KEY POINTS:
HANOI - Another week, another Australian on death row for drug smuggling, this time in Vietnam.
Three more are locked up, waiting to learn if the Vietnamese courts will deliver them the same fate.
And there's every indication they won't be the last to dice with death.
"Sydney has become one of the major routes for drugs that have been transited through Vietnam" says Nguyen Tung Dung, the National Programme Officer at the United Nations' Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
"The increased number of cases and the (methods) runners are using has become vastly more complex and organised than what we were seeing previously, the trafficking has become more organised."
Since 2006, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has rolled out awareness campaigns in the Australian-Vietnamese community about the risks - including the death penalty - attached to drug trafficking offences in Vietnam.
But the lure of a quick buck is more powerful for some. And the number is not small.
About 20 Australians, including many Vietnamese Australians, are currently in detention either awaiting trial or serving sentences for drug offences.
They include five who have had their death sentences commuted to life jail terms, thanks to the quiet diplomatic efforts of the Australian government.
But as Australians continue to involve themselves in the global drug supply chain running through Vietnam, and on to Australia, how much more understanding can Canberra expect from its northern neighbour? Particularly when the death penalty is so strictly enforced for Vietnamese nationals who involve themselves in the same crimes.
That question is obviously weighing heavily in Canberra in the case of NSW man Tony Manh, 40, who was sentenced to death in a Ho Chi Minh City court this week for trafficking almost 1kg of the drug of heroin.
Manh - who admitted the crime, complicating diplomatic efforts to save him - was, like so many others, bound for Sydney after being promised US$10,000 ($13,755) by a Vietnamese man to be a courier.
"There is a constant problem here of people thinking they can traffic drugs in and out of Vietnam, particularly out of Vietnam and down to Australia," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said this week.
"It is, obviously, highly illegal. It is extremely hazardous, the Vietnamese authorities have a very good system of tracking people down and this is, of course, what happens to them if they are caught."
Vietnam has voiced its concern that the number of Australians using the country as a transit point in the drug trade is not only increasing, but their methods are becoming more sophisticated and organised.
And its actions are backing up its hard line on drugs.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung ordered all ministries and localities to launch a nationwide six month crackdown on the trade.
His edict came as the country reviews its decade-long war on drugs that has seen the government's action plan for drug prevention and control encompass the majority of society.
According to Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security, since 1997, police have uncovered more than 111,000 drug smuggling cases and arrested more than 190,000 people while confiscating caches of opium, heroin, marijuana, ecstasy and other banned narcotics.
"The vulnerable who get sucked in to becoming couriers are lured in by a slick and well-organised network," says Lily de Roof of the NGO PrisonAid who works with prisoners facing death and life sentences away from home.
"The recruiters rely on the way that drug smuggling can still present an illusion of a quick solution to a money problem and a glamorous thing to do for a potential courier."
The reality, she says, is that societies like Australia's aren't doing enough to prevent the demand for drugs on their own streets.
While penalties for drug trafficking in Vietnam are harsh, anti-drug forces also have sent thousands of addicts to rehabilitation centres in an effort to undercut local demand.
And authorities have been hard at work in rural areas of the country, where swathes of opium poppy fields have been eradicated and replaced with cash crops.
"Since the 1980s when there was an estimated 20,000 hectares of poppy fields in Vietnam, to today where we put the figure at around 15 hectares, the Vietnamese government has been remarkably successful in eradicating heroin production in the country," said UN's Nguyen Tung Dung.
As the nation works to rid itself of the drugs scourge, some Vietnamese feel aggrieved at what they see as double standards.
Why should foreign citizens get their death sentences commuted when their own citizens rarely get such let-offs?
"You know (the) law, and you break (it), you pay (the) price," says Din Van Tinh, a rickshaw driver in Hanoi.
A Ho Chi Minh City fruit vendor known as Nguyen says plenty of Vietnamese have not been spared the death sentence and nor should Australians. The law must be applied equally to all people.
How that principle plays out in relation to the pending cases involving Australians remains to be seen.
Manh has 15 days to lodge an appeal against his death sentence. If the Supreme Court confirms it, he will then have seven days to submit a letter to Vietnam's president seeking clemency.
Should those avenues fail, Australia has said it will lobby the government to spare his life.
Developments in the case will no doubt be closely watched by the three other Australians awaiting sentencing for drug crimes that could also see them sentenced to death.
Two Victorians, Nguyen Van Huy, 38, and Hoang Le Thuy, 41, were arrested in July at Ho Chi Minh City's airport. They were on their way to Australia when authorities allegedly found half a kilogram of heroin in ointment jars in their bags.
The third case involves a 34-year-old woman, from NSW, who was arrested at the same airport with 1.5kg of heroin in her luggage.
In an ominous sign of things to come, Australian Federal Police commenting on the arrest of the Victorians said it was just "the tip of the iceberg".
- AAP
