AAM DISPATCH

This month, as Vietnam assumes the Presidency of the UN Security Council in New York, the AP reports continuing conflicts back home between Vietnamese police and followers of the superstar Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) took the opportunity to highlight what they see as Vietnam’s continued human-rights abuses, particularly in the realm of religious freedom.

The commission writes that:

…religious freedom conditions have not improved since Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and have deteriorated for some religious groups and the human rights lawyers who try to protect them…

As America Abroad explored in The First Freedom, Vietnam has become something of a Rochard test for how you view the struggle to advance International Religious Freedom. Many point to the end of violent forced renunciations of faith and the release of religious activists from Vietnamese prisons as evidence of monumental progress. Yet there are those, including the folks at USCIRF, who argue that despite these first steps, the Communist government of Vietnam still has many miles to go.

The Commission has called for the Obama Administration to turn up the heat by placing Hanoi back on the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) – that’s among the strongest sticks available to the US government in the decade-old International Religious Freedom legislation. But that move seems unlikely, since Vietnam essentially worked their way off the CPC list three years ago. And the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom champions the case of Vietnam as a prime example of the effectiveness of IRF diplomacy.

To see an interactive map of USCIRF Countries of Concern, go here.

Matt Ozug Religion, Vietnam

America Abroad’s September’s show, called “The First Freedom,” will focus on the issue of international religious freedom. I’ve just returned from Vietnam, where I was producing a field piece on the Communist Government’s modest steps forward in expanding the rights of Vietnam’s faithful. It’s a rich topic. Vietnam has a wonderful diversity of faiths, and I was able to listen in on far more worship services than we’ll be able to include in the show’s broadcast. Here’s a small glimpse at a morning service in one of Hanoi’s many Buddhist temples:

Tu Bi Hi Xa temple is one of the oldest temples in Hanoi. On the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month, streams of people arrive all day long to celebrate. Worshipers buy incense and paper money from religious stalls set up on the sidewalk, and enter the centuries old pagoda to make offerings to deceased relatives.

A constant chanting drowns out the street outside. I spoke to a woman that arrived with her nephew. She came to remember her husband who was killed in the American war (or what we in the US call the Vietnam War). She lived a few hours drive outside of Hanoi, but she was in town for a doctors appointment and wanted to come make an offering and ask for continued health. But she say’s “I’m not Buddhist.”

Its an interesting thing about Vietnam: religion imbues local culture and hard lines are difficult to draw between practices that are strictly religious and what you might call cultural. Many here practice what’s called the “triple religion of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.” Most homes have a small alter to ancestors.

Many faiths have co-existed in Vietnam – though by no means always peacefully. Roman Catholicism – originally a Portuguese import – has been present in some form in Vietnam since the early 1600′s. But it was threatened by waves of violence, including a massacre in the 1800′s by a commander known as “the Western Pacifying Heretic Exterminating Generalissimo.” Communism, it seems, is simply the most recent cross to bear for religious practitioners of in Vietnam.

Matt Ozug South Asia, Vietnam

We’ve been ramping up work on our September radio program on international religious freedom in the past week. One of my colleagues has just arrived in Pakistan and another has just returned from Vietnam, and those of us that have stayed on solid ground have been interviewing all sorts of people who have somehow worked on or been touched by this issue—from architects of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act to people who have fled religious persecution and resettled in the US.

One man we spoke with, a Muslim Uyghur from Xinjiang Province in western China talked about how he came to a small town in Tennessee to study journalism and began to write about his own experiences and the oppression of the Uyghurs—and more than 10 years later, he has yet to return home and says that he can never go back now that he is a recognized dissident.

I’ve been working on a video-web feature on the situation of the Baha’is in Iran, and in the last few days, I’ve met with several Iranian Baha’is who have had to leave home—one who paid smugglers to take him to Pakistan after his father was executed and another who was imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison as a young teen.

The common theme in these stories of religious persecution has been a loss of home—leaving, and never returning. There’s no question, if you ask these people, and anyone who enjoys practicing their religion openly and unfettered, why religious freedom is important, crucial, even, to living a healthy fulfilling life—and why it’s not something to be taken for granted. In fact, many Americans know religious freedom as the “first freedom,” the foundation for all other freedoms and a cornerstone of the campaign for human rights.

At the personal level, it’s not hard to understand why this issue is important, and why it touches a nerve with many, from government officials to churchgoers. The US has enshrined the promotion of religious freedom into law, and it’s been an official component of US foreign policy for more than a decade now. But how successful has America been in this goal? And how much can it hope to achieve given the trade-offs—pushing for religious freedom in China versus fostering economic ties and good relations with Beijing?

We’ll explore these and other questions in the show, coming out the first week of September.

Monica Villavicencio China, Pakistan, Religion, Vietnam