Hanoi Train Street, a relatively new tourist attraction in Vietnam’s capital, has become one of the country’s landmarks, captured on T-shirts, bags, notebooks, paintings, and other souvenirs. Perhaps unknown to many Filipinos, this area in Hanoi’s Old Quarter used to be an urban poor area, described in an article by the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) in 2019 as having been “long occupied by drug addicts and squatters.” 

Today, it’s home to mostly small cafés where foreign tourists come to sit and watch Vietnam’s decades-old trains pass by, with literally just an arm’s length from where they stand.

It’s the thrill of being close to passing trains that makes it a unique experience. After the trains pass by, tourists mingle on the single track again and then wait for the next train while drinking coffee or tea in the cafés.

Hanoi Train Street’s beginnings as a tourist attraction has been traced to the tour offered by British travel operator Alex Sheal back in 2012. But it was social media, especially the photos and videos posted by visitors over the past decade on various apps, that catapulted it to one of Vietnam’s iconic landmarks in 2019 or only six years ago.

To Filipino visitors like myself, with the recent arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte for crimes against humanity (specifically murder) still on my mind, the transformation of an area that was once home to many drug addicts is a clear sign that you don’t need a bloody drug war to attain socio-economic progress and peace and order. 

Death penalty in Vietnam

It’s true that Vietnam has kept the death penalty for drug trafficking, and continues to execute offenders. It’s been labelled by a human rights group as one of Asia’s “leading executioners” for keeping capital punishment for serious crimes, but the number of people executed by lethal injection pales in comparison to Duterte’s drug war, where over 6,000 were killed in official drug operations in six years (on average 1,000 a year), with thousands more summarily executed by vigilantes, many believed to be by policemen themselves.

According to the Advocates for Human Rights and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, while Vietnam has classified the use of the death penalty as a state secret, there were around 1,200 people on death row as of 2022. “In 2022, courts imposed 80 out of at least 102 (78%) new death sentences for drug-related offences,” says the two groups’ report dated May 7, 2024 submitted to the 46th Session of the Working Group for the Universal Periodic Review on human rights in member-states of the United Nations.

The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty reported 170 executions for all crimes (not just drug trafficking) in Vietnam from 2020 to 2022 (average of 56 a year), and an Amnesty International report in 2017 said there were 429 people executed between August 6, 2013 and June 30, 2016 (143 a year).

Harm Reduction International (HRI), a group that advocates a health-based approach to drug addiction, in its report, The Death Penalty for Drug Offences: Global Overview 2023, lamented the limited information in some countries, such as Vietnam, on drug sentences and executions. However, HRI said it was able to “confirm 188 death sentences for drug offences in Vietnam in 2023.” 

The numbers reported by these non-government organizations are paltry when compared to Duterte’s murderous drug war, where drug suspects were not even given due process. Vietnam, now a model of socio-economic progress in Asia, has achieved this development with way fewer executions than during the reign of Duterte. 

Duterte has repeatedly argued that the drug war was something he had to do, both in Davao City when he was mayor, and in the whole country when he was president, to bring about order and progress. But the case of Vietnam clearly shows these can be achieved through sustained socio-economic growth rather than a bloody drug war. 

Rappler’s resident economist JC Punongbayan said the average Vietnamese is now richer than the average Filipino, and that Vietnam is also “emerging as a manufacturing powerhouse, exporting a lot of electric vehicles, computers, smartphones, and the like,” while the Philippines is “stuck with assembling semiconductors, other electronic products, as well as low value-added exports like furniture, coconut, and pineapples.”

Surveys by pollster Social Weather Stations on families reporting victimization of common crimes also show that whatever gains attained during the Duterte administration have not been sustained, a sign that the high cost to life by Duterte’s war on drugs does not outweigh the supposed benefits from it. – Rappler.com