Righteous protests: when the Vietnamese prime minister came to the United States, he heard from Vietnamese Americans

RELATIVELY few Americans spend their time thinking about the plight of the millions of people living under Vietnamese Communism. The visit of Vietnamese prime minister Phan Van Khai to the United States last month provided an opportunity to change that. Khai's trip--the first official visit by a Vietnamese leader since the end of the Vietnam War--was welcomed by some as a chance for the U.S. to "bury the ghost of a past conflict" (the words of the Houston Chronicle's editorialists) and to show, as Sen. John McCain put it, "that enemies can become partners and partners friends." To thousands of Vietnamese Americans across the country, however, it was instead an occasion to point out the extent to which the Hanoi government abuses its citizens, and to call on the Bush administration to use its leverage to push for change.

Take Nina Nguyen, who flew from her home in Hawaii to the capital to participate in two demonstrations while the prime minister was in town. The director of a television station for Vietnamese Americans that promotes religious and civil liberty in Vietnam, Nguyen fled the Communists in 1975 (she was evacuated by American airlift). "I don't fight for me, because I have freedom in America," she says. "I fight for 80 million people living in Vietnam. The Vietnamese Communists are terrorists. They used force to overcome the Republic of Vietnam--they took away the traditional country we learned from our history."

Her sentiment is hardly uncommon. Nguyen Tai Dam, the founder of a Vietnamese-American organization in northern California, organized a demonstration in San Francisco that he estimates around 200 people attended. "We have to fight for our brethren in Vietnam--to let their voices be heard to the free world." Dam was a lieutenant colonel in the Republic of Vietnam's armed forces during the war, and, like most officers in that army, he was imprisoned afterward by the Communists, in his case for ten years. "Without these protests and demonstrations in the U.S., I am sure that the Vietnamese government would oppress its people even more. And without these demonstrations on the outside, the people inside the country wouldn't have the courage to voice their concerns."

A group of Montagnards, a predominantly Christian tribal people who live in Vietnam's Central Highlands, also organized a demonstration during Khai's visit, along with fellow ethnic minorities the Hmong and Khmer Krom. Members of the three groups fought alongside American soldiers during the Vietnam War, and have suffered for it since. The fate of the Montagnards has been especially grim. Their population has reportedly declined significantly since 1975, perhaps by as much as half, even though the total Vietnamese population has exploded. In 2001, several thousand Montagnards held a series of peaceful demonstrations in response to the confiscation of their ancestral land and to crackdowns on their freedom to worship. The Vietnamese government met the demonstrators with force, injuring and arresting hundreds and prompting over a thousand more to flee to Cambodia. Ever since, Vietnam's Montagnards have been subject to increasing intimidation and violence, a fact that came to international attention during Easter of 2004, when security forces attacked demonstrators killing several--some say hundreds--and wounding many more.

The lack of religious liberty is widespread in Vietnam, despite some reported improvements in recent years. The banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, once the largest Buddhist organization in the country, has found its monks and members sentenced and monitored, and its top two leaders confined to their monasteries for years. Mennonite Christians have been arrested, sentenced, and beaten. And the Hmong, hill tribes living in the north, have been pressured to renounce their Christian faith through monitoring, detention, torture, and sometimes fatal assaults. In fact, conditions are so bad that in 2004 the State Department designated Vietnam a "country of particular concern" (CPC) with regard to religious freedom.

According to Freedom House, the think tank that measures degrees of freedom around the globe, Vietnam is not quite as restrictive as North Korea but less free than Iran and Egypt. This year it received a seven, the worst possible score, in political rights and a six in civil liberties, making its average the same as that of China, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan. "Vietnam is similar to China in its policy of registration and treatment of non-registered groups," says Paul Marshall of Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, "but in Vietnam you get the additional factor of assaults on the Montagnards and Hmongs." Vietnam allows religious organizations to register with the government, but rather than promoting religious freedom such registration can curtail it, bringing the groups under Hanoi's control and creating what one observer pithily called "religions with socialist orientations." Open Doors, a Christian organization that each year ranks countries according to their levels of religious freedom, places Vietnam at number three, behind North Korea and Saudi Arabia, on its list of countries most hostile to Christianity.