Vietnam: Officials confiscate home of evangelist

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Lead story - Friday May 16, 2008
VIETNAM: OFFICIALS CONFISCATE HOME OF EVANGELIST
Phenomenally effective former opium addict cited for ‘illegal religious activities.’

HANOI, May 16 (Compass Direct News) – Local officials in Lao Cai province have confiscated the land and home of a former opium addict because of his phenomenal success as an evangelist, local Christian sources said.

Sua Yinh Siong of Lau Chai village, in Sapa district in the Northwest Mountainous Region, had long been a desperate opium addict, leading to destitution for him and his family. In 2004, after hearing a Firm Foundation broadcast over FEBC radio in his own Hmong language and deciding to follow Christ, he was able to quit his debilitating opium addiction in astonishingly short order with God’s help, he said.

Siong broke completely from his animistic past, taking down paraphernalia for ancestor worship and other spirit-related articles and burning them. His joy over his liberation soon spread to others, and eventually more than 200 families in Sapa district also decided to follow Christ.

The number of Christians kept growing, not just in his own village and district, but in areas several hours away.

Instead of being pleased that a member of their community had been able to rehabilitate his life for his own good and that of his family and community, local government officials launched a campaign of harassment against him. It was not long before Siong began to receive stern warnings against his activities.

This escalated to more open harassment when government officials threatened to seize his property and run him off of it.

Out of appreciation for bringing them the gospel, some of the new believers had helped Siong to buy some terraced rice fields. They diligently completed all the required legal paperwork at both the local and the provincial levels.

Earlier this month, Siong told other Christian leaders that the harassment had reached a crisis point – in April local and provincial officials had confiscated his land, citing “illegal religious activities.”

In the first few days of this month, Siong said, officials evicted him from his home and threatened to destroy it.

Located in his ancestral village, the house is the same one in which he was born and raised and where he started is own family. Officials could not have picked a worse time to take his home; his wife gave birth to a child in mid-April. The infant became seriously ill and was receiving treatment at the Lao Cai provincial hospital.

Such harassment and worse has long been used against ethnic minority Christians in Vietnam’s Northwest Mountainous Region. Since the mid-1990s local officials have driven some 20,000 believers to abandon ancestral lands and homes and flee to Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

Questionable Progress

Such mistreatment of religious believers has been reduced since Vietnam promulgated more enlightened religion legislation in 2005, but it has not stopped. Vietnam’s treatment of Christians in the northwest provinces continues to receive mixed reviews.

Christian sources said experiences such as Siong’s, deliberately orchestrated by government officials, still happen all too often.

“Officials clearly still believe the instructions they are under give them the freedom to suppress new believers without violating Vietnam’s religion regulations,” said one long-time observer.

The Central Bureau of Religious Affairs instruction manual for training officials, entitled “Concerning the Task of the Protestant Religion in the Northwest Mountainous Region” and revised in 2007, shows no change to the 2006 document’s core objective to “solve the Protestant problem” by subduing its development, according to a February report by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and the International Society for Human Rights.

The 2006 manual had outlined a government plan to “resolutely subdue the abnormally rapid and spontaneous development of the Protestant religion in the region.”

“Whereas the 2006 manual provided specific legitimacy for local officials to force renunciations of faith among members of less well-established congregations, the 2007 edition imposes an undefined and arbitrary condition of stability upon the freedom of a congregation to operate,” the CSW report says. “Therefore, the treatment of any congregation deemed not to ‘stably practice religion’ is implicitly left to the arbitration of local officials, who had previously been mandated to force renunciations of faith.”

Without a full and unconditional prohibition on forcing renunciations of faith, the report concludes, the amended manual does not go far enough to redress problems in the 2006 original.

So far, Vietnam claims to have registered only about 90 of the approximately 1,200 congregations in the Northwest Mountainous Region.

But registration of congregations is often used to curtail rather than enable religious activities. For example, the registration procedure requires congregations to list by name all believers over 12 years old. Some congregations report that local officials then use this list to exclude any children or visitors not on the list from participating in worship services or other church activities.

Designation as Religious Freedom Violator

Still, the country has shown signs of progress. For example, authorities have recently permitted church leaders to hold the first training seminar ever for Hmong leaders since the Hmong movement to Christian faith began 20 years ago.

