Repression in Vietnam addressed

August 02, 2009
By Lorraine Ahearn
Staff Writer

GREENSBORO — Until the sweltering day in June when they were reunited at Ho Chi Minh City Airport, it had been 30 years since H’Juel Ya’s mother and grandmother laid eyes on each other.

The elder had been imprisoned by the Vietnamese government as a Christian; the younger fled into the jungle, escaping to Cambodia.

From there, she eventually made her way to the United States, settling in Greensboro in 1992, part of a community now estimated at 9,000 strong in North Carolina, the largest such ethnic enclave of Montagnards outside Vietnam.

“It was happy, but sad, seeing them together,” said H’Juel, 19, of her first trip to Vietnam. “Leaving her mother was the hardest decision my mother ever had to make. Montagnards are so close.”

For many such fractured families living in exile and watching the long anguish of human rights abuses in Vietnam — religious repression, jailing of labor leaders and journalists, the crushing of political dissent — a glimmer of hope has emerged.

Amid reports of escalating civil rights violations, members of Congress held a press conference Thursday in Washington calling for the Vietnamese government to release 400 alleged political prisoners.

The action was led by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), sponsor of this year’s toughly worded Vietnam Human Rights Act, to which Greensboro Republican Howard Coble signed on as a co-sponsor last week.

The resolution, laying out a litany of human rights abuses on the part of the Communist regime, would tie non-humanitarian foreign aid levels to progress toward a civil society.

“This gives us some leverage to insist that they improve their human rights approach better than they’ve done in the past,” Coble said in a phone interview Friday, citing the heavy concentration of Montagnards in his district for his interest.

Earlier in July, 37 U.S. senators led by Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., signed a letter demanding the release of Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly.

A symbol of religious repression in Vietnam, the 63-year-old Hue Catholic priest has spent a total of 17 years in prison since 1970. Photos by Agence France Presse from his last trial on political dissidence charges show the priest bound and gagged by guards as he stood trial.
But to understand the picture in everyday Vietnam, consider H’Juel’s recent trip. A UNCG student and caseworker for the Greensboro nonprofit Montagnard Dega Association, she was immediately picked out as an American when she arrived in the Central Highlands, the mountains and valleys that are home to the tribes.

“It’s your glasses,” relatives told her. Villagers are so poor, no one can afford them. “I didn’t see a single person wearing glasses. Even old people.”

Cousins her age did not go to school — let alone college — but worked in the heat, picking coffee beans, doing wash.

Her uncle works closely with local authorities, therefore, H’Juel and her family needed to register with the police only when they arrived, to let them know who was staying overnight and which extended family would be visiting.

Yet a fellow Greensboro Montagnard who flew with H’Juel’s family to Vietnam but whose relatives weren’t as well-connected was stopped and questioned daily during the trip, H’Juel said.

While in Vietnam, H’Juel attended Protestant services, but at a government-approved church, where the service was in Vietnamese, not the Mnong language her relatives speak.

Apart from the repressive flare-ups that make headlines — the June attack on a Buddhist monastery in south Vietnam, for example, or arrests of Catholics last week — the very idea of government-registered churches troubles those promoting civil rights.

Under international law, there is no provision for registering churches, and human rights advocates argue that the practice is the first step toward government control.

Denominations that join hundreds and thousands of citizens together on Sunday mornings are perceived — in the mind of the authoritarian regime — as dangerous.

“It’s the organization that’s the problem,” said Scott Flipse, director of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom’s East Asia program. “That’s the threat to the government.”

Part of a delegation to Vietnam in May, Flipse said the commission had verified that 355 Montagnards are currently imprisoned by the government. This comes against a backdrop of accelerating repression, with the shutdowns of newspapers and blogs, the arrest of a prominent labor lawyer and the destruction of one of the original Christian churches in the highlands last spring.

And though the Human Rights resolution addresses an array of broken promises by the Vietnamese government since it joined the World Trade Organization and prepares to reassume presidency of the U.N. Security Council this fall, some believe the Montagnards may be the most desperate part of the picture.

Before the Vietnam War, in which the Montagnards fatefully took sides with U.S. forces, the population of the highland tribes numbered in the millions; today, unofficial estimates are as low as 650,000.

Because of that history, as well as such ongoing land issues as a massive bauxite mining rights sale in the highlands, exiled leaders fear the Montagnards are destined to be completely displaced, if not erased.

Said Y Siu H’long, executive director of the Montagnard Dega Association, “For Buddhists, they want them to practice within the border of the law. For the Montagnards, they want to kill us all, so they can live on our land. That’s the main point.”

At Human Rights Watch, observers noted that just prior to Vietnam’s acceptance into the WTO, there was a climate of tolerance of newspapers, unions and political opposition.

But once Vietnam had been embraced by the world community and removed from the U.S. State Department’s “Countries of Particular Concern” human rights watch list in late 2006, the situation deteriorated with crackdowns on Internet use and arrests of labor leaders.

In a recent BBC interview, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Michalak maintained there was “no evidence” that Vietnam should be put back on the list.

Out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, an amendment to the proposed appropriations bill seeks to put Vietnam back on the watch list.

Rep. Brad Miller, who sits on the Foreign Affairs panel, has supported that idea in the past, a spokeswoman said last week, and is reviewing the human rights resolution, which has a companion version in the Senate introduced by B oxer.

Previous versions of the resolution passed the House but failed in the Senate, where a core group of senators led by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry argued that trade and geopolitical interests take precedence.

This year, however, human rights advocates say there could be a policy shift in the new administration.

“I’m not saying I would bet the farm on it,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “But if this thing passes, it would send a very potent message.”