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CRIME PREVENTION AND
SECURITY MANAGEMENT
Vietnamese
Organized Crime in
the Czech Republic
Miroslav Nožina · Filip Kraus
Crime Prevention and Security Management
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Miroslav Nožina • Filip Kraus
Vietnamese
Organized Crime
in the Czech Republic
Miroslav Nožina Filip Kraus
Institute of International Relations Sinophone Borderlands - Interaction at the
Praha, Czech Republic Edges, Department of Asian Studies
Faculty of Arts, Palacky University
Olomouc, Czech Republic
Crime Prevention and Security Management

ISBN 978-3-030-43612-4 ISBN 978-3-030-43613-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43613-1
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

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Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Theoretical Background, Research Methods and

Information Sources 5
3 Vietnamese Migration to the Czech Republic and the

Appearance of Vietnamese Criminal Networks 23
4 The World of the Vietnamese Diaspora in the CR 59
5 Vietnamese Criminal Activities in the Czech Republic 89
6 Conclusions137
B
ibliography145
Index165
v
About the Authors
Miroslav Nožina is a senior researcher at the Institute of International

Relations, Prague. He is specialised in social anthropology/cultural crimi-
nology and Southeast Asian Studies. His recent research focuses on
Vietnamese organised crime, geopolitics of drugs and wildlife crime.
Together with the below-mentioned studies published with Filip Kraus,
Nozina is the author of several other relevant books and articles, includ-
ing The World of Drugs in the Czech Lands (in Czech; KLP,
1997); International Organised Crime in the Czech Republic (in Czech;
Themis, 2003); “The Czech Republic: A Crossroads for Organised
Crime”. In: Cyrille Fijnaut & Letizia Paoli (Eds.), Organised Crime in
Europe. Concepts, Patterns and Control Policies in the European Union and
Beyond (Springer, 2004); “Organized Crime in the New EU States of
East Central Europe”. In: Henderson, Karen (Ed.), The Area of Freedom,
Security and Justice in the Enlarged Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
“Crime Networks in Vietnamese Diasporas. The Czech Republic
Case”. Crime, Law, and Social Change (2010); “The Role of Vietnamese
Criminal Networks in Drug Crime. The Czech Republic Case”. In:
Petrus C. van Duyne, Tomáš Strémy, Jackie H. Harvey, Georgios
A. Antonopoulos, & Klaus von Lampe (Eds.), The Janus-Faces of Cross
Border Crime in Europe (2018); “The Fate and Future of the Wildlife
Trade Regulatory Regimes: The Case of CITES and Rhino Horn
Trafficking”. In: Nik Hynek, Ondrej Ditrych, & Vit Stritecky (Eds.),
Regulating Global Security. Insights from Conventional and Unconventional
Regimes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
vii
viii About the Authors
Filip Kraus is a senior researcher and a senior lecturer in the Department

of Asian Studies, Faculty of Art, Palacky University, Olomouc. He
obtained his doctoral degree at the Graduate Institute for Social Research
and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. His
research interests include social and cultural anthropology of Vietnamese
society; Vietnamese literature; Western critical philosophy; postcolonial
studies in contemporary Southeast Asia; Vietnamese migration and
international relations in the Southeast Asia.
He is a former policeman who was responsible for combating Vietnamese
organised crime at the Organised Crime Detection Unit of the Criminal
Police and Investigation Service, Police of the Czech Republic. He has
published a number of books, articles and lectures on these issues. Most
notably, he is a co-author of two monographs—Bosses, Soldiers, and Rice
Grains; Vietnamese Crime Networks in the Czech Republic and Their
International Dimension (2012) and Vietnamese Crime Networks in the
Czech Republic (2009).
Abbreviations
CMEA Council of Mutual Economic Assistance

CR Czech Republic
CSO Czech Statistical Office (Český statistický úřad).
CSSR Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Československá socialistická
republika)
EU European Union
GO-CR Government Office of the Czech Republic (Úřad vlády ČR).
HRW Human Rights Watch
ILO International Labour Organisation
ME-CEI Czech Environmental Inspectorate of the Ministry of
Environment (Česká inspekce životního prostředí Ministerstva
životního prostředí)
MF-GDC General Directorate of Customs of the Ministry of Finance of the
Czech Republic (Generální ředitelství cel Ministerstva financí České
republiky)
MFA Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic (Ministerstvo
zahraničních věcí České republiky)
MI Ministry of Interior of the Czech Republic (Ministerstvo vnitra
České republiky)
MWSA Ministry of Work and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic
(Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí České republiky)
NCA Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic (Agentura
ochrany přírody a krajiny České republiky)
ix
x Abbreviations
OGD Observatoire géopolitique des drogues, Paris, France

PCR-FPS Police of the Czech Republic-Foreign Police Service (Policie
České republiky—Služba cizinecké policie)
PCR-NCAOC National Centre Against Organised Crime of the Criminal
Police and Investigation Service, Police of the Czech
Republic (Národní centrála proti organizovanému zločinu
Služby kriminální policie a vyšetřování Policie České republiky /
NCOZ SKPV PČR)
PCR-NDH National Anti-Drug Headquarters of the Criminal
Police and Investigation Service, Police of the Czech
Republic (Národní protidrogová centrála Služby kriminální
policie a vyšetřování Policie České republiky / NPC
SKPV PČR)
PCR-OCDU Organised Crime Detection Unit of the Criminal Police and
Investigation Service, Police of the Czech Republic (Útvar
pro odhalování organizovaného zločinu Služby kriminální
policie a vyšetřování Policie České republiky / UOOZ
SKPV PČR)
SIS Security Information Service (Bezpečnostní informační
služba / BIS)
VCS Vietnamese community sources
1
Introduction
The study is a complex socio-anthropological analysis of the structures and

criminal activities of Vietnamese organised crime in the Czech Republic
(CR). The problem of Vietnamese criminality gained importance in recent
decades due to the formation of a strong Vietnamese diaspora and the
development of internationally based activities of Vietnamese criminal net-
works in many countries of the world. However, it remains weakly
researched due to its secretive nature, language and cultural barriers and the
tendency of many Vietnamese communities abroad to isolate themselves.
Composed as a case study, this book aims to broaden our knowledge of
Vietnamese organised crime and its function in society, especially in the CR.
Particularly since the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, we can see a
rise in the number of Vietnamese living, working and studying abroad.
Current estimations indicate that the Vietnamese diaspora abroad
includes 4 million people. Most of the Vietnamese emigrants are looking
for an opportunity to improve their lives and ensure better lives for their
children in the “new homeland”, or back home in Vietnam. However,
criminal activities connected to the local Vietnamese diaspora communi-
ties in host countries have been frequently registered as well. This fre-
quently leads to criminal stigmatisation of the whole Vietnamese diaspora.
© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Nožina, F. Kraus, Vietnamese Organized Crime in the Czech Republic, Crime
Prevention and Security Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43613-1_1
2 M. Nožina and F. Kraus
For decades, the Vietnamese criminals have been easily crossing state
borders, creating networks and introducing new modi operandi of criminal
activities to the host countries. As a result, Vietnamese crime has become a
problem in the Southeast Asian countries, Australia, the United States,
Canada and the Russian Federation. Regarding Vietnamese organised
crime groups in the European Union (EU) countries, their presence was,
for example, recorded in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands. Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Vietnamese criminal networks, which are frequently active interna-
tionally, are engaged in a broad spectrum of criminal activities such as
human smuggling and the trade in human beings, managing the trade in
illicit commodities, money laundering, violations of customs and tax
laws, other forms of economic crime, violent crime, theft, counterfeiting
activities, trafficking in weapons, production of and trafficking in drugs,
wildlife crime and so forth.
In the Czech Republic, the Vietnamese diaspora has existed since the
1950s, and the number of its members has steadily grown, especially
since the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Currently, approximately 65,000 peo-
ple of Vietnamese origin are legally living in the country. It is the third
biggest Vietnamese diaspora in the EU countries, after those in France
and Germany.
Together with the new immigrants from Vietnam, new kinds of crime
have appeared in the CR as well. During the 1990s and 2000s, the
Vietnamese criminal networks fully developed their organisational struc-
ture within the diaspora and established the modi operandi of their crimi-
nal activities. Their bosses, who frequently merge together legal and
illegal activities, create parallel power structures within the Vietnamese
diaspora, and some of them were able to establish corrupt ties to the
Czech public administration.
In order to address the deficiency in the research of Vietnamese organ-
ised crime, the authors of this study carried out a research programme
that took place between 2007 and 2019 mainly at the Institute of
International Relations, Prague. Since 2019, Filip Kraus also carried his
own research that took place within the research project Sinophone
Borderland—Interactions at the Edges. Within the researches, several
1 Introduction 3
questions about the structure of the Vietnamese criminal structures in

