Ethnic minority Christians in Vietnam increasingly face charges of national security crimes, severe abuse, property confiscation and forced renunciations of faith, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and US parliamentarians.
Vietnamese law requires all religious groups to register with the government and operate under government-approved religious organizations.
Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director, questioned the legality of such registration as well as its application to indigenous communities, known collectively as the Montagnards.
Robertson said the government had long considered Montagnards “a national security threat” intent on “subverting the state”. The HRW report released on 31 March, links increased government crackdowns on unregistered indigenous religious groups in the Central Highlands to their growing calls for more land rights and religious freedom.
“Why are they [Montagnards] being forced to register in the first place? Freedom to practise religion doesn’t set out [that groups] have to register with a state-controlled… group to be considered legitimate… [The government is] making broad-brushed claims that religion is a cover for an attempt by the Montagnards to break the Highlands away into an independent country.”
According to the most recent government census in 1999, Vietnam’s ethnic minorities, who mostly reside in the interior mountainous and highlands areas, comprised close to 14 percent of the country’s population, or about 10.5 million people.
Pendulum of persecution
In 2005, Vietnam passed comprehensive religious freedom legislation, outlawing forced renunciations and permitting official recognition of new denominations.
In November 2006 the US removed Vietnam from its blacklist of “Countries of Particular Concern”, determining that the country was no longer a “serious violator” of religious freedoms as defined by the US 1998 International Religious Freedom Act.
But a Vietnam Human Rights Sanctions Act submitted in January 2011 to the US Congress noted that “despite reported progress in church openings and legal registrations of religious venues, the government of Vietnam has halted most religious reforms since the Department of State lifted the ‘country of particular concern’ for religious freedom violations designation”.
The situation is particularly grim for unregistered ethnic minority Protestant congregations, noted the bill’s authors, involving forced renunciations of faith; pressure to join government-recognized religious groups; arrest and harassment; the withholding of social programmes provided for the general population; destruction of churches and pagodas; confiscation and destruction of property, and severe beatings.
However, HRW noted in its report a decade-long cycle of government repression that interspersed “arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and torture” with public works, land allocation and improved educational opportunities to address Highlander grievances.
Religious persecution continues in Vietnam
Government curbs on religion in Vietnam have been a source of tension since the communists took power after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. At that time, the communist leaders either closed or imposed strict controls on places of worship, and sent many religious leaders to re-education camps.
Despite the improvements in Western relations with Vietnam, recent reports suggest that religious repression remains universal. A quarter century on, the government continues to impose controls over the training and appointment of priests, a cause of frustration for the Catholic community of about 8 million.
A US-based human rights group – Freedom House, located in Washington, DC – recently revealed it has acquired eight secret Vietnamese government documents that prove the communists are trying to undermine religion, contrary to its public pronouncements.
Freedom House said the documents, dated between 1998 and 2000, showed “a concerted and ongoing government campaign to arrest and reverse the country’s growing Christian movements … Although Vietnam is a signatory to international conventions on human rights that guarantee religious freedom, the documents provide irrefutable evidence that repression continues to drive day to day policy and practice.”
The documents primarily address Protestant Christianity’s spread among the Hmong ethnic minority living in remote highland areas.
One document, issued by the Bureau of Religious and Minority Affairs in the northern province of Lao Cai bordering China, included ten recommendations to control the spread of Christianity, including “working hard to control religious leaders” as well as improved propaganda efforts. It expressed concern that Christian churches had helped bring down Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Despite diplomatic breakthroughs with the United States and other Western nations in recent years, religious persecution is said to have intensified over the past few months, although the Vietnamese foreign affairs ministry has dismissed the documents as “distorted and slan-derous.”
On the very day US President Bill Clinton visited the Catholic Archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) last November to discuss religious liberty, security police were breaking up a quiet worship service in the home of a Protestant house-church leader. And earlier the same day police raided the worship service of Grace Church, a house church organisation, being held in the home of Rev Nguyen Ngoc Hien, according to the Compass Direct agency. Authorities confiscated Bibles, threatened those attending the worship service, and seized Rev Nguyen’s identity card.
Catholic difficulties
During his brief meeting at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception with President Clinton, Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh M‰n spoke about the difficulties the Catholic Church continues to suffer at the hands of the Communist regime in Vietnam.
According to Compass Direct, violations of religious liberty have been continuing, especially among Protestant communities. In Phu Yen province, six Christians were fined, for meeting in a home for Christian worship. A Hmong Christian named Sung Seo Choa, 42, of Xin Man in Ha Giang province, was sentenced last September to 24 months of labour and re-education. The official decision paper stated he was sentenced because he “continually preaches religion illegally after being educated many times not to do so.”
At a time of rapid economic growth, many young Vietnamese have been turning to Christianity to fill the spiritual void. “More and more young people are coming,” said Father Stanislas Nguyen Duc Ve of the Church of St Francis Xavier. “With our society opening up, they have more opportunities to attend church.”
However, Freedom House said the documents it released show Vietnam’s public statements on religious liberty bear “little resemblance to its internal practices. Vietnam’s policies … are driven by the assumption that Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity are seamlessly connected with Vietnam’s imperialist enemies past, present, real and imagined.”
June 14th, 2011 → 10:49 am
[...] VIETNAM: Religious persecution intensifies, study says >> Vietnam Committee on Human Rights denounces brutal repression against religious freedom in [...]