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 networks 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 communities in host countries have been frequently registered as well. This frequently leads to criminal stigmatisation of the whole Vietnamese diaspora.
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 internationally, 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 people 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 structure within the diaspora and established the modi operandi of their criminal 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 organised 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 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 subjectivization 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 diaspora 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 countries, especially those in Central and Western Europe. In this sense, albeit based on Czech materials, the analysis tried to understand the phenomenon of Vietnamese crime in a wider international context.
In the first part of the study, the establishment of the Vietnamese diaspora in the former Czechoslovakia under the communist regime’s supervision 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 demonstrated. 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 agencies play a crucial role in these processes. In the present text, special attention 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 symbiosis, where the contacts are quite frequent. Moreover, the illegal component 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 developed 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 economic 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 ...