the CR, about the main criminal activities and modi operandi of those
structures and about their social role within the diaspora were addressed.
Also, the international ties of the Vietnamese organised crime and the
concept of criminal networks were analysed and socio-economic subjec-
tivization of migrants was studied.
The research analysis was based mainly on primary data: unpublished
reports and analyses, interviews with members of the security forces and
foreign services, or interviews with members of the Vietnamese diaspora
in both the CR and Vietnam. The research traced the history of the dias-
pora in the CR and highlighted the role of criminality and Vietnamese
organised crime in the diaspora’s everyday life, its social stratification and
its integration into the majority society. The study analysed the problem
from a broader perspective that included the situations in other coun-
tries, especially those in Central and Western Europe. In this sense, albeit
based on Czech materials, the analysis tried to understand the phenom-
enon of Vietnamese crime in a wider international context.
In the first part of the study, the establishment of the Vietnamese dias-
pora in the former Czechoslovakia under the communist regime’s super-
vision and the beginnings of the Vietnamese presence in the Czech
criminal underworld are discussed. In this part, the ability of Vietnamese
shadow businessmen and criminal delinquents to operate even in the
conditions of a closed totalitarian state in Central Europe is demon-
strated. The fundamental political, economic and social changes after
1989 paved the way for new waves of Vietnamese immigration and
allowed further penetration of Vietnamese organised crime into the
Vietnamese diaspora in the CR.
The Vietnamese migration is based on (1) legal principles, namely
exploiting gaps existing in the CR’s migration regimes; (2) semi-legal
principles, which merge legal and illegal activities together; and (3) illegal
principles such as using counterfeit documents, smuggling of people
across the green line or bribing local officials in order to legalise illegal
resident statuses. Various unlicenced and licenced individuals and agen-
cies play a crucial role in these processes. In the present text, special atten-
tion is paid to the role of labour and migrant agencies in these processes.
The second part focuses on the Vietnamese diaspora in the CR, its
everyday life, social stratification and the relations between the main
social figures of the diaspora. It is shown that the diaspora is a relatively

isolated social entity that consists of two components, the legal and illegal
ones. At the top, the two components are connected by a special figure,
the respected man and criminal boss. Besides this, the part attempts to
show that the legal and illegal components are living in a difficult sym-
biosis, where the contacts are quite frequent. Moreover, the illegal com-
ponent of the diaspora usually absorbs less successful members of the
legal component. Especially the laid-off migrant workers, who lost their
jobs because of the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent crisis that
followed, became an easy prey for the illegal component of the diaspora.
Outside of its own business, the illegal component serves as a repressive
apparatus within the diaspora.
The third part introduces the most common crimes committed within
the diaspora. A special attention is paid to the main modi operandi devel-
oped within the Vietnamese criminal networks’ activities. The socially
most dangerous crimes are those with a high degree of violence. Those are
the most visible, but hardly the most frequent crimes. Given the eco-
nomic nature of the diaspora, it is not surprising that economic crimes,
such as various types of tax evasion and money laundering, or smuggling
of goods, are ubiquitous. Also, people smuggling was quite widespread
during the 1990s. The trade in people and prostitution were less frequent
in the Vietnamese community, but those crimes still exist there in the
present. More popular criminal activities among the Vietnamese were the
illegal production of cigarettes and alcohol, and theft. But, since the
2000s, the trade in drugs became a serious problem within the diaspora
that is not easy to eradicate. It goes without mentioning that these are
serious problems both locally and in the international context.
In general, the structure of the Vietnamese criminal networks in the
Czech Republic, the spectrum of their criminal activities and their modi
operandi are similar to those we know from other countries of the
EU. However, due to the specific historical, economic and social condi-
tions in East-Central Europe, we can also identify some specific features
of the Vietnamese criminal networks there.
2
Theoretical Background, Research
Methods and Information Sources
2.1 Theoretical Background

Especially during the last two decades, Vietnamese organised crime has
become highly developed in terms of its structures and modi operandi,
and it has deeply penetrated the societies of Asian diasporas. It became
obvious that the existing “traditional” research concepts of organised
crime are not sufficient to describe and analyse this phenomenon. Instead,
the concept of criminal networks was accepted for the purpose of
the study.
The data collected within the study, especially those collected in recent
years, suggest that the traditional image of organised crime (i.e. as crimi-
nal activities dominated by centrally controlled organisations with a
given hierarchy and a strict division of labour) is outdated. It appears that
a better portrayal of organised crime is one in which it is depicted as a
collection of offenders and criminal groups that collaborate with each
other in varying combinations (Bruinsma and Bernasco 2004: 79).
According to this concept, criminal organisations have characteristics
that are common to other social networks but are also different in many
ways due to the fact that they are criminal businesses. They should

therefore be studied as special kinds of social networks, more specifically,

as criminal networks. To support this idea, there emerged a growing
number of empirical evidences which suggest that social network analyses
could be used to get a better understanding of the organised crime that
can be detected in the Vietnamese diaspora living in the Czech Republic
(Lupsha 1983; Reuter 1986; Sparrow 1991; Canter and Alison 2000;
Coles 2001; Klerks 2001; Williams 2001; Lemieux 2003; Raab and
Milward 2003; Chatterjee 2006; Morselli et al. 2006; Morselli 2009;
Schwartz and Rouselle 2009; van der Hulst 2009; Spapens 2010;
Bouchard and Amiraut 2013; Hobbs 2013).
According to Finckenauer and Chin (2007), who applied the criminal
networks’ concept to Asian organised crime, it is important to differenti-
ate genuine “traditional” Asian organised crime from criminal networks.
The main difference between the two is that “traditional” crime groups
are pre-existing patterns, but concrete crime networks are developed in
response to concrete criminal opportunities. The “traditional” crime
groups (such as the triads, the yakuza, the chao pho or the geondal) are
formalised, rather rigorous groups based on traditional forms—they have
their own name, an established “turf ”, a certain continuity, a relatively
stable hierarchical structure and a restricted membership. These groups
often use violence to monopolise their illegal markets, some of them have
been in existence for centuries, and they are most likely to continue to
exist in the future.
In contrast, contemporary diasporic Asian crime networks are
developed in and shaped by the social environment in the Asian emigrants’
host countries. They usually develop in response to specific criminal
opportunities, and their members (participants) are involved in organ-
ised criminal activities on an ad hoc basis. They do not have a fixed group
name, a territory or a rigid structure. They are highly flexible, and their
members act like, and view themselves as, opportunistic businesspeople
rather than violent gangsters. Very often, a nuclear or an extended family
initiates an operation in response to a new opportunity. Moreover, it is
often the case that people from the same village or region or at least from
the same ethnic group are recruited to participate as members of a net-
work that may dissolve after the criminal operation it was created for is
successfully carried out (Finckenauer and Chin 2007: 13–14, 19). These
2 Theoretical Background, Research Methods and Information… 7
criminal networks have dominated Asian crime operations in recent years

(Zhang and Chin 2003; Finckenauer and Chin 2007: 14).
The conditions in the Vietnamese diaspora are favourable for the
development of criminal networks and their activities. Similarly to other
diasporas in the world, we can identify various crime risk factors: (1)
language and culture barriers; (2) the migrants’ problematic relations
with the mainstream societies, which cause the isolation of the diaspora
and the creation of parallel power structures ruling the diaspora life; (3)
unsatisfied expectations of a distinctive enriching life in a tolerant host
country; (4) a return movement accompanied by the emigrants’ feeling of
“temporariness” in the host country, which leads to exploitative behav-
iour regardless of the limits of the law; (5) the maintaining of the family,
regional and ethnic bonds between the citizens in the home country and
the members of the diaspora, which supports the expansion of criminal
activities internationally; (6) the poorly managed migration regimes in
combination with various illegal activities that push the migrants into a
debt trap, which frequently leads to economic overexploitation of the
migrants and their involvement in alternative activities with a possibility
of high incomes, that is, crime, and so forth (Cohen 2001: 26, 180–187;
Nožina 2010a: 231–232; Kraus 2013: 26).
In the case of the Vietnamese diaspora in the CR, we argue that the
function of criminal networks there and their co-existence with other
members of the diaspora are mainly based on the Vietnamese traditional
“village mentality” and emigrants’ exploitation strategies being trans-
ferred to the Western cultural space combined with traditional patterns
of Asian criminal societies.
When describing the Vietnamese traditional mentality, Hickey (1964:
276–278) mentions a homogeneity in social expectations characterised
by a strong motivation for trying to obtain economic gains, a strong self-
consciousness, disregarding (if not disdaining) the outside world, and an
accent on family and social bonds. A traditional Vietnamese considers
himself not as an independent individual but as a component within a
system of relationships: as a member of the family, and of the village, or
in the case of criminals, a member of the criminal gang (Nožina 2000b:
21). The Vietnamese researcher Le Xuan Khoa tells us: “The tendency of
Indochinese refugees to cluster together and to form community
organisations can be traced back to a traditional pattern of behaviour

