According to conference leaders, the U.S. government is turning a blind eye to what is really happening in Vietnam.
The convention—sponsored by the Montagnard Foundation—began with an opening prayer for the Montagnard prisoners and their families. The event called attention to the severe repression of Montagnard Christians in Vietnam that continues unabated, and petitioned the Obama administration to negotiate with the Vietnamese regime to either end the religious persecution or else place Vietnam back on the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC).
The conference saw dozens of attendees related to individuals who were imprisoned for attending religious “house” churches. (The “house” church movement in Southeast Asia expresses a popular desire for attending an unofficial Protestant church not sanctioned by authoritarian governments, such as those of Vietnam, China, and North Korea.) Some were former prisoners themselves having served five or more years in communist prisons.
While many who came to the Montagnard church were born in the U.S. and have never known religious persecution, there were some who had fled Vietnam and have the scars and memories of brutality that they wanted to share. At least 40 of the attendees brought photos of loved ones killed or detained.
Scott Johnson, lawyer, writer, and human rights activist, has championed the Montagnard cause. At the conference, he noted that the Montagnards were U.S. allies during the Vietnam War. After our departure, these people have been targeted for extreme repression and some would say genocide by the Vietnamese regime. The ancestral home of the Montagnards is the Central Highlands, where the supply lines from north to south (Ho Chi Minh Trail) went through.
Johnson read a speech by Edmund McWilliams, who could not attend, at the conference. A retired senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer of 27 years, McWilliams spoke of the obligation the U.S. owes to its former allies. McWilliams served in the U.S. Army 1970-1973, including 11 months in Vietnam.
“Also long overdue is the formal recognition and honor due the estimated 100,000 Montagnards who fought with extraordinary courage alongside U.S. military personnel during the U.S. wars in Indochina,” wrote McWilliams. “That recognition can and should take the form of an unvarnished examination of the plight of these former comrades in battle and their families who have suffered grievously at the hands of the Hanoi regime which Washington now courts as an ally.”
Johnson said that by the end of the war in 1975, an estimated quarter of the Montagnard population, or over 200,000 people, had paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Since our departure “the Montagnards have been deliberately marginalized as losers of the war and survive today in a cycle of crushing poverty,” writes Johnson in the Asian Times, April 7.
There is no evidence of any Montagnard resistance movements currently advocating violence, as there was after the war. But the Vietnamese authorities regard with suspicion the refusal of the Montagnards to join their state-sanctioned churches. The government treats the unregistered house churches of the Dega Protestants as a cover for a Montagnard independence movement.
Post Conference Petition
Following the conference, the Montagnard Youth Group established a petition to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. It calls for the government to officially acknowledge the detention of 350 prisoners of conscience, to negotiate with Vietnam the release of the nonviolent religious prisoners, and an end to the religious persecution of independent churches. If the negotiations come up short, the petition asks that Vietnam be put back on the CPC list again. The official watch list would allow the potential for punishing Vietnam through trade sanctions.
Vietnam was placed on the U.S. State Department CPC list in 2004 and then delisted in 2006 when it agreed to end its religious persecution. It did stop the practice of coercing forced public denunciations of one’s faith. But authorities found other ways to suppress the evangelical movement it can’t control and that has grown six-fold in the last decade, according to Johnson.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) also recommends that the U.S. put Vietnam back on the CPC list in light of their egregious religious freedom violations, including the Montagnard religious repression. USCIRF is mandated to review the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and to make policy recommendations to the president, the secretary of state, and Congress. The president and the leadership of the House and the Senate appoint its members.
State Department Reluctance to Criticize
McWilliams and Johnson point to a Wikileaks classified message between the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and Washington that downplays the continued ethnic cleansing as a “land dispute” and the persecution of Montagnard Christians and other political prisoners as diminishing. Johnson said the cable even praises the regime for its registration of scores of new religions and the training of hundreds of new Protestant and Catholic clergy. Johnson says that the embassy ignores that these activities are for the state-controlled religions.
According to a recent report by the watchdog group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), released in March, “Since 2001, more than 350 Montagnards have been sentenced to long prison sentences on vaguely defined national security charges for their involvement in public protests and unregistered house churches considered subversive by the government, or for trying to flee to Cambodia to seek asylum.”
The charges brought against them are vague, for example, “undermining national solidarity” or “disrupting security.”
According to HRW, during the last decade, the Vietnamese regime has initiated a series of crackdowns on Montagnards. The HRW report says that the government objects to “mass public protests calling for the return of confiscated land and greater religious freedom.” The Montagnards are angry and desperate over the steady loss of their farmland to agricultural plantations and the invasion of lowland Vietnamese settlers, as well as increased restrictions on independent house churches.
More recently, the HRW’s website reports on Jan. 26, 2010, of the kidnapping of Degar Montagnard Christian Ksor Ju, 37, by two Vietnamese government security police who was handcuffed and took away to an unknown prison. “The security police had tied him to their motorcycle and dragged him away while his teenage daughter watched in horror. The same day approximately 30 security police searched and ransacked his house and threatened his family,” says the Foundation account.
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