By Kok Ksor, President, Montagnard Foundation, Inc.
Special to ASSIST News Service

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.

Source: ANS