common to all agrarian societies in Southeast Asia”. Individualism,
which, in a sense, is the foundation of Western, especially American, soci-
ety, is to the Vietnamese “…something inconceivable, because his pri-
mary sense of identity is so indissolubly a component within a broader,
collective ego structure”, that is, the totality of a family or social unity.
This phenomenon is further strengthened in a linguistically and cultur-
ally different environment, as the Western world is for the Indochinese
newcomers. “Being cut off from their families, villages and countries”,
writes Le, “Indochinese refugees feel an urgent need to cluster together
and to form community organisations as secondary sources of security”.
Some writers call it the “village mentality” (ibid.).
Another strong phenomenon is the feeling of “transitoriness” of the
Vietnamese emigrants’ phases of life in the host countries, particularly in
the first generation of migrants. It supports exploitation strategies directed
towards gaining maximal profit as soon as possible—frequently regardless
of the limits of law. We argue that the “transitoriness” is fictive in many
aspects.
The “village mentality” and exploitation strategies definitely extend to
the criminal fringe—and thus, they are the foundation not only of
Vietnamese communities in Europe but also of Vietnamese criminal net-
works or organised crime groups. Due to their “ideological proximity”,
the legal (civilian) branches and criminal branches are not isolated com-
ponents of the diaspora, but closely related subgroups cooperating and
competing at the same time. Moreover, a broad shadow zone of semi-
legal and illegal activities exists between them.
In the diasporic life, organised crime exists in a specific symbiosis with
the local Vietnamese communities, where one can identify both “classi-
cal” organised crime structures, represented by professional criminal
delinquents and gangs, and broader criminal surroundings composed of
occasional delinquents. These two components are connected and create
criminal networks in response to criminal business opportunities. Also,
the modi operandi of concrete criminal business activities frequently
reflect the duality of “legal/illegal” and give specific features to the
Vietnamese criminal businesses.
The key actors who connect the legal and illegal elements of the
diasporas are “respectable men”—strong personalities acting as both legal
businessmen and criminal bosses—who make use of considerable eco-
nomic power and maintain corruption networks, patron-client ties, and
groups of criminal delinquents. As such, the “respectable men” create
parallel power structures that enforce their will within the diaspora and
they are respected for their ability to “mediate” disputes among the dias-
pora members.
Not only economic pressure and expected profits but also a solidarity
born from the village mentality and the complicated network of mutual
“gratitudes”, while rejections of a request for a counter-service for a
respectable man are not frequent in Vietnamese communities, are the
motion behind the engagement of diaspora members (who are basically
without criminal backgrounds) in criminal activities organised by these
strong men. The roles of various criminal delinquents and violent gangs
in the scheme of Vietnamese diasporic life and the roots of the tolerance
of a criminal underground within the diaspora are clearly visible in the
light of these facts.
This interpenetration makes the situation more complicated and allows
for further intrusion of criminal networks into Vietnamese communities.
Many criminal activities are just cubes in a complicated mosaic of the
Vietnamese diaspora’s life. One of the main problems in combatting the
Vietnamese organised crime is the inability of security forces to separate
the “legal” and the “criminal” components within the diaspora. The
“stage of ambiguity” frequently leads to the criminal stigmatisation of
whole ethnic communities, and also to an inability to trace the criminal
activities, especially in their transnational dimension.
To answer the question of the role of criminal networks in the
Vietnamese diaspora, we argue that legal and illegal activities are in a
dialectical unity in Vietnamese communities. The necessity to break this
unity is the main condition for efficient suppression of the Vietnamese
criminal activities within the diaspora.
2.2 Research Methods

and Informational Sources
There are numerous high-quality studies on the problem of the Vietnamese
diaspora in the world (Viviani 1984; Kibria 1993; Coughlan 1998;
Dorais 2000, 2005; Rutledge 2000; Mazyrin 2004; Blanc 2005; Thomas
2005; Sims 2007). In the EU countries, the problem has been studied
especially in Germany (Fritsche 1991; Bui 2003; Wolf 2007), France
(Gilles 2004), Poland (Grzymala-Kazlowska 2002; Halik and Nowicka
2002; Iglicka 2005a, b; Halik 2006; Dang 2011) and the Czech Republic
(Vasiljev 1989; Nguyen Tung 2001; Brouček 2002, 2003a, 2003b;
Martínková 2010; Martínková and Pechová 2010; Martínková et al.
2012; Kušniráková et al. 2013). The majority of the studies discuss the
economic, social and cultural aspects of Vietnamese migration and the
diasporas’ everyday life in general, while almost exclusively focusing on
the legal component of the diaspora.
The problem of Vietnamese criminality has been less analysed, even
though many security reports and studies have mentioned the problem in
various contexts and various countries in recent years (Parliament of
Australia 1995; Adamoli et al. 1998; Emmers 2002; Helfand 2003;
Siegel-Rozenblit 2011; OCTA 2011; Bąkowski 2013; Europol 2013,
2018; FBI 2014, etc.). In relation to Vietnamese crime, the majority of
the criminological studies focus on specific criminal activities such as ille-
gal migration (Okólski 1999), the trade in drugs (OGD Report 1998;
Silverstone and Savage 2010; Schoenmakers et al. 2012, 2013; Hai
Thanh Luong 2014, 2017), the trade in cigarettes (von Lampe 1999,
2005), delinquency as a general phenomenon (Zhou and Bankston III
2006) and Vietnamese gangs (English 1995; Kleinknecht 1996; Du
Phuoc Long and Richard 1997; Nye 2006). Vietnamese criminal net-
works and the constitutive role of illegal undergrounds within the
Vietnamese diaspora are discussed rather marginally in this context
(Cross 1989; Hai Thanh Luong 2014).
In the Czech Republic, the problem of Vietnamese criminality was
formerly studied in the broader context of the topic of international
organised crime penetrating the Czech Republic’s territory during its
transitional stage following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In 1999–2002,

Vietnamese organised crime studies were a part of the research project
carried out at Prague´s Institute of International Relations (IIR).1 The
project attempted to map the historical trajectory of organised crime in
the Czech Republic, but did not aim to reach an understanding of the
Vietnamese organised crime as a constitutive factor in the diasporic life of
Vietnamese people living in the country. The 1999–2002 project was
realised mainly through structured interviews with officials from the
Czech police and other security forces and a complementary analysis of
existing literature on the Vietnamese diaspora that appeared in the CR
(Macháček and Rumpl 1997; Nožina 2000b, 2003a, b, 2004a).
In the late 2000s, a number of studies analysed the Vietnamese diaspora
life in the CR. In 2007, the non-profit organisation La Strada carried out
research on the trade in Vietnamese people (Pechová 2007). Also a few
university theses completed by policemen and customs officers (with
personal experience in investigations of Vietnamese criminality) appeared.
These works represent a further valuable contribution to the study of the
crimes occurring within (or committed by the members of ) the diaspora
(Hammer 2007; Vlček 2008; Seďa 2013). However, the problem of
Vietnamese criminal networks and their role in the diasporic life has
remained only weakly researched.
To fill the existing gap, new researches took place within two research
projects realised by the IIR in 2007–2019. During these projects, new
data were collected through interviews with members of the Czech secu-
rity forces, NGOs and the Czech administration, and also with members
of the Vietnamese diaspora in the CR. The basic idea of the research was
to cross the lines of the formerly strict “police” views and to provide a
better understanding of the phenomenon by taking into account the role
of the organised crime in parallel power structures that were identified
within the Vietnamese diaspora living in the CR.2 The research was
1
The research project was called Mezinárodní organizovaný zločin v České republice (International
Organised Crime in the Czech Republic) and was supported by the Research Support Scheme of
the Open Society Foundation (RSS No.: 84/1999).
2
These research projects were Organised crime in the Vietnamese Diaspora (No. 407/09/1291;
2009–2011) and Global Prohibition Regimes: Theoretical Refinement and Empirical Analysis
(No. 13-26485S; 2013–2016), which were supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic.
aterialised in several related publications (Nožina 2010a, b, 2013,

m
2018; Nožina and Kraus 2009, 2012, 2016, 2017). Nevertheless, most of
these works were published only in the Czech language and they are thus
not available for an English-speaking audience.
This publication is intended to provide a more comprehensive analysis
for English readers and to present them with a new monograph analysing
the latest developments in the diaspora’s life and its criminal under-
grounds, which had been studied as a part of the research on security
aspects of international migration currently being realised at the IIR.3 At
the same time, a research on Vietnamese migration analysing how the
poorly managed migration policies lead to various illegalities that are
socially ostracising, economically over-exploiting or politically excluding
the migrants, who are not only isolated but also subjected to the parallel
power structures created in the host countries and ultimately pushed into
a dark sphere of illegality, is being realised at Palacký University Olomouc
in the Czech Republic.4 The final studies of these projects are the base of
this book.
The present research was based mainly on primary sources: unpublished
reports and documents, and interviews with members of the security
forces and foreign services. Especially interviews with members of the
Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic and Vietnamese citizens
living in Vietnam are considered as valuable sources of information in the
research. To penetrate more deeply into the Vietnamese community, the
ethnographic methods of structured interviews and participant
observation were employed. As a part of the research, a “snowball”
method was applied; this method is based on the observation of
communities through communication with selected members of it, who
act as intermediaries between the researchers and the given community.
For this purpose, seven field assistants were engaged at various stages of
the research. All of them were of Vietnamese origin and fluent in both
3
Migrace z oblasti Blízkého východu, subsaharské Afriky a Asie: geopolitické a bezpečnostní
souvislosti, důsledky a doporučení pro ČR (Migration from the Near East, Sub-Saharan Africa and
Asia: the Geopolitical and Security Context, Implications and Recommendations), Technologická
agentura ČR (TAČR ÉTA TL01000432).
4
Within the research project called Sinophone Borderlands—Interaction at the Edges. The research
project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (reg. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_01
9/0000791).
Czech and Vietnamese. They helped to collect relevant information on

