THE
MONTAGNARD FOUNDATION WELCOMES THE UNITED STATES’ DESIGNATION OF VIETNAM
AS A “COUNTRY OF PARTICULAR CONCERN” FOR VIOLATIONS OF RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM
The 2004 Report on International
Religious Freedom presented yesterday by the US Secretary of State, Colin
Powell and John Hanford, the US Ambassador-at-large for International Religious
Freedom, includes for the first time Vietnam among the “Countries of Particular
Concern” (CPCs), a category reserved for the Governments, which engage in
vast and consistent violation of religious freedom. With Vietnam are listed
as countries of particular concern, Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea,
Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
The Montagnard Foundation
welcomes the decision the State Department and is encouraged by seeing that
its own denunciations, together with those of many other NGOs and civic groups,
of the growing and systematic repression of religious freedom by the Vietnamese
Government is recognized as important issue by the US Government.
In fact, the definition
of Vietnam as a “Country of Particular Concern” could lead to the adoption
of sanctions against the Vietnamese Government. Indigenous Montagnards (Degar
People) who live in the Central Highlands of Vietnam are a specific target
of the repression carried out by Hanoi, which is trying to eradicate our culture
as indigenous people, including our religious belief. The State Department
report rightly denounces how this repression is carried out i.e. through harassments,
detentions, and tortures, fines, which aim at forcing our people to renounce
their faith. In order to do so, as documented by Hum Rights Watch in 2003,
The Vietnamese Government has recently adopted a policy of forced renunciation
of Christianity in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, which is carried out
also through public ceremonies where the Dega people are forced to renounce
their faith drinking animal blood and pledging allegiance to the Communist
Party’s flag.
Finally, the Montagnard
Foundation wishes to State that a reference contained in the 2004 Report on
International Religious on its activity and agenda, repeated various times,
is not accurate, namely that:
An urgent step that needs
to be taken is to allow independent Human Rights monitors and UN agencies,
in particular the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees and the Office
of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, access to the Central Highlands
of Vietnam where grave human rights violations occur daily.
This allegation to be
a separatist movement has been widely publicized by the Vietnamese Government
over the last few years in the attempt to block the participation of the MFI’s
President Mr. Kok Ksor, to the works of the UN Commission on Human Rights,
thanks to his affiliation with the Transnational Radical Party, an NGO in
Consultative Status with the UN.
Such attempt and allegations
have been recently rejected by the United Nations on July 23 when the request
of the Government of Vietnam to suspend for three years the Transnational
Radical Party Consultative Status was rejected by the UN ECOSOC, thanks in
particular to the support of the European Union the US Government and Latin
American Countries.