Most of Vietnam’s Christians are ethnic minorities often living in remote areas of the Central Highlands and the Northwest Mountainous Region. Much more than ethnic Vietnamese in the lowlands, they continue to suffer harassment, discrimination, and still, in some cases, harsh persecution.

In a hearing on human rights in Vietnam before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Wednesday (May 14), U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Commissioner Leonard Leo said that progress in religious freedom has been accompanied by persistent abuses, discrimination and restrictions.

“Local government officials [are] confiscating the property and destroying the homes of ethnic minority Protestants in the northwest provinces, reportedly in an effort to persuade them to renounce their faith and return to traditional religious practices,” Leo said. “In view of the ongoing and serious problems faced by many of Vietnam’s religious communities, the uneven pace of reforms meant to improve the situation, the continued detention of religious prisoners of concern, and what can only be seen as a deteriorating human rights situation overall, the Commission again recommends that Vietnam be re-designated as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’ or CPC.”

In spite of religious rights improvements, the removal of Vietnam from the state department’s list of the worst violators of religious freedom in 2006 was premature, Leo said.

“Improvements for some religious communities do not extend fully to others; progress in one province is not realized in another; national laws are not fully implemented at the local and provincial levels and are sometimes being used to restrict rather than protect religious freedom,” he said. “There continue to be far too many abuses and restrictions affecting Vietnam’s diverse religious communities, including the imprisonment and detention of individuals for reasons related to their religious activity or religious freedom advocacy.”

The state department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, on the other hand, believes Vietnam has shown considerable progress and no longer deserves the CPC designation.

State department spokesman Tom Casey said at a May 2 press briefing that while a number of religious freedom issues remain, efforts Vietnam has taken to address concerns merit its removal from the CPC list.

“We took them off the list because, among other things, they’d released a significant number of prisoners, including 35 that we had specifically raised with the government,” Casey said. “They have also reopened most of the churches that had been forcibly closed, particularly in the Central Highlands. They put forward a new legal framework on religion that banned forced renunciations of faith. And we are also, of course, in regular contact with religious groups throughout the country, and they have all reported a significant decrease in the instances of harassment and abuse directed at religious believers.”

END

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http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.a ... D53B42A37F

Religious Freedom Lost on Vietnam
By Michael Benge
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, August 05, 2008

In direct contravention of President Bush’s policy of promoting religious freedom abroad, the State Department has established a foreign policy toward Vietnam promoting that communist government’s control of churches. This is the same government that murdered over a million of their own people after the communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1975.

In the 1980s, the phrase “Coke Bottle Diplomacy” was coined to describe US policy put forth by our best and brightest of that time, whereby trade and American investment would bring communist China into the civilized world and change that country’s long history of human rights abuses and repression of religion and democracy. The policy never worked and has only resulted in a huge trade deficit, US dollars funding a huge military buildup, poisoned products, and untold number – tens of thousands – of Tibetans and Chinese killed and imprisoned in slave labor camps.

The Bush administration has resuscitated this failed policy of Coke Bottle Diplomacy and is applying it to Vietnam, and in 2007, the US accumulated trade deficit was $10.6 billion.

Recently, dozens of democracy activists, journalists, cyber-dissidents and Christian and other religious leaders have been arrested and imprisoned by the Vietnamese communists. Congressional leaders and human-rights groups have charged Hanoi with "unbridled human-rights abuses," the "worst wave of oppression in 20 years." Some in Congress have accused the Administration of worshiping at the “Alter of Trade” while turning a blind eye toward religious persecution and human rights abuses in Vietnam.

Despite Vietnam’s increased human rights abuses, on June 24th, President Bush, for the third time, met with communist Vietnamese officials in the Oval Office, this time with Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. The meeting focused on improving trade, developing even closer economic ties and increasing US investment in Vietnam in order to bail out Vietnam’s failing economy. In passing, President Bush told the prime minister that he “thought the strides the government is making towards religious freedom is noteworthy.”

Noteworthy indeed. President Bush’s Pollyanna view of religious freedom in Vietnam is based in part on erroneous reporting fed to him by the Department of State. In 2006, Vietnam was removed from the State Department’s designation as a Country of Particular Concern for severe violations of religious freedom. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, joined by Human Rights Organizations, has urged the Department of State to put Vietnam back on its CPC religious freedom blacklist.

