THE FORGOTTEN
ALLIES
VIETNAM (ANS) -- For our people –
the Montagnards - the Vietnam War did not end in 1975. The war
continues today in a somewhat different manner, but it just as
savage. This Easter  Vietnam has launched a brutal persecution
against my people - my people who served as allies to American during
the 1960s and 70s.(Pictured: Italians
protest the killing of Montagnards in Vietnam).
Many of the ethnic groups that live in Vietnam are indigenous tribes
that have inhabited the peninsula for thousands of years, moving from
the coast to the so-called Central Highlands. Those populations, who
are known with the French name of Montagnards, are my people and we
have our own culture, tradition, economic peculiarities and today
many of us are also Christian. In the 1920s, many Montagnards had
been converted to Christianity by Western missionaries. After the
Communist takeover, our ancestral homelands were seized by the
government, our leaders executed or imprisoned in labor camps and we
as a people were denied the freedom to practice Christianity.
On Saturday, April 10, this Easter, against an order of the Communist
Government of Hanoi, some 150,000 Montagnards went to the city of
Buonmathuot in Vietnam's Central Highlands and staged a peaceful
demonstration to celebrate Easter. After only a few hours, Vietnamese
soldiers, mixed with the police and Vietnamese civilians, attacked
the praying crowd, beating demonstrators with electric batons,
throwing rocks, and shooting with rifles. Dozens of demonstrators
have been reported dead by our people and many have their legs and
hands broken. There are reports of people being decapitated. The
latest news relayed to us by survivors estimate at around several
hundred the number of dead bodies left in the city and in the
surrounding coffee plantations. These figures cannot be verified
however, as the Central Highlands have been completely sealed off by
the Vietnamese authorities and nobody, not even monitors of the
United Nations, can access the region.
I warned my people not to demonstrate knowing how the police would
react, but, their desperation prevailed and they decided to worship
Christ in public. They told me that they cannot wait “because they
are killing us now and we cannot take that anymore." For the last
three years we have been receiving pleas from help from our people
and they regularly report electric shock torture, arrests and
killings. Our people knew that celebrating Easter would have
triggered harsh consequences. I urged them to pray peacefully in the
spirit of Christianity and to use the non-violence principals
proposed by Gandhi. And, knowing my people from the bottom of my
heart, I am sure that they, men, women and children prayed with
peaceful devotion. The police, with the help of the army, took full
advantage of the situation and unleashed a violent repression. For
days and days, I have received reports that Vietnamese police and
soldiers, unprovoked, attacked my people by shootings and beatings.
At the beginning of the year, the US State Department reported that
“Ethnic minority, unregistered Protestant congregations in the
Central Highlands and in the northwest provinces continued to suffer
severe abuses.” In May 2003, the US International Commission for
Religious Freedom stated that “the increased repression of religious
freedom has been reportedly sanctioned at the highest levels of the
Vietnamese government.”
The European Parliament has also regularly denounced the oppressive
character of the Vietnamese regime highlighting the total lack of
religious freedom in the Country. Thanks to the support of some MEPs,
among them the founder of Italy's Radical Party – Marco Pannella, the
President of the European Commission - Romano Prodi and also the
Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs clear statements have been made
denouncing the current situation and questioning also the
relationship that European countries have with Hanoi.
In these hours, the United States government is trying to obtain
access to the Central Highlands in Vietnam. According to news
agencies reports, US Ambassador Raymond Burghardt said Monday. “It's
obviously best to have people visit the area in order to find out
what's going on and not have to rely on rumors or third-hand reports
[...] If you close off an area, people just assume the worst and you
end up with people who may not be your friends giving interpretations
that very likely will contain a lot of inaccurate information,” he
added.
If, and when, Ambassador Burghardt will be allowed to visit the
region, he, together with the rest of international community, will
finally realize that what we have been saying since the end of the
Vietnam War is not secessionist propaganda, but a cry for freedom.
I must say also that our people have no word for independence in our
language. We do however, have a word for freedom. And it is only
basic freedoms that we want.
We supported America in its struggle against Ho Chi Min, paying with
thousands of lives; and the US has assisted many of us in the past
and today, they allow us to live a decent life in America, but our
families, friends and heart is also in the Central Highlands and we
need to help our people there now.
Especially the Special Forces veterans, who served their country,
they know us well. We Montagnards who served side by side with them
during the war also greatly respect them and it is many of these same
honorable soldiers who support us today.
But since 1975, the Vietnamese Communist government has been carrying
out a very sophisticated campaign of ethnic cleansing against our
people. The government confiscates our ancestral lands and forces us
to live a life of poverty. If we raise our voice in protest they
arrest and persecute us. Today our people are trapped in our villages
and being forced to escape to Cambodia vacating what is left of our
ancestral homelands. Unless the international community intervenes,
we fear Hanoi will persecute us even more driving us into oblivion.
We pray that a concerted effort of European and American pressure can
put an end to the repression and allow our people to live in peace
and freedom.
You may read more this article here
from ASSIST News Service (ANS)
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