Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

The spirit of freedom and liberation of the human spirit embodied in these words was revived in Vietnam in the past year and a half. Against the backdrop of a global community's co-operated advances in technology, economy, medicine, and global democracy, in late December of 2000, one humble parish priest in the parish of Nguyet Bieu in central Vietnam dared to stand up to an isolationist, backward, corrupt, and totalitarian government in reclaiming parish land confiscated by the government.

Father Nguyen Van Ly was no stranger to the tentacles of Communist oppression. Since his ordination into the priesthood in 1974, he had repeatedly spoken out about the government's policy to severely restrict any form of religious practice and worship, calling it "a noose around the neck of the religions". For speaking his mind, he had received 10 years of imprisonment, suffered countless other acts of aggression towards him, and has now again been sentenced to a prolonged jail sentence.

Ever since the start of the Communist government in 1975, strategies were instituted to try to phase out religious worship. The rationale was to replace worship of chosen religious deities with worship of their own political deity and doctrine, that is, Ho chi Minh, and the doctrine of Communism. One of these strategies was to confiscate land previously used to conduct religious services. Thus, the parish of Nguyet Bieu had in effect ceased to exist. Until December, 2000. This was when Father Ly decided to erect a sign on the top of the church's steeple proclaiming " We Need Freedom of Religion" and with a number of stoic parishioners, proceeded to reclaim the land and commenced sowing seeds on the church's land. The reaction was immediately antagonistic. Public security cadres arrived to engage in acts of intimidation and violence.

However, as is common with any oppression, the more oppressed one becomes, the more determined is one's resolve. As tension mounted over the ensuing days and weeks, Father Ly became even more defiant. Drawing on the symbolism of the above immortal impassioned cry for liberty, he erected a further banner with the words "Freedom of Religion or Death". This would become the slogan for the rest of his campaign.

By the end of 2000, prominent religious dissidents from all the major faiths had heard of Father Ly's campaign, and there was unanimous agreement with respect to the principles of Father Ly's campaign.

A joint statement was put out proclaiming the need for freedom of religious worship, with cosignatories being Venerable Thich Thien Hanh, Head of the League of Buddhist Clergies in Hue; Reverend Le Quang Liem, Chairman of the Central Council of the Hoa Hao Buddhist Church; Father Chan Tri of the Salvadorian Order in Saigon, and Father Ly. Although not official cosignatories, representatives of the Protestant and Cao Dai faiths also lent their unconditional support, agreeing that the principle of the statement transcended any religious boundaries. However, the greatest irony would lie in the fact that, because of the Communist government's strict control of all forms of media communications and its widespread false propaganda generation, this statement and subsequent events in the campaign would arouse much more public attention abroad than it would within Vietnam.

The U.S. congress was thus alerted to these events, what was seen as a further transgression of basic human rights by a government with a long reputation for this. Father Ly was invited to present an account of the latest violations in person in front of the U.S. congress. Alas, in what was probably the most striking indication of the absence of basic human rights in Vietnam, Father Ly's testimony was given in his absence by proxy due to the government's detainment of Father Ly. The result? 41 out of 54 congressman voted to delay ratification of the U.S.A.- Vietnam bilateral trade agreement until Vietnam's human rights records improved.

In May of 2001, Father Ly went on to provide written remarks for a briefing by the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus. For this act, Father Ly was rewarded by over 600 security police storming his parish to put him under house arrest. In another typically cowardly act by the presiding government, the terrorist events of September 11th were used to escape international attention in conducting a two hour trial in the absence of defense lawyers or independent witnesses. While the international community were honouring Father Ly with a nomination for the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the Vietnamese government honoured him with a sentence to a further 15 years of jail with an additional 5 years house arrest. Father Ly is now once again on the Amnesty International's official list of prisoners of conscience.

In a further transgression of basic human rights and civil liberties, two nephews and a niece of Father Ly living in Vietnam have just recently been accused of espionage, and are facing imminent trial. They are accused of maintaining relations with Vietnamese groups in the United States, in particular, with one of the directors of a large Vietnamese radio broadcasting station, and also with the president of the Commission for Religious Liberty in Vietnam, exiled in the United States. Their sentencing could very well involve the imposition of the death sentence.