One of the justifications that the Department of State gave for removing Vietnam from its blacklist is that regime’s purported liberalization of restrictions on house churches. However, evidence disputes this claim. The fact is the Vietnamese communist regime has imposed even tighter restrictions. Although Christian families are now allowed to pray in their home, they are not allowed to pray in groups – including extended families, in public or in churches unless they are government sanctioned and controlled.

In the Central Highlands and other contentious areas, US officials are taken to Potempkin villages and model government churches and fed disinformation by government agents posing as religious leaders. US officials often take their word as the gospel. One such agent and informant for the State Department’s Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom John Hanford is Siu Kim, a Montagnard with a church in Plieku, who works for Vietnam’s communist government. According to that government’s statistics, the Montagnards are among Vietnam’s poorest inhabitants; yet, Siu Kim has been on four tours to the US, paid for by the communist government to propagandize the Montagnards here.

Upon his appointment, US Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Michalak stated that he was going to continue the policy of Ambassador Hanford of promoting the accelerated registration of churches in Vietnam. However, Ambassador Michalak neglected to explain the cost to religious freedom that this registration entails. To register, churches must submit to the Central Bureau of Religious Affairs (CBA) a list of names and addresses of members, and only those approved by the CBA can attend services. All church meetings and sermons must be approved by the CBA, and sermons must be given in Vietnamese – even in ethnic minority churches. Pastors and priests can neither deviate from the approved sermon nor proselytize, and CBA police monitor all services. Nor can churches and pastors provide aid and comfort to local villagers. This is de facto communist control of churches in Vietnam.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill reconfirmed this misguided policy in his March 12th testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as further justification stated, “Since the CPC designation was removed, there has been further progress. The government held over 3,000 training courses and 10,000 workshops for officials throughout the country on how to implement the new law on religion.” What Hill forgot to mention is Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung’s certification of “the Vietnamese communist party’s 2007-8 ‘Religion Campaign Plan’ to train 21,811 communist religious workers in the political management of religion, with a special focus on ethnic minorities.” (Vietnam News Agency, 6/13/07) These religious “workers” are to ensure that churches and church members comply with CBA’s registration requirements and the communist control of religion.

The Vietnamese communist government repeatedly promises to ease up on religious repression while it simultaneously steps up its crack down those advocating religious freedom. The communist government does not discriminate in its repression of religious faiths, nor who it persecutes – both men and women. Most noted is Roman Catholic Priest Father Thaddeus Nguyen Van Ly who was depicted on television gagged and restrained during sentencing to several years in prison in a Vietnamese kangaroo court.

The recently deceased Thich Huyen Quang, 87, patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), one of Vietnam's most beloved and esteemed spiritual leaders, who along with the UBCV deputy leader Thich Quang Do, was sent into internal exile in 1982 and detained in remote provinces for the past 26 years for refusing to submit Vietnamese Buddhism to Communist Party control. Although over 80% of the Buddhists in Vietnam adhere to the UBCV, the government refuses to recognize the UBCV and continues to try to force the members to join the communist state-controlled Vietnam Buddhist Sangha church. Monks, nuns and members of the UBCV, the Hoa Hao Buddhist Church, and the Khmer Krom Buddhist Church (Cambodian ethnic minorities) are continually harassed, beaten and imprisoned.

On February 8, two hundred Khmer Krom Buddhist monks peacefully demonstrated in Soc Treang, Vietnam, asking for religious freedom. The Vietnamese government responded by brutally beating, arresting, imprisoned nineteen Monks -- five were given prison sentences of 2 to 4 years. Vietnam went so far as to arrange the kidnapping of the Venerable Tim Sakhorn, a Cambodian citizen who was the Abbot of the Phnom Den North Pagoda temple in Takeo province, Cambodia, who was aiding the Khmer Krom refugees who fled the religious repression in Vietnam and sought refuge in Cambodia. The Venerable Tim Sakhorn was imprisoned in Vietnam and ironically charged with crossing the border without proper documentation. Most recently, Vietnamese authorities claim that he has been released from prison, but to no one’s surprise, he has since “disappeared.”