the Vietnamese communities and carried out a series of structured
interviews with other members of the diaspora. Given the object of the
research, all the interviews were strictly confidential. For security reasons,
the co-workers and respondents from the Vietnamese community are
quoted as “Vietnamese community sources”, or VCS, in the text.
The information obtained through the native assistants contributed
mainly to gaining a general understanding of the structures and functions
of Vietnamese communities in the Czech Republic and the role of crime
networks in the communities. More concrete information related to the
structures of Vietnamese criminal networks and the modi operandi of
their criminal offences, and other data were collected through an analysis
of security reports by various police units and through carrying out inter-
views with members of the Czech security forces, mainly the Organised
Crime Detection Unit of the Police of the Czech Republic (PCR-
OCDU), and its successor organisation after 2016, the National Centre
Against Organised Crime of the Police of the Czech Republic (PCR-
NCAOC); the National Anti-Drug Headquarters of the Police of the
Czech Republic (PCR-NDH); the Foreign Police of the Police of the
Czech Republic (PCR-FPS); the Ministry of Interior (MI); the Czech
foreign services, particularly the Embassy of the Czech Republic in
Hanoi, the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Czech Republic (MFA) and the General Directorate of Customs of the
Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic (MF-GDC); the Czech
Environmental Inspectorate of the Ministry of Environment (ME-CEI);
and the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic (NCA).
Interviews with employees and the internal unpublished documents of
institutions are quoted under abbreviations of the institutions’ names in
the text because of confidentiality.
The main limitation of these kinds of resources lay in the fact that
much of the information was considered confidential, and its publication
could negatively affect the further investigation of concrete criminal
cases. Because of this, the information from police sources frequently
pertained to commonly known facts, already solved criminal cases (which
ended with one or more individuals being convicted of a crime), or out-
dated or fragmented data. Another problem was that virtually every
interview with a member of the security forces had to be permitted and

authorised by the responsible leadership of the given security agency. This
made the research process extremely inflexible and, in many cases, cen-
sorship led to a certain devaluation of the information source.
The problem was partly overcome by the personal experience and
contacts of one of the monograph’s authors, who has served as a police
expert on Vietnamese organised crime in various police units in the
Czech Republic over the course of 16 years. Also, the data and information
that came from his previous work became an important resource for
further analysis. But, in some cases, the use of data and information was
limited due to the fact that it had been obtained in the course of operative
investigations and therefore classified as secret.
Another valuable source of information was Vietnamese informers
cooperating with the Czech Police. These individuals provide the police
with information from the Vietnamese criminal underworld, and some
of them were also willing to cooperate with the authors. The main prob-
lem with using them in the research, however, is their motivation for
cooperation. This ranges from a certain kind of patriotism and beliefs
about the need to fight crime to personal desires for revenge and attempts
to abuse the Czech security forces in order to obtain personal benefits. As
a result, the information was frequently tendentious. These people fre-
quently reported only vague hearsay information or rumours commonly
shared in the Vietnamese community, which have only limited value for
analytical purposes.
Because of the different levels of quality of the sources, the collected
field data were further compared to and verified through information
from other sources. The research in the Czech Republic was completed by
materials from and interviews with experts in Poland, Germany, Slovakia,
France, the United Kingdom and Vietnam.
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3
Vietnamese Migration to the Czech
Republic and the Appearance
of Vietnamese Criminal Networks
3.1 Introduction
According to official statistics of the Vietnamese State Committee of
Vietnamese Overseas, there are about 4 million people of Vietnamese
descent currently living, working and/or studying in nearly 103 countries
and territories around the world. The Việt Kiều, overseas Vietnamese liv-
ing in diaspora, are concentrated mainly in 21 countries in North
America, North-West Europe, Eastern Europe (including Russia), South-
East Asia, North-East Asia and Australia. Vietnamese people are also liv-
ing in other regions, such as South and West Asia, the Middle East, Africa
and South America. There are approximately 1.5 million Vietnamese
residents in the United States, 250,000 in Canada and 245,000 in
Australia (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam 2012: 29). As for
Asian countries, it is estimated that 600,000 Vietnamese are living in
Cambodia, 200,000 in Tai-wan, 143,000 in South Korea, 136,000 in
Japan, and 70,000 in Malaysia. In Europe, approximately 350,000
Vietnamese are living in France, 150,000 in Germany, 140,000 in Russia,
55,000 in the United Kingdom and 50,000 in Poland (Tyabaev et al.
2016: 2).

In the Czech Republic, approximately 65,000 citizens of Vietnam and

Czech citizens of Vietnamese origin were legally living in the country in
2018 according to official statistics and estimates (CSO 2018). The num-
ber of illegal immigrants from Vietnam is difficult to ascertain, but esti-
mates range from 5000 to 10,000 (PCR-OCDU 2010, 2014, 2015). In
this country with 10 million residents, Vietnamese represent the third-
most numerous immigrant community. Only Ukrainians (113,000) and
Slovaks (86,000) are more numerous (GO-CR 2013a, b; CSO 2018).
The creation of diasporas in the world is connected to various factors
associated with the area of origin (push factors); factors associated with
the area of destination (pull factors); the so-called intervening obstacles
(such as distance, physical barriers, migration politics, the relaxing and
tightening of emigration and immigration laws, etc.); and personal fac-
tors (Lee 1966). This is the case with the Vietnamese diaspora as well.
Due to the changes of the above-mentioned factors in different historical
periods, or to various historical, social, economic and political conse-
quences of their emigration out of Vietnam, Việt Kiều can be generally
divided into four distinct categories. The first category consists of people
who have been living outside of Vietnam prior to 1975 (mainly in
Cambodia, China, Laos, France, and Canada—particularly Québec)
(Bouhier 2005; Blanc 2005: 1159–1162; Nožina and Kraus 2012:
42–43). To the second category belong the Việt Kiều who escaped
Vietnam after the communist takeover in 1975 and their descendants.
After the tough experience of life in the refugee camps in Malaysia,
Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore, they
were, for the most part, resettled in the industrialised states of North
America, Western Europe and Australia (Viviani 1984; Kibria 1993;
Coughlan 1998; Rutledge 2000; Vo 2004; Dorais 2005; Thomas 2005;
Nožina and Kraus 2012: 26). The third category consists of Vietnamese
working and studying in the former communist countries. After the
democratic changes at the end of the 1980s, a lot of Vietnamese students
and workers who came to these countries in the communist period opted
not to return home (Nožina 2010: 230). The fourth category is com-
posed mainly of economic migrants and people who left Vietnam to join
their relatives abroad after the start of the đổi mớ i reform process in
Vietnam in 1986. These migrants go to many countries of Europe, Asia,
3 Vietnamese Migration to the Czech Republic… 25
the Middle East and Africa, and also to the United States and Australia
(MFA 2009; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam 2012: 16; Thuy
Huong 2012).
The Vietnamese residents in the Czech Republic belong to the third
and fourth category of migrants. These categories have many specifics in
both legal and illegal spheres of Vietnamese migrant communities’ lives.
To understand these specifics, this chapter goes back to the history of
mutual relations between the then Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
(CSSR) and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, as study programmes
for foreigners and massive exports of the Vietnamese labour force to
Czechoslovakia were organised during Czechoslovakia’s communist era.
In the same time period, the first Vietnamese criminal networks were
established in the CSSR.
After the fall of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989, a
lot of the Vietnamese students and workers living in the country opted
not to return home. They established a base for new waves of Vietnamese
economic migrants, and the number of the members of the Vietnamese
diaspora in the Czech Republic then gradually grew to its current size.
The diaspora dramatically increased especially after 2006, when the
Czech labour market was opened to the massive and weakly controlled
imports of Vietnamese workers organised by labour agencies.
The formation of the Vietnamese diaspora in the Czech Republic after
the “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 is depicted as an ever-changing process
containing legal, semi-legal and illegal strategies that were formed in reac-
tion to the changing economic, social, legal and administrative environ-
ments in the transforming Vietnam and the Czech Republic, and also in
reaction to the situations in the countries of the emigrants’ transfers. The
various social agents (such as family and kin, but also migration networks
operating on both legal and illegal bases) along with the previous indi-
vidual experiences and individual decision making of migrants also play
important roles in the process.
The transfers of migrants between Vietnam and the Czech Republic
have been organised by various migration networks. These groupings
have several typical features: they operate on illegal, semi-legal and legal
bases; they act as official agencies on one hand and as crime organisations
on the other, frequently merging legal and illegal activities together; they
constantly search for new opportunities in the migration business, look-

ing for gaps in the immigration laws and systems of host countries; and
they are flexible in adapting to changes in these laws and systems. The
relaxation/tightening of prohibition regimes is reflected in the modifica-
tion of the structures and modi operandi of the migration networks.
3.2 ietnamese Migration to the CR

