Hanoi - Hoang Minh Chinh, the former Communist ideology chief who became one of Vietnam's leading democracy activists, was cremated in Hanoi Saturday after a memorial service attended by hundreds, including many of Vietnam's leading dissidents. Police briefly struggled with two dissidents who tried to make political statements, but otherwise the ceremony, which included strong pro-democracy speeches, was allowed to proceed without incident.
Chinh, who died February 7 aged 87, was the head of Vietnam's Marxism-Leninism Institute before falling out of favour in 1963 and spending years in prison.
By the 1990s he had become an advocate for multi-party democracy, and in 2006 he refounded the Vietnam Democratic Party he led in the 1940s when it was largely a Communist front.
In a commemorative speech, Tran Lam, 84, a lawyer who has defended other democracy activists, said Chinh had joined the Communist Party in 1938 out of patriotic motives.
"Hoang Minh Chinh came to communism with the heart of a young patriot, and he gave up communism with the heart of a patriotic intellectual," Lam said.
The ceremony was conducted by six yellow-robed monks from the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam. Chinh was converted to Buddhism last November by Thich Quang Do, the elderly dissident monk who heads the UBCV.
Thich Khong Than, a UBCV monk from Ho Chi Minh City who led the ceremony, was among several attendees who had initially been prevented by authorities from travelling to Hanoi, though he was eventually allowed to proceed.
"Several activists who wanted to come to this ceremony today were searched by the police to see whether they were carrying anything," said Nguyen Tien Trung, 25, head of the Democracy Party's youth wing.
Trung said up to a dozen activists who had wanted to attend were prevented from doing so by police.
A representative of the US Embassy in Hanoi presented a wreath at the funeral. On Friday, US Ambassador Michael Michalak issued a statement calling Chinh a "true patriot."
Chinh's death means the Democratic Party, with members in both Vietnam and the Vietnamese exile community in the United States, is without a leader. Trung said the party had not yet selected a new president, but would do so in the near future.
Chinh's move to refound the party in early 2006 was part a brief flowering of democratic activity in Vietnam, including the founding of the so-called Bloc 8406 dissident movement.
The government sharply curtailed the movement in early 2007, sentencing several leading activists, such as human rights lawyers Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Cong Nhan and the Catholic priest Father Nguyen Van Ly, to prison.
Other leading dissidents attending the funeral included Pham Hong Son, a doctor and journalist, and lawyer Bui Kim Thanh, an activist on land rights issues.
Thanh had a brief altercation with police early on when she tried to make a political statement, but she was calmed by Chinh's eldest daughter, Tran Thi Thanh Ha, 59, who organized the ceremony.
"Your life was a constant battle," Ha said in her speech, addressing her deceased father. "You suffered in the prisons of the French and of the Communists."
There appeared to be over a hundred plainclothes policemen in attendance, many of them filming the guests with handheld video cameras, but they did not interfere with the speeches or with Western media.