While Vietnamese communist officials can travel freely throughout the United States, US officials cannot travel freely in Vietnam without advance notice to national and local officials and accompaniment by Vietnamese government minders and security personnel. UN and independent human rights organizations are not allowed an established presence in Vietnam; therefore, incidences such as the “disappearance” of the Cambodian Monk, nor the plethora of other human rights abuses, cannot be investigated

Routinely, house church Christians are rounded up and beaten, given electric shocks, and jailed when they refuse to join communist controlled churches. Reports continue to emanate from Vietnam that Montagnard and Hmong men and women are still being subjected to forced renunciation of their Christian faith, often resulting in torture and sometimes death. As communist Vietnam's "President" Nguyen Minh Triet's 2007 met with President Bush in the White House, Y-Het Vin, a young Hroi ethnic minority man from Phu Yen province was being tortured by Vietnam’s religious police (CBA). He died from injuries after several days of sustained beatings in an attempt to force him to recant his Christian faith. This is not an isolated case. Over 350 Montagnard political prisoners, many of whom are Protestant pastors, languish in jail, and the number that died or was tortured while imprisoned is unknown.

Because of continual religious persecution and other human rights abuses, large numbers of Montagnards continue to flee to Cambodia seeking asylum with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Unfortunately, UNHCR’s policy toward the Montagnards is heavily influenced by communist Vietnam, and the Montagnards are continually forced back to communist Vietnam in violation of UNHCR’s charter. Equally as sad for the persecuted Montagnards is that the US’ refugee policy is also heavily influenced by the communist Vietnamese. During a trip Cambodia in February 2007, Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, told a press conference that Montagnards should stay in Vietnam and not seek asylum in Cambodia for Vietnamese officials assured her that Montagnards were not being abused.

Tell that to H’Suin Rmah, a Montagnard, who recently fled to Cambodia seeking refuge with UNHCR after being raped by Vietnamese officials. She lives in fear, not knowing if UNHCR will send her back to Vietnam, even though by nature of the crime, she is qualified for resettlement in the US. Several cases of Montagnard women being repeatedly raped by provincial police/authorities as the price to obtain their papers and passports have been reported.

Evidence shows that Sauerbrey’s advice is very bad policy. In April of this year, police arrested Y Ben Hdok in Dak Lak after he and other Montagnards in his district tried to flee the persecution and seek refuge in Cambodia. Vietnamese police refused to allow his family or a lawyer to visit him during three days in detention. On May 1, police told Mr. Y Ben's wife to pick up his battered body. His rib and limbs were broken and his teeth had been knocked out. Police labeled the death a suicide." This is not an isolated incident, and happens all too often.

President Bush has called religious freedom "the first freedom of the human soul." However, he wouldn’t attend services at St. Johns across the street from the White House if it were controlled by the communist party, so why then would his foreign policy makers think the people of Vietnam want to worship in churches controlled by a repressive regime whose only religion is atheist communism?

The State Department’s mistaken policy on religion in Vietnam sends the message that if the US supports communist control of churches, we will also turn a blind eye to their continued crack down and imprisonment of advocates for human rights, democracy, free speech and internet access. This is Coke Bottle Diplomacy at its worst, and is playing right into the hands of the same brutal communist regime that murdered more than 1 million of its own people.
Michael Benge spent 11 years in Vietnam as a Foreign Service Officer, including five years as a Prisoner of war-- 1968-73 and is a student of South East Asian Politics. He is very active in advocating for human rights and religious freedom and has written extensively on these subjects.

[Felix Culpa]

Very interesting---thanks!

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/ ... igion.html

July 22, 2012
Vietnam's Two-Front War on Religion
By Michael Benge

The Vietnamese regime's religion is communism, and the Party views all other organized religions as a direct threat to national security and its authoritarian control of the Vietnamese people. Religious tolerance exists only in theory; Article 70 of Vietnam's Constitution of 1992 states that citizens "shall enjoy freedom of belief and of religion; they can follow any religion or follow none; all religions are equal before the law; and places of worship of all faiths and religions are protected by the law." However, the fly in the ointment is this statement: "No one can violate freedom of belief and of religion; nor can anyone misuse beliefs and religions to contravene the law and State policies." This opens the door for officials of the communist government to arbitrarily define what constitutes a violation and which violations misuse and contravene law and policies.