V
in Communist Time
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the Soviet Union and the other
states of the communist bloc started their political and economic coop-
eration with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam shortly after its estab-
lishment in 1945. The cornerstone of this cooperation was the Council
of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) established in 1949. Within
the cooperation, study programmes and exports of the Vietnamese labour
force were organised. The exports of the labour force intensified after the
Second Indochina War, when the Vietnamese government tried to pay
off its war bill and overcome the growing export-import gap. The main
destinations of those migrant workers were the Soviet Union, the German
Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and, to a lesser extent, Poland and
Hungary or other socialist countries. Especially in the 1980s, thousands
of Vietnamese workers were exported within the so-called assistance pro-
gram for the suffering Vietnam organised by the CMEA. These exports of
the Vietnamese labour force were carefully supervised and regulated by
the communist regimes on the both sides (Kocourek 2001; Brouček
2002: 12–13; Nožina 2010: 235–236; Nožina and Kraus 2012: 78–79;
Vasiljev 1989a, b).
The first larger wave of Vietnamese migrants to the CSSR started in
1956. The majority of those migrants were war orphans and students. By
1967, there were 2100 Vietnamese workers and apprentices in the CSSR
(Brouček 2002: 11–12). Since the 1970s, every year, approximately 500
Vietnamese students enrolled in Czech secondary schools and universi-
ties with scholarships from the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party (Ústřední výbor Komunistické strany Československa),
the Central Trade Union Council (Ústřední rada odborů) and the
Czechoslovak government (Vasiljev 1989b; Nožina 2003a: 189).
Czechoslovakia was also one of the important sources of weapons and
military materials for the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong in
the course of the Indochina war. Also the plastic explosive SEMTEX,
which today is widely used by terrorists all over the world, was developed
by the Czechoslovak company Synthesia Semtín upon a Vietnamese
request for war purposes in 1964. At the time, it was considered as an
analogue of the American explosive C4 (Nožina 2003a: 189).
After the war, economic and political relations between the two coun-
tries grew further. Within the CMEA, Czechoslovakia exported indus-
trial goods to Vietnam and realised investment projects in regard to it in
exchange for raw materials and agriculture products. At the beginning of
the 1980s, the Vietnamese government started to export members of the
Vietnamese labour force to the CSSR. Within three to six months, the
young Vietnamese workers (who were usually in the 18–20 age group
and therefore not former soldiers from the Indochina war, as is frequently
suggested in the press) received their basic language and professional edu-
cation in Vietnam. Then, they were transported to the CSSR, where they
continued in their language studies for another three to six months and
also in their professional education, which could be prolonged according
to the specific employers’ requirements. After that, they were distributed
into textile, chemical and industrial factories or agricultural cooperatives
across the Czechoslovak territory. Their contracts usually lasted for four
years (sometimes prolonged to seven years) (Vasiljev 1989b; Nožina
2003b: 189). Although official data on this does not exist, it is estimated
that between 70,000 and 120,000 Vietnamese participated in the pro-
gramme and around 30,000 Vietnamese had been living in Czechoslovakia
at any moment within the period of 1980–1989. In 1990, when the
Czechoslovak–Vietnamese programme was cancelled, there were still
20,000 Vietnamese residents in the country (Brouček 2002: 12–13).
Overall, the programme worked well by the middle of the 1980s. The
first waves of students and workers were composed of carefully selected
young people with communist backgrounds (i.e. members of the com-
munist youth organisation and the Communist Party) nearly exclusively
from North and North-Central Vietnamese regions (Son La, Dienbienphu,
Hanoi, Langson, Haiphong, etc.). In the second half of the 1980s, how-
ever, the programme gradually declined and both sides started to widely
exploit the situation. Czechoslovakia employed Vietnamese workers in
unpopular and low-paying jobs, and the Vietnamese co-ordinators of the
programme were engaged in the organisation of paid migration and
black-market activities. Especially in the second half of the 1980s, the
“quality” of the workers gradually declined because of the low interest in
the programme among potential volunteers, and the selection became
formal. Some rumours of the Vietnamese police collecting new “volun-
teers” among juvenile delinquents on Hanoi and Saigon streets circulated
at the time (Nožina 2003a: 190).
It is hard to estimate when the first Vietnamese criminal networks in
the CSSR were established. For political reasons, the Czechoslovak gov-
ernment and security forces closed their eyes to the situation and now, we
have no data about it. But it was probably in the second half of 1980s
when the Vietnamese small-scale entrepreneurs started their illegal activi-
ties in order to supplement their decreasing incomes. At the time,
Vietnamese workers received only 40–50% of their real wages. A part of
the rest of the money was paid to their families in Vietnam, but a consid-
erable part of it was taken by the Vietnamese government to “cover work-
ers’ travel expenses”—in other words, to cover the Vietnamese foreign
debt. As a result, the living standard of the Vietnamese workers was not
satisfactory and a lot of the workers looked for additional incomes (VCS
1999). However, the migrant workers were allowed to work only in their
assigned positions and under the control of their supervisors.
Consequently, they turned to semi-legal or illegal activities supplying the
Czech black market with products. The Vietnamese quickly discovered a
huge demand on the part of the Czech people for “Western” fashion
commodities such as clothes, digital watches or electronics. Thus they
started to manufacture and sell fake popular brand name garments, espe-
cially jeans, from stolen textile materials produced in the CSSR factories
for export, and, as the second main source of their additional income,
they imported and sold various goods, especially watches and cheap elec-
tronics, with fake brand names from Asia.
These originally small-scale entrepreneurial activities accelerated when
the Vietnamese Embassy in Prague entered the business. According to
eyewitnesses, namely several former employees of Prague Airport who

were interviewed in 1999, in the second half of the 1980s, special aero-
planes used to land at Prague’s Old Ruzyně Airport (which was usually
used for receptions of foreign delegations, military purposes, charter
flights, etc.) loaded with Asian goods. This went on under the supervision
of the Vietnamese Embassy employees. The goods were immediately
reloaded into lorries and transported out of the airport without any con-
tact with Czech customs. After a few days, they appeared on the black
market (Nožina 2003a: 190–191).
In the opposite direction, mainly bicycles, small motorcycles and sew-
ing machines were transported in planes officially chartered for transpor-
tation of workers coming back to Vietnam. It is not clear how the
commodities with fake Western trademarks produced in Taiwan,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and so forth were smuggled to
Vietnam, but the black-market trade networks between the Asian coun-
tries and Czechoslovakia via Hanoi have lasted for years (PCR-OCDU
1999). The 1989 democratic changes in Eastern Europe only opened
doors for further acceleration of the trade.
3.3 ush and Pull Factors of Vietnamese