Father Ly's case has and continues to attract international attention, most significantly from a number of internationally renowned non-government organisations, such as Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International in the U.S.A. have just recently initiated one of their well known intense action plans to campaign for the immediate and unconditional release of Father Ly, plans which have met with great success in the past in the case of a number of other prisoners of conscience throughout the world. These action plans involve flooding the Vietnamese government with letters calling for the prisoner of conscience's immediate release from throughout the globe. If you would like to support this campaign, please go to: http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/action/index.asp, and click on

Call for the Immediate Release of Father Ly, Religious Freedom Activist in Vietnam.

Of course, the story of Father Ly is only one story, albeit the most prominent, of a people's struggle for religious freedom and democracy. The Most Venerable Thich Quang Do of the Buddhist faith has been arrested and jailed for several lengthy terms as well. His "crimes" include: a) in 1995, organising an emergency food convoy to victims of the floods in the Mekong Delta because these efforts were deemed to be "sabotaging government policies and damaging the interests of the state", b) in 1994, putting out a document decrying the goverment's restriction of and persecution against the Buddhist church since 1975, and c) his intentions of escorting back to Saigon for urgent medical attention the 82 year old patriarch of the Buddhist church who at that time was under house arrest. His efforts in recent years have won acclaim internationally and also attracted nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize on three separate occasions.

Figure 4. A recent photo of the Most Venerable Quang Do

In September 2001, Ho Tan Anh, a 61-year-old farmer and a leader of the Buddhist Youth Movement in central Vietnam, burned himself to death to protest restrictions on his group. The Buddhist Youth Movement was founded in the late 1930s by the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, one of a number of independent religious groups now banned by Vietnam's government.

During February, 2001, as a group of faithful Hoa Hao worshippers were making the annual pilgrimage to their founder's worship centre, they were met with unprovoked violence from local public security police demanding that they abandon their pilgrimage or face the consequences. Those who did not comply, which were the majority, suffered baton blows and garment stripping with no-one spared, from a 16 year old boy, to an 83 year old man.

Apart from the prominent dissidents that attract international recognition and support, there are many other faceless individuals who have suffered and many religious organisations that have collapsed under the government's religious persecution. Countless clergymen and religious leaders have been sent to concentration camps, exiled, been victims of "staged" fatal accidents, burned themselves to death in protest and endured long prison sentences for the crime of engaging in religious worship. The Hoa Hao faith and the Buddhist faith both had their official organisations outlawed to be replaced by a quasi-religious national organisation in reality run by members handpicked by the government for their compliance in agreeing to gradually phase out religious worship. These puppet organisations would allow entry to religious training only to those who they considered were docile and subservient enough to acquiesce to government demands and not constitute a threat in speaking out against restrictions on religious worship. Official publications and magazines of religious faiths would also be outlawed and in their place would be government controlled publications with articles carefully selected and censored to eliminate any elements of criticism against government policy. There would often be disagreement between the Holy See in the Vatican in Rome and the goverment over who could be ordained to the priesthood or undergo promotion to bishophood because the government felt that the candidates deemed to be the most capable by the Vatican often were the ones with the greatest potential to speak out. As a result, there may be 8 to 10 parishes over which only one priest resides, thus making the essentials of religious practice such as weekly masses and Eucharist, religious gatherings, prayer groups etc. an impropable dream rather than a demanded necessity. Even foreign delegations of politicians assigned to assess first hand the situation of religious freedom in Vietnam would be forbidden to meet in person anyone considered to have the potential to speak out against the government's policy on religion.

In a totalitarian government with a suffocating oppressive rule, freedom to religiously worship may be the one opportunity for a brief and total liberation of the human spirit, a free expression of thought considered to be a basic unalienable human right. Although there is the old axiom that one should not engage politics in religious issues, when politics undermines religion to such an extent that it threatens its very existence, then the fight for religious freedom is no longer merely political, but becomes a struggle for one of the basic rights of any human being.

It is interesting to note the lengths to which President George W. Bush went to emphasise that the ongoing war against terrorism was not a war against Islam. In our modern society, there is a certain symbolism in this, almost as if saying that even in war, there are certain things too sacred to violate or transgress, one of them being the retention of the active choice of Muslims to practise their faith. The happenings in Vietnam constitute a blatant transgression of this religious freedom considered so sacred in our society.

Contact

Australia Vietnam Human Rights Committee
http://www.fva.org , AU
Quan Dinh - General Secretary Australia Vietnam Human Rights Committee, 614 02114320

Email

drquandinh@catholic.org

Keywords

Nguyen Van Ly Religious Freedom Vietnam

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