Vietnam: 600 policemen nab priest (UPI)
Thursday, 17 May 2001 18:21 (ET)
Vietnam: 600 policemen nab priest
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI religion correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 17 (UPI) -- As part of an ongoing crackdown against religious figures in Vietnam, 600 police officers surrounded a church in Hue early Thursday and seized a priest, according to Radio Free Asia.

The arrest of Father Thaddaeus Nguyen van Ly, 54, a leading religious rights advocate, occurred during a 4:30 a.m. prayer service in the An Truyen Catholic Church in Hue, said Khanh Nguyen, senior editor at RFA's Vietnam desk in Washington.

"Father Ly was charged under article 269 of the penal code -- with spreading propaganda against the government. He now faces 10 to 12 years in prison," Khanh Nguyen said.

"We received this information in a telephone call from another priest in Hue. There were 150 worshipers in the church," Nguyen said.

The Hanoi government claimed Ly had distributed anti-communist leaflets during the service.

In the early 1960s, this former imperial capital was the center of Buddhist ferment against the predominantly Catholic regime of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

"But now the major faiths are for the first time united in their opposition to the communist regime," the Rev. Nguyen Huu Le told United Press International.

Le is the executive director of the International Committee for Religious Freedom in Vietnam.

On Wednesday, Le, who had been detained in his homeland for 12 years and spent much of that time in shackles, told the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus of a "well-planned, well-coordinated strategy to destroy and paralyze religions."

In an interview with United Press International, Le said: "The communist government does not fear any political groups. But they are afraid of religion because religion is synonymous with people. In the past, the
different faiths only acted to protect their own members. That weakened them."

"But now that they are acting as one, they present a great danger to the regime." Hence, he said, a major assault was underway.

Le said that about half the Vietnamese population belonged to one of the organized religions: Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, Hoa Hao (a Buddhist reform movement), and Cao Dai (a syncretistic religion that venerates the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, the French thinkers Victor Hugo and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, and German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe).

"This does not mean that the other half of the Vietnamese population are atheists. They, too, seek God," Le said.

Vietnamese exiles keeping in constant contact with the opposition via e-mail said the Hanoi regime accused Ly of treason. The apparent reason was that he had appealed to the United States to link a bilateral trade
agreement with Vietnam to religious freedom in that country, exile sources said.

In February, Ly was placed under house arrest and vilified by the state-controlled media, the International Committee for Religious Freedom informed U.N. Human Rights commissioner Mary Robinson.

When a member of Norway's parliament, Lars Rise, visited him in April, 100 policemen surrounded Ly's church. In what Vietnamese exiles see as a sign of extraordinary nervousness, the Vietnamese authorities subsequently risked an international incident:

They arrested and jailed the Norwegian politician briefly, and then expelled him from their country.

Vietnamese exiles said Ly's arrest was the most dramatic event in Hanoi's latest drive against religious figures unwilling to submit to the supervision of the Fatherland Front, a pro-communist mass organization.

There were several other major incidents this year: 

--In January, Ha Hai, general secretary of the Hoa Hao church, was sentenced to five years imprisonment for "disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and disregarding the order of house arrest."

-- In February, secret police stopped Thich (Venerable) Quang Do, a senior official of the United Buddhist Church and forced him to strip. He was on his way to visit that denomination's ailing leader, Thich Huyen Quang, 82, who had been imprisoned and then placed under house arrest for 21 years.

-- In March, Hoa Hao Chairman Le Quang Liem organized a rally against Ly's house arrest, and immediately received the same punishment. Vietnamese exiles in the United States celebrated his action as a welcomed sign of the new solidarity between faith groups in their homeland.

-- Two days later, 72-year old Nguyen thi Thu, following the examples of Buddhist monks in the 1960s, doused herself with gasoline and burned herself to death in protest against the government's suppression of people of
faith.

Le, who is on a two-year leave of absence from his New Zealand parish to head the Washington-based religious rights committee, stressed an unheard-of consequence of Hanoi's actions against believers:

After centuries of antagonism between the ethnic Viets living in the lowlands and the racially distinct mountain tribes, "they are now united." Of these tribal people, 500,000 are Protestants and 200,000 Catholics,
according to the Montagnard Human Rights Organization based in Raleigh, N.C.

"Up to 20 leaders of local congregations have been abducted. All sermons must be approved by the authorities before services," the organization reported.

"Pastors cannot deviate from approved sermons. Minorities cannot hear sermons in their native languages, only in Vietnamese. All church members must be registered. (Others) are not allowed to attend services," it said.

In March, government thugs burst into a service in the village of Phu Non, punching women and yelling, "Let's beat them until they are dead."

In the same month, 20 cadres entered two villages, asking the inhabitants to abandon their faith. If they didn't they would force the villagers to feed them until they had nothing left for themselves to eat, according to
the Montagnard organization.

The organization further reported that the communists accused highlanders of following "an American religion" and a "counter-revolutionary" faith. In one case they told a patient requiring surgery, "We will not provide help for a Christian."

In Quang Ngai province, local officials denied Christian villagers access to electricity.

Le said tales like these give him a glimmer of hope. "I have found out in re-education camp that the worse the oppression of believers the closer they grow. When we were starved and beaten with rifle butts we learned to pray together."

Given the new solidarity between believers, Le mused that he would not be surprised "if this communist nightmare were over in a few years' time."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
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