P
Migration to the CR After the Democratic
Changes in 1989
3.3.1 V
ietnam: Doi Moi and the New Waves
of Economic Migration Abroad
The final amount of money paid for a transfer from Vietnam to another
country depends on the number of required services, but the amount of
money needed to solve the problems of the administrative process usually
ranges from US$4000 to US$20,000 in the Czech Republic, but it can
rise up to US$40,000—or even US$50,000 when the final destination is
a more attractive West European country such as the United Kingdom
(MI 2007; VCS 2009–2013, 2017, 2019; Smatana 2017; PCR-NCAOC
Report 2018a:17; Quynh Le 2019).
In the majority of cases, the fees must be paid even before any process
leading to the emigrant’s departure (legal or illegal) starts. In cases of
illegal transfers, the emigrant’s family in Vietnam pays the fee according
to the location of the migrant at the time or upon the migrant’s arrival at
the final destination (VCS 2009, 2012, 2019). To obtain the required
amount of money, the migrant must collect money from his family mem-
bers or borrow the money from various financial institutions, including
informal ones. This is so particularly in some poorer localities, such as
Nghe An Province, Ha Tinh Province, and Quang Binh Province, from
where a substantial part of the migrants to the Czech Republic is recruited
(Nožina and Kraus 2012: 119).
So why are a lot of Vietnamese people willing to dip their families into
a big debt and run a high risk of losing all of their family’s property? The
reasons lie in the economic situation of Vietnam, the efforts of many
ordinary Vietnamese to improve their lives and ensure a better future for
their children, the Vietnamese government’s policy of support of eco-
nomic migration abroad, and the dubious activities of numerous broker
agencies profiting from the migration.
During the 1980s, as a result of the three wars in Indochina, an inef-
ficient state-planned economy, and the bad politico-economic situation
in the Communist Eastern Bloc, the Vietnamese economy stood over its
own perdition. Due to the ill-realised land and financial reforms, people
from many Vietnamese provinces faced starvation or great economic dif-
ficulties (The Economist 2002; Crosette 1988). The GDP per capita did
not reach US$200 (Nožina and Kraus 2012: 83), the annual rate of infla-
tion soared to over 700% and the value of Vietnamese exports did not
constitute even half of the total value of the country’s imports, which
barely reached US$1221 million. Due to military expenditures, the bud-
get resources were almost depleted, government revenues were low and
the fiscal deficit was large and persistent (Arkadie and Mallon 2003: 67).
As a result of the bad economic situation, wide-scale reforms (đổi mớ i)
were launched at Hanoi’s Sixth Communist Party Congress in December
1986. The resulting new Vietnamese economic model, which can be
characterised as a multi-sector socialist-oriented market economy using
both directive and indicative planning, was partly successful. The eco-
nomic situation of Vietnam improved in the coming years; however, a
number of new economic and social problems were born under the new
conditions, affecting primarily the lower strata of Vietnamese society.
Old Communist ideas about the equality of people fell into oblivion and
the đổi mớ i reforms transformed the Vietnamese early socialist welfare
state into a type of transitional hybrid economic-political system, which
G. Vidal characterised as “free enterprise for the poor and socialism for
the rich” (Vidal 1972: 153). On one hand, a new political-economic elite
benefitting from đổi mớ i was born in Vietnam, and on the other hand,
the increasing costs and devaluing currency started to push low-paid
workers and low-income families into poverty. The differences between
the poor and the rich in Vietnam have deepened since the introduction
of this policy. According to an analysis of the Institute of Social Sciences
Information in Hanoi, currently in Vietnam an income of a rich family
is 25 times higher than an income of a poor household. Many families,
especially in the countryside, still fail to achieve a decent standard of liv-
ing (Nožina and Kraus 2012: 87).
The ongoing stratification of the Vietnamese society is further accom-
panied by a strong population growth, growing unemployment and
changing roles of the individual, the family and the state in the social and
economic life of Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese population rose
from 49 million in 1976 to 98 million in 2019. As a result, the ratio of
eligible working-age people was 55.6% in 2019 (Countrymeters 2019).
This figure shows a big potential for Vietnam’s economic growth, but it
also exerts pressure on the unemployment rate. According to official sta-
tistics, the unemployment rate has been low and stable in Viet Nam,
slightly increasing from 1.96% in 2012 to 2.26% in 2017. This means
that nominaly, the majority of people have a job. However, the quality of
employment remains limited with a large-scale informal economy, low-
labour productivity and low-income levels. The unemployment is high,
especially among young people. In 2016, young people made up 48.9%
of the unemployed (ILO 2018). Many others are employed in “vulnera-
ble occupations”, as they are employed only occasionally, self-employed
or involved in family businesses where their labour generates only a low
profit (Thanh Nien News 2013).
The đổi mớ i transformation from the centrally planned economy to
the market-oriented economy led to a reduction of the state intervention
in the job market and a loss of social security for many Vietnamese indi-
viduals. However, the strong control of the state bureaucratic apparatus
over the daily life of Vietnamese people continues. The Communist Party
of Vietnam controls the central government, all major political and social
organisations, and executes its power through the branched but ineffec-
tive bureaucratic apparatus. Many people’s activities still have to be
approved by government officials, and independent initiatives are
restricted (HRW 2019). The relative indefeasibility of the Vietnamese
administrative system together with the relatively underpaid bureaucratic
apparatus leads to a situation where corruption and clientelism exist at
many levels of the state bureaucratic system. (Nožina and Kraus 2012:
88; GAN Business Anti-Corruption Portal 2017). After more than three
decades of đổi mớ i, despite the economic recovery and continuing eco-
nomic growth, Vietnam remains a country where, in the words of
Angsuthanasombat (2008: 2), “poverty, unemployment, limited access to
education, and a desire among people to improve their lifestyles are all
strong push factors for Vietnamese to go and work abroad”.
Although the controlled export of the Vietnamese labour force ended
with the disintegration of the Soviet bloc at the end of the 1980s, the prac-
tice of Vietnamese families feeding their budgets with money sent as remit-
tances from their relatives abroad survived. The practice was further
supported by money first directly imported by the Việt Kiều from Western
countries and then sent home after the situation became more liberal
thanks to đổi mới, when the Vietnamese government relaxed the existing
strict prohibition regimes connected to travelling inside and outside of
Vietnam. Those families who received support from relatives living abroad
could have a much better living standard than their neighbours and friends.
These differences were striking, and households receiving such support
were quickly noticed by their neighbours. Over time, it became a matter of
prestige to have a family member working and earning money abroad.
The đổi mớ i transformation led to the reduction of the state interven-
tion in the job market and the cancelation of the state-provided social
security for many Vietnamese. As a result, the Vietnamese family again
became a basic socio-economic unit. Collecting money and sending
selected young men and women to the West so that they would be able
to support their families back home started to look like a “good
investment for the future” (VCS 2007). Many Vietnamese families have
been copying the pattern (Mai Thi Thu 2013).
The experience of the Vietnamese government has been similar. The
Vietnamese government incorporated foreign investment and economic
migration into its new economic strategy and relaxed migration prohibi-
tion regimes. This policy was highly successful. Currently, approximately
500,000 Vietnamese workers are working abroad in more than 40 coun-
tries and territories worldwide while supporting their families back home.
These countries include the Czech Republic, Taiwan, Japan, the Republic
of Korea, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia and
Australia, among others (Nožina and Kraus 2012: 121–123; Ministry of
Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam 2012: 22–27). Between 1993 and 2014,
Viet Nam’s total received remittances were about US$96.66 billion, with
an average rate of US$4.4 billion per year, accounting for 6.8% of the
country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The remittances reached
US$712 billion in 2014, which places the country among the top eleven
remittance recipient countries in the word (Vietnamnet 2015). It can be
expected that the interest of the Vietnamese government in the profits
coming from economic migration will continue in the future in the light
of these numbers.
The strong interest of the Vietnamese people in economic migration
and the governmental support created a broad operation space for various
agents organising the migration. The agents recruit the migrants, process
their visa and working permits, execute their transfers, and provide voca-
tional and basic language training to them. The research revealed that
extensive advertisement and recruiting activities for working abroad are
organised in poor regions where many potential emigrants live. The
advertising process has both formal and informal procedures.
The interviews with the visa applicants at the Czech Embassy in Hanoi
indicate that the majority of the migrant workers obtain information
about the working and living conditions (and employment opportuni-
ties) in the Czech Republic from their friends and countrymen. It is a
part of Vietnamese culture to share information about economic oppor-
tunities, including those related to working migration. During their
occasional visits to Vietnam, in order to maintain the respectable appear-
ances of their families, who are the recipients of the remittances, the
members of the diaspora living in the CR usually present themselves as

successful businessmen who earn their money in various jobs and are
becoming rich. Especially during the New Year festivals, they present
valuable gifts and red envelopes to all of their relatives, but they would
never disclose that in order to earn the money, they have to work in infe-
rior jobs for long hours, often working overtime. By being selective in the
information they share, they spread positive but nevertheless incomplete
information about the living and working conditions in the CR. Besides,
in Vietnam there is a positive historical experience with the working
migration to the CR. This creates the illusion that in the CR it would be
relatively easy to earn a substantial amount of money in a relatively short
time. As such, the CR became a popular destination of Vietnamese eco-
nomic migration (MFA 2010, 2013; Brouček 2003b; Martínková 2007;
Mai Thi Thu 2013; Kraus 2013). As one member of the Vietnamese
community in the Czech Republic commented: “The desire to come
back home and celebrate the New Year as a Vietnamese living in the
Czech Republic is simply irresistible. These guys are always well dressed
and they are giving out American dollars and luxury presents to all their
relatives and kinsmen” (Trang Tran Thu 2008).
The “Promised Land” picture is supported also by various official and
unofficial agencies engaged in the migrants’ transfers. These agencies dis-
tribute false information about wages, job opportunities, and/or working
and living conditions in the host countries. During the recruiting pro-
cess, the job agencies usually promise stable jobs, relatively high salaries
and good working conditions, the likes of which even the locals in the
Czech Republic would never achieve (Nožina and Kraus 2012: 121–123).
They also make use of associates working in various companies, schools,
offices or other institutions for advertising their services. The negative
impacts of the migration are commented upon only marginally. The
internet and social media increasingly play a role in the recruitment phase
(VCS 2019; Europol 2018: 19). The situation is slightly better on the
unofficial internet social networks, where negative aspects of migration
are sometimes discussed (VCS 2019).
Another problem is that on the local level, the recruitment for indi-
vidual migration abroad is frequently provided through the same chan-
nels as government information about the export labour policies, or more
specifically the policies pertaining to temporary work abroad on the basis

