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HANOI - Vietnam premier Nguyen Tan Dung has ordered authorities to ensure a trouble-free Olympic torch relay next week, warning that "hostile forces" may seek to disrupt it, the government said Monday.
The demand came amid reports on unofficial blogs that police last week questioned and detained activists linked to a series of anti-Chinese protests last year over two disputed island chains in the South China Sea.
Dung at the weekend chaired a meeting with officials in southern Ho Chi Minh City, where the Olympic torch, will arrive from Pyongyang on April 29.
Dung said that "although Vietnam's social security is stable, hostile forces always attempt to disrupt the stability and harm Vietnam's prestige and position in the international arena," according to the main government website.
He ordered officials "to conduct the relay safely and solemnly, showing the patriotic, sports-loving and peace-loving spirit of the Vietnamese people and the Vietnam-China special friendship," the statement said.
Trouble has followed the torch since protesters disrupted the flame lighting ceremony in Olympia in Greece on March 24 after China's crackdown in Tibet, followed by protests in London, Paris and San Francisco.
Communist Vietnam rarely tolerates public protests, but anti-Chinese sentiment flared in street rallies late last year over the disputed Spratly and Paracel archipelagos.
Vietnam allowed initial peaceful demonstrations outside Chinese diplomatic missions in December but then deployed thousands of police to stop repeat rallies as students took up the anti-China cause.
The territorial issue has flared up again as the Olympic torch heads for Vietnam.
One of the Vietnamese relay runners, law student Le Minh Phieu, wrote an open letter to International Olympic Committee president Jaques Rogge, charging that Beijing had "politicised" the Games by marking the Paracels as Chinese territory on Olympic-related websites.
Although communist leaders in Hanoi and Beijing stress their comradely ties, memories run deep in Vietnam of the millennium-long domination by its powerful northern neighbour and their most recent border war in 1979. -AFP/vm
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