HANOI, Vietnam - A woman who was jailed after writing a blog critical of the Vietnamese government said Monday that she agreed to stop blogging as a condition of her release.
"It's time for me to put an end to this blog," Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh said in a handwritten statement posted on her website Monday, following her release over the weekend. "I came to blogging as an adventure in the world of information, but every game comes to an end."
Quynh was one of three online writers arrested and released by Vietnamese authorities since late August. All of them wrote critically about Vietnam's policies toward its powerful northern neighbour, China.
The three also planned to produce anti-China T-shirts, according to a foreign diplomat who declined to be named, citing embassy protocol.
The bloggers had chided the Vietnamese government for not taking a stronger stand in a territorial dispute with China over the Spratly and Paracels archipelagos in the South China Sea. They also objected to Vietnam's plans for a large bauxite mine in the strategically important Central Highlands. A Chinese firm is building part of the project.
"I was wrong and I am responsible for what I did," Quynh said in her hand-written statement.
Quynh wrote that she knew her decision to stop blogging would disappoint her friends, but said she had promised to stop in order to win her freedom. "I made my promise and I will keep my promise," she wrote.
She added that she had come to the "bitter" realization that her ability to express her patriotism was constrained by political realities.
If she were as brave as the Vietnamese patriots who have come before her, Quynh said, she would have continued her blog. But after 10 days in jail, she decided to give it up.
"From the bottom of my heart, I believe we will see each other again somewhere in this immense information highway, because we share a belief in the Vietnamese spirit," said Quynh, who blogged under the pen name "Me Nam," or "Mother Mushroom."
Quynh, 30, was released on Sunday, a week after police freed another blogger, Bui Thanh Hieu, and online journalist Pham Doan Trang.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga, in a regular press briefing last week, said the three had been detained for alleged violations of national security.
Earlier this year, the government tightened its rules for bloggers, requiring that they restrict their writings to personal matters.