of labour contracts supported by the Vietnamese government. Since the
export of labour is in accordance with governmental directions, local
leaders show supportive attitudes towards various agencies’ worker
recruitments as well, regardless of the agencies’ background. As a village
leader from a village in Central Vietnam commented: “Well, when the
beaters from Hanoi come to our place, they first come and talk to the
village administration. Then, the people get the information through the
village officials. Almost every month, the officials arrange a meeting to
announce the village’s activities, party directions and relevant politics.
When this policy came out, the officials encouraged people to join other
labourers going abroad. They were and still are targeting especially those
from poor families and then those workers who have experience with
work in the required industries” (Mai Thi Thu 2013: 51).
Undoubtedly, if the unofficial recruitment is mixed together with
other official village activities and shielded by local authorities, many
local people assume a certain level of credibility in the provided informa-
tion. Under these conditions, it is not very difficult for the labour agen-
cies to find recruits who are more than willing to pay the enormous
transfer fees to escape from their poor living conditions (ibid.; Kraus 2013).
3.3.2 The Situation in the Czech Republic
At the end of the 1980s, the communist states of Central Europe, includ-
ing Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, embarked upon a process of
fundamental political, social and economic transformation. After the for-
mer hegemon the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the Central European
states’ newly established democratic governments turned to the West.
The borders were opened, and the far-reaching rapid economic transfor-
mation was launched with extensive transfers of property, the creation of
the free market and circulation of capital. As in other countries, the trans-
formation was accompanied by significant socio-economic problems
such as a high degree of unemployment, ubiquitous corruption and crime
or falling living standards of certain social strata.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
VAINAJA
(A. E. Housmanin mukaan.)
»Sano, vieläkö orhini juoksee yhä kentällä kilpaillen ja

heiluuko silojen hihnat, kuten ennen, välkkyen?»
Oh, kyllä orhisi juoksee

ja silat kirkkaat on…
Vaan sinut on kannettu alle
vihreän nurmikon.
»Sano, jalkapallopeli
yhä jatkuuko joukkueen,
kun kaikki tietävät minun
pois iäksi lähteneen?»
Oh, tietysti pallo lentää

ja tietysti kamppaillaan
ja tietysti maalivahti
on tiukkana maalissaan.
»Miten voinee tyttöni armas,
joka jäi mua suremaan?
Hän vieläkö mahtaa kastaa
yhä kyynelin patjojaan?»
Hän nukkuu aivan hyvin

ja niin onnellinen on.
Sun tyttös on onnellinen,
ole aivan huoleton.
»Ja miten voi ystäväni?

Hän on hyvissä voimissa kai?
ja toki hän paremman vuoteen
kuin minä, yöksi sai?»
Hyvin nukkuvat ystäväs kaikki, vaan minä parhaiten: on

minulla vaimona leski. Oh, älä kysy, ken…
III
KAUNAS
1.
Sinä likainen juutalainen,

sinä saastainen elukka.
Joku ryssä istuu ja kiroaa
Väinäjoen rannalla,
jalat roikkuen vanhaan lotjaan,

jota verkkaan lastataan.
Hyvä päivä katsoo surullisesti
suviseen Liettuaan.
Pater Spielmanis ja minä

— me kovasti hikoiltiin,
kun ajoimme hitaassa pikajunassa
Kaunasin kaupunkiin:
me junassa tutustuimme;
me tulimme Puolasta päin;
pater Spielmanis kutsui minut
ja minä tietysti jäin —
me pohdimme probleemoita rannalla kulkien ja teemme
välipäätöksen, että paha on ihminen…
ja sitten me janoisina lähdemme kapakkaan. Pater

Spielmanis maistaa ja ryhtyy minulle kertomaan.
2.
(Hämärä metsä, pater Spielmaniksen tarina maailmansodasta.)
Metsässä, metsässä oli hyvin hämärää. Veljeni, sanoin

minä, vielä, vielä jää.
Join hänen pullostansa,

söin hänen rasiastaan,
hymyilin ja nukuin
metsään uudestaan.
Enkä tuntenut häntä,

unessa älysin sen.
Hän puhui outoa kieltä,
hän oli vihollinen.
Heräsin valjuun aamuun,

hyvin hämärään.
Verinen pääni oli
hänen sylissään.
Ah, minä nousin hiljaa

kipein sydämin.
Hän näkyi nukkuvan vielä.
Sitten pakenin.
Ammuimme kivääreillämme
sinne puitten taa.
Metsässä, metsässä oli
hyvin valoisaa.
TIVOLI
Yö. Kööpenhamina. Tuulee. Sataa.

Ja Tivoli kylpee lyhdyissään.
Vaan pitkin nauravaa liukurataa
minä kauniin neidin ajavan nään.
Joku porvaristyttö kai. Tanskalainen.

Hän nauttii. Hän nauraa. Hän kaunis on.
Hyvin kaukana täältä on toinen nainen.
Miks muistin hänet, minä onneton?
Nyt on loppu. Raketit. Punaista tulta.

Tule. Mennään. Maailma unohtukoon.
Jokin kahvila. Madeira. Kahvi. Mä sulta
suupieleeni naurun siepannut oon.
Joku itkee sun takanas. Tjaener. Spriitä.

Joku itkee sun takanas. Missä? Ken?
Minä muistin jotakin. Jostakin. Siitä.
Olen taas niin tavattoman murheellinen.
Hei Tjaener. Maksamme. Mennään. Ulos.

Käsikoukussa. Miksei. Sinä kaunis oot.
Yö. Kööpenhamina. Tuulee. Tulos:
tämä kaupunki, maailma hukkukoot.
FÜRSTENHOF
Ylen juhlallisesti kumarsi, kumarsi hän. Herra, saanko tuoda

olutta enemmän.
Kiitos, sanoin ja katsoin

hänen kasvojaan,
samalla toivottavasti
laskuni maksaa saan.
Taas hän kumarsi. Häntä

tuijottamaan jäin.
Aivan selvästi Kuoleman
kyyppärinä näin.
Poltin huolettomasti
loppuun sikaarin.
Nousin ja lähteissäni
häntä hyvästelin.
Tunsin kadulla vielä

jäätävän henkäyksen.
Potzdamer Platzilla tunsin
vielä, vielä sen.
Luin reklaameita silmin vapisevin: Iosty, Wintergarten
punaisin kirjaimin…
WINTERGARTEN
Hei, Ganymedes, Zeus on kuollut, vaan

sä kotkinesi elät ikuisesti.
(Hätäinen syrjäkatse ohjelmaan:
The Bermos, Catalani, Schöne Betsy.)
… Vai onko, sanoo Thompson itsekseen,

Englannin politiikka aivan turhaa…
Se Sovjetiin ei näytä tehonneen,
ne siellä niinkuin puolihullut murhaa…
… En tainnut mainitakaan, että tää

on Tanskanmaasta mulle juuri tullut.
Ääneensä sanoo tämän Mustapää.
Ne Tanskan lyyrikot on puolihullut…
… No, Bonnelykke… Junalyriikkaa…

Ja illan valtaa sellon hautasoitto:
Maa on niin musta, musta, musta maa
ja taivas on niin etäinen ja loitto.
Se ihmisien osaks annettiin:

yks päivä elää, kuolla huomenna jo.
… Oi. Yö jo tuli Wintergarteniin,
jo katos viimeinenkin päivänkajo.
Oi Ganymedes. Thompson, Mustapää,

kaks sälliä sun tykönäsi löytään.
(He lähtee kohta. Silloin tähän jää
kaks tyhjää olutseideliä pöytään.)
IV
TRIPOLIS
1. Miss Annabel
Hei, kaksi nuorta: sälliä,

Thompson ja Mustapää
purjehtien saapuivat Tripoliin kaupunkiin.
Vaan Tripolikseen saapuu ken, se on oma Tripoliin:
hän täällä viihtyy vain
isänmaansa unhoittain.
Hei, indigonvärinen taivas
yllä palmujen,
hullut, hullut tanssit
neekerinaisien.
Nauraa kultainen hiekka,
soittaa haikea, haikea pilliniekka
Tripoliissa.
Hei, kaksi nuorta sälliä,

Thompson ja Mustapää,
läksi kerran Tripoliissa katuja kulkemaan.
He näkivät arabialaiset, jotka lakanat viittoinaan
lensivät yli maan
jaloilla ratsuillaan.
yllä palmujen,
neekerinaisien.
Tripoliissa.

istui katukahvilassa mokkaa nauttien.
He näkivät kahylineidet, joitten pitkien ripsien
takana juoksivat
kuin pienet valkeat.
yllä palmujen,
neekerinaisien.
Tripoliissa.

sytytti vesipiippunsa ja vaipui uneksimaan.
He havahti: kalpea dervishi löi suurta rumpuaan
ja katos lyödessään
taas kadun hämärään.
yllä palmujen,
neekerinaisien.
Tripoliissa.

juutalaisten kadulla näki mattoja kutovan.
Ja pienen muulin he näkivät ja kameelin ruskean:
vaan selässä kameelin,
ah, miss Annabelin.
yllä palmujen,
neekerinaisien.
Tripoliissa.

nousi katukahvilasta palaten hotelliin.
Ja Thompson kaipasi ihmeellisesti takaisin Englantiin
kun siellä verraton
kaupunki Lontoo on.
yllä palmujen,
neekerinaisien.
Tripoliissa.
2. Fatiman kuolo.
Me istuimme kabylimajassa ja poltimme tupakkaa, ja

mieleemme muistui vienosti kaukainen isänmaa ja tyttö ja työt
ja kaikki, vaan emme me tunnustaneet sitä toisillemme, vaan
rauhassa me poltimme tupakkaa. Ja oli kuin varjot puista olis
maahan varisseet. Kuu istui päämme päällä. Me poltimme
tupakkaa, ja mieleemme muistui vienosti kaukainen isänmaa.
Me kuulimme, miten pakenivat äänet eläimien.

