IF NGUYEN DAN QUE had any doubts about the danger of the internet, they were dispelled the night that he began his last long spell in captivity. It was a Monday evening, and Dr Nguyen, a veteran opponent of Vietnam’s communist Government, was quietly working in his local cyber-café.

The plainclothes security police had severed the telephone line at his home, so he depended on the café to read the news and exchange e-mails with Vietnamese dissidents at home and abroad.

“I was surfing the internet when somebody grabbed me with an arm, choking my throat,” he recalls. The police dragged Dr Que away from his screen, and into jail. It would be two years before he was released for the crime of “abusing democratic rights” — posting on the internet statements denouncing Vietnam’s suppression of the media.

“The internet is a battlefield of the Government and dissidents,” he said at home in Ho Chi Minh City, as government spies with cameras hovered outside. “It’s a dangerous weapon of repression in the hands of the Government. But we have to exploit this tool, even if it means going to prison.”

This weekend, as President Bush and the leaders of China, Japan, Russia and 17 other countries fly in for the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) Forum, Vietnam has a rare opportunity to present an attractive modern face to the outside world. Behind the smiles, however, ugly realities are concealed.

The Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights, says that homes of dissidents in Hanoi have been blockaded by police and signs posted in English ordering foreigners to stay away. Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, as it was called until 1975, is such a lively city that it is difficult to imagine it as a place of repression. A visit to Dr Que reveals the reality.

Two plainclothes policemen stand by the gate and film me as I arrive, and my taxi is followed by a relay of young men on motorbikes when I leave. Inside, Dr Que, 64, draws the curtains and gives me an envelope containing an account of his career as a dissident.

“Take this now,” he says. “If they come in after you, we will not have time to talk.” Since 1978, he has spent 20 of his 64 years in jail, and has suffered torture, beatings and grievous medical neglect.

For much of the rest of the time he has lived, as he does now, in a state of virtual house arrest — his phones bugged and frequently disconnected, his movements followed, his friends and family harassed.

Politically, his demands are the bare democratic minimum — a free press, freedom of speech and assembly, and an end to the 31-year old monopoly of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Until recently his was a lonely and isolated voice.

Dr Que insists that it is the harshness of the repression that has silenced the majority — but the internet is fast changing that.

“You have to face brutal measures when you stand up to these authorities,” he says, “but this year the democratic movement has been progressing a lot compared with the past two or three decades. That momentum will continue.”

One in six of the 84 million Vietnamese people is estimated to be an internet user, compared with one in nine a year ago. Most do not have home computers but use the 5,000 cyber-cafés for a few pence an hour.

Dissidents also make use of online voice services such as Skype to speak in person to one another in a medium less susceptible to tapping than fixed or mobile telephone lines.

Even the Venerable Thich Quang Do, the 77-year old Buddhist monk who is perhaps the most eminent and revered dissident in Vietnam, is installing an internet connection in the temple where he has spent eight years under “pagoda arrest”.

The authorities are now blocking access to dissident websites and recruiting the proprietors of cyber-cafés to spy on their customers.

Some dissidents suspect that anonymous contributors to chat rooms may include agents provocateurs hoping to flush out and identify dissidents. “The communists are like a person afraid of the wind blowing outside,” says the Venerable Do. “They won’t open the door because they fear they will catch a cold.”

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