Le Hien Duc has shown “personal strength and courage… to break the corruption cycle,” said Transparency’s Chair Huguette Labelle at a ceremony in the German capital.

The 75-year-old retired primary school teacher spends her days in Hanoi working through a stack of complaints from Vietnamese people who have been asked to pay bribes by local officials, policemen and companies.

She sends petitions to the authorities calling for justice, sometimes harrying officials with repeated phone calls in a one-woman campaign financed by her monthly pension of about US$70.

“This award is a great honor for me and for those affected by corruption, many of whom have contacted me for sympathy and help,” Duc said after accepting the Integrity Award, given to individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the fight against graft.

“I am not powerful, I am just a retired teacher who has dedicated her whole life to the fight against corruption.”

Her stance has made her many enemies, but Duc brushes off the numerous death threats she has received.

For instance, when she gets flowers, they are often funeral wreaths dropped outside her home.

“People are always threatening to knock me down with a motorbike or a car but I am not afraid,” she told journalists before the prize-giving ceremony.

“An official from the United Nations Development Program has tried to persuade me to get a bodyguard, but I turned down the offer. “I am old but I can look after myself. My only fear is that if I am killed the work I am doing will stop.

“If we do not fight corruption, the poor will suffer most”

The sprightly grandmother of eight, only 150 cm tall and 40 kilograms in weight, is busy from morning until night working through stacks of citizens’ complaints.

She has taken on school officials who have short-changed children on their lunch meals, a water company that charged residents for renovations it never delivered, and once called a minister 30 times to pursue a complaint

When she witnessed a Hanoi traffic cop squeeze a motorcycle driver for a bribe, she hounded him with a digital camera, recorded his badge number and launched a complaint with the police chief that got the officer demoted.

Duc has four children and eight grandchildren, but she says she won’t let them visit her house – a virtual war room outfitted with phones and a computer donated by an IT company - because it is too dangerous.

“During the resistance war against the French, I fought against injustice,” said the one-time army decoder who worked in the jungle for revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

“Now that I’m retired, I have more time to fight injustice.”

“Vietnam has won every war it has fought in the past There is no reason it cannot win the war against corruption,” she says.

Vietnam ranks 123rd most corrupt out of 179 nations in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, a closely watched survey of business people and experts that lists Denmark as the ‘cleanest’ and Somalia as the worst.

Graft scandals have rocked the communist government - one scam involving transport officials betting millions on European football, another concerning kickbacks and missing funds in a still unrealized e-government project.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has vowed to stamp out corruption, which donor countries and business groups again highlighted as a major concern in December last year.

The other winner of this year’s Transparency award was Mark Pieth, a Swiss criminal law professor credited with playing a leading role in securing international implementation of the Anti-Bribery Convention drawn up by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) think-tank.

Source: AFP