Ja me kuulimme, miten äkkiä Tripolis oli hiljainen.
Ja silloin me lauloimme hiukan ja poltimme tupakkaa,
ja mieleemme muistui vienosti kaukainen isänmaa.
Ja vyöryi öinen lintu kuun yli, kadoten.

Me kuulimme sen äänen, ja se oli ihmeellinen.
Me värisimme hiukan, me, Thompson ja Mustapää:
se oli vaakalintu, jota ihmissilmä ei nää.
Ja Thompson raapaisi tulta ja sytytti piippumme taas
ja kenttäpullosta kummallekin iltaryypyn kaas.
Ja sitten me uneksimme ja poltimme tupakkaa
ja mieleemme muistui vienosti kaukainen isänmaa.
Vaan keskellä yötä kuulimme, kun joku valitti niin kuin

suuressa tuskassa valitetaan. Ja sitten huudettiin hyvin
monella kurkulla kamalasti. Se oli huuto, se, se karmi luita ja
kävi todella lujasti hermoille. Ja Bimbo, neekeripoika, tuli
kotiin ja tiedon toi: vain Fatiman, kauniin kabylitytön,
kuoinhuuto soi. Me paljastimme päämme. Ja Thompson
ääneti kaas hänen muistollensa kenttäpullosta pienen ryypyn
taas.
Koko yön me istuimme kabylimajassa. Kylä heräs jo ja

nousi mustasta palmupensaasta punainen aurinko. Me
kuulimme härkien mölyn ja kukkojen kieunnan ja mustien
kerjuripoikien me näimme tulevan. Vaan kun me astuimme
satulaan ja aloimme ratsastaa, niin mieleemme muistui
vienosti kaukainen isänmaa.
LASISESTA SILMÄSTÄ
Hän oli ylen ruma. Hän katsoi mua toisella silmällään. Hänen
toisen silmänsä kohdalla — se rumensi koko pään — oli
hirveä sininen kupla vain, ja sen minä nytkin nään kun
kirjoitan hänen haudalleen, joka näyttää muilta unohtuneen
vain hiekkaan: Birgitta.
Vaan hän oli hyvä. Hän paimensi mua hellällä kädellään.

Hän leikki aina ja lohdutti mua kun rupesin itkemään. Hän
juoksi kerran illalla Pyhäjärveen hämärään. Hänen
vettävaluvan kätensä nytkin niin selvästi nään kun kirjoitan
hänen haudalleen, joka näyttää muilta unohtuneen vain
hiekkaan: Birgitta.
He aamulla löysivät hukkuneen. Aurinko kultainen

ilomielisnä leikki sillalla. Ja minä näin sen. (Joku kertoi minulle
myöhemmin, kun olin jo aikuinen, hänen rakastuneen
renkiimme, joka torjui hymyillen…) Mua kukaan ei tullut
lohduttamaan, minä muistan vielä sen kun kirjoitan hänen
haudalleen, joka näyttää muilta unohtuneen vain hiekkaan:
Birgitta, vain hiekkaan: Birgitta.
YXI WALITETTAWA WIRSI, KOSKA
IHMINEN HELENA ERIKIN TYTÄR
HALIKON PITÄJÄSTÄ ULWOS KÄWI
MURHAN TÄHDEN SINÄ 11. PÄIWÄNÄ
MARRAS KUUSA. WUONNA 1778.
Ja kylmä, kostea selli

hänelle annettiin,
ja kylmä, kostea peite
selliin kannettiin,
ja puiselle lavitsalle hän putosi istumaan ja puisella

lavitsalla hän muisti uudestaan
koko eilisen päivän ja illan ja vielä iltayön, jolloin hän vaipui

tekemään hirveän, hirveän työn.
»Oi rakas, pieni Jeesus,

joka olet niin kultainen,
oi rakas, pieni Jeesus,
minä tunnustan sulle sen,
vaan noille tuomareille minä en sano sanaakaan, noille
mustille tuomareille, jotka käy mua tutkimaan…
Oi, rakas pieni Jeesus,

se oli niin kamala mies,
joka pienen pienistä synneistäni
liian paljon ties.
Minä rakastin toista miestä,

minä häntä jumaloin,
ah, pienet syntini häneltä
kätkin, minkä voin.
Minä olen niin kaunis, Jeesus,

kai näet, kun katsot vain,
vaikka tässä mustassa sellissä
ei ole valoa lain…
Ja se kuulutti kaduilla julki,

se kamala, kamala mies
minun pienistä synneistäni
kaiken minkä ties.
Ah, eilen iltayöstä —

niin vaikea kertoa on,
sillä kurkussani on kyyneleitä
ja olen niin lohduton:
Ah, eilen iltayöstä

minä päätin tappaa sen.
Hän oli niin rietas ja kamala,
kamala ihminen…
Ja muuta ei ole, Jeesus.
Minä tapoin hänet siis.
Oi auta, ota kaunis pääni
väkeviin kämmeniis.»

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Vietnamese Organized Crime in the

Czech Republic 1st ed. Edition Miroslav

More information about this series at

Crime Prevention and Security Management

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Cover illustration: J Stromme / Alamy Stock Photo

2 Theoretical Background, Research Methods and

3 Vietnamese Migration to the Czech Republic and the

4 The World of the Vietnamese Diaspora in the CR 59

5 Vietnamese Criminal Activities in the Czech Republic 89

Miroslav Nožina is a senior researcher at the Institute of International

Filip Kraus is a senior researcher and a senior lecturer in the Department

CMEA Council of Mutual Economic Assistance

OGD Observatoire géopolitique des drogues, Paris, France

The study is a complex socio-anthropological analysis of the structures and

© The Author(s) 2020 1

questions about the structure of the Vietnamese criminal structures in

social figures of the diaspora. It is shown that the diaspora is a relatively

2.1 Theoretical Background

© The Author(s) 2020 5

therefore be studied as special kinds of social networks, more specifically,

criminal networks have dominated Asian crime operations in recent years

organisations can be traced back to a traditional pattern of behaviour

2.2 Research Methods

transitional stage following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In 1999–2002,

­ aterialised in several related publications (Nožina 2010a, b, 2013,

Czech and Vietnamese. They helped to collect relevant information on

interview with a member of the security forces had to be permitted and

Bąkowski, P. (2013). Organised Crime in the European Union. Library Briefing.

Cross, G. (1989). The Vietnamese Crime Network. In H. M. Launer &

Fritsche, K. (1991). Vietnamesische Gastarbeiter in den europäischen RGW-­

Migrants and European Labour Markets. Patterns and Processes of Immigrant

Nožina, M. (2018). The Role of Vietnamese Criminal Networks in Drug Crime:

Pechová, E. (2007) Migrace Vietnamců do ČR v kontextu obchodu s lidmi a

Around the World, Volume II: Diaspora Communities (pp. 1141–1149).

© The Author(s) 2020 23

In the Czech Republic, approximately 65,000 citizens of Vietnam and

constantly search for new opportunities in the migration business, look-

3.2  ietnamese Migration to the CR

eyewitnesses, namely several former employees of Prague Airport who

3.3  ush and Pull Factors of Vietnamese

members of the diaspora living in the CR usually present themselves as

specifically the policies pertaining to temporary work abroad on the basis

3.3.2 The Situation in the Czech Republic

(A. E. Housmanin mukaan.)

»Sano, vieläkö orhini juoksee yhä kentällä kilpaillen ja

Oh, kyllä orhisi juoksee

Oh, tietysti pallo lentää

Hän nukkuu aivan hyvin

»Ja miten voi ystäväni?

Hyvin nukkuvat ystäväs kaikki, vaan minä parhaiten: on

Sinä likainen juutalainen,

jalat roikkuen vanhaan lotjaan,

Pater Spielmanis ja minä

ja sitten me janoisina lähdemme kapakkaan. Pater

(Hämärä metsä, pater Spielmaniksen tarina maailmansodasta.)

Metsässä, metsässä oli hyvin hämärää. Veljeni, sanoin

Join hänen pullostansa,

Enkä tuntenut häntä,

Heräsin valjuun aamuun,

Ah, minä nousin hiljaa

Yö. Kööpenhamina. Tuulee. Sataa.

Joku porvaristyttö kai. Tanskalainen.

2 Theoretical Background, Research Methods and

3 Vietnamese Migration to the Czech Republic and the

4 The World of the Vietnamese Diaspora in the CR 59

5 Vietnamese Criminal Activities in the Czech Republic 89

2.1 Theoretical Background

2.2 Research Methods

aterialised in several related publications (Nožina 2010a, b, 2013,

Fritsche, K. (1991). Vietnamesische Gastarbeiter in den europäischen RGW-

3.2 ietnamese Migration to the CR

3.3 ush and Pull Factors of Vietnamese

3.3.2 The Situation in the Czech Republic