. Michal Hefer
Dr. Yoel Greenberg
Ofri Akavia
Chaya Offek
Prof. Judith Cohen
Michal Toussia-Cohen
Prof. Ruth HaCohen Pinczower
Prof. Emer. Menachem Zur
Dr. Elisheva Rigbi
Prof. Emer. Naphtali Wgner
Yochanan Nerel
Prof. Emer. Shmuel Magen
Dr. Aline Gabay
Dr. Dochy Lichtensztajn
Prof. Amnon Wolman
Inbal Djamchid
Prof. Edwin Seroussi
Dr. Michael Lukin
Prof. Benjamin Oren