WikiLeaks released encrypted State Department diplomatic cables revealing that former U.S. Officials John Hanford, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary for the bureau of population, refugees, and migration, were making wrongful and harmful policy decisions regarding religious freedom in Vietnam and relative to whether Montagnard refugees in the Central Highlands were genuinely fleeing persecution. The decisions were based on disinformation fed them by an agent of the communist government. The agent, "Pastor" Siu Y. Kim, presided over the communist Vietnamese government-controlled "Potempkin" Hoi Thanh Tin Lanh Vietnam church for Montagnards in Plieku city, Gialai Province. And these two State Department officials were largely responsible for delisting Vietnam as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for egregious violations of religious freedom.

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right. Some of our Founding Fathers fled religious persecution in their own countries of origin, and they saw religious freedom as vital to the existence of the United States. Yet the State Department has determined to remove this basic freedom from their annual report on human rights violations around the world.

In her recent meeting in Hanoi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Vietnam's Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and "raised concerns about human rights, including the continued detention of activists, lawyers, and bloggers, for the peaceful expression of opinions and ideas," focusing on particular concern "about restrictions on free expression online and the upcoming trial of the founders of the so-called Free Journalists Club." However, concern over continued religious persecution was absent from her agenda, as was any mention of the hundreds of imprisoned Christian believers. Trade seems to have a higher priority than human rights and religious freedom in Vietnam. Congressman Frank Wolf has called for the immediate dismissal of the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam after he reportedly demonstrated little concern for the importance of human rights in the country.

Clinton also told Foreign Minister Minh that in regard to trade, "we're working on expanding it through a far-reaching, new regional trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership." There is no indication that the State Department will link progress on human rights and religious freedom to gaining Vietnam's most valued prize from the U.S. -- a Trans-Pacific Partnership in trade. During the first half of 2012, the U.S. imported $9.3 billion of goods from Vietnam, while Vietnam imported only $2.4 billion from the U.S.

Despite the fact that freedom of religion is a crucial part of Vietnam's Constitution, the communist leadership continues to grossly violate the freedoms of all faiths. Members of Congress, Freedom House, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and human rights groups have called upon the State Department to re-list Vietnam as a Country of Particular Concern; however, their calls have fallen upon the deaf ears of the Obama administration.

Vietnam's latest egregious violations include the destruction of two Hmong ethnic minority churches and the threatened destruction of a third. On June 13, the regime destroyed the Phan Ho Church of the registered Evangelical Church of Vietnam (North) in Dien Bien province. On June 17, the Ho He Church, erected in April by the unregistered Vietnam Good News Mission, was also demolished. The church threatened with demolition, the Cong Church, is also part of the Vietnam Good News Mission. The Hmong Christian movement in Vietnam's Northwest Mountainous Region has grown from nothing to include some 400,000 believers in the last two decades (Compass Direct News, 06/29/2012).

Also, on July 1, a violent attack was launched against the community of Con Cuông (Vinh Diocese) as they gathered for mass, where a priest was beaten and dozens of parishioners were injured -- five were hospitalized with serious injuries, including one woman with a fractured skull, and many young Catholics were arrested and held in custody. Local sources believe that this is part of a government campaign to eradicate Christianity in rural areas in Vietnam. The rapid growth of Christian believers, even after decades of communist indoctrination, is seen as a serious threat to its authoritarian rule. Led by plainclothes police, the attacks are said to have been carried out by government-sponsored thugs belonging to the Vietnamese Fatherland Front (Mặt Trận Tổ Quốc Việt Nam), which is closely linked to the Communist Party of Vietnam and commonly used as "enforcers" by the government.

The destruction of churches is just the latest example of the regime's campaign of violence against Hmong Christians. In May 2011, reports from Viet-Catholic, Vatican news services, and local NGOs indicated that over 75 ethnic Hmong Christians had been killed by Vietnamese forces, while hundreds more were wounded and/or arrested and taken to undisclosed locations. An estimated 9,000 Hmong, mainly Catholics and Protestant Christians, had gathered in the Muong Nhe district in North Vietnam's Dien Bien province to honor the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Located in the remote and mountainous area bordering Laos and China, Dien Bien is one of Vietnam's poorest provinces. The province's estimated 170,000 Hmong represent 35 percent of its population, with the Hmong earning less than a tenth of the average annual income of the Vietnamese (AT, 06/12/2011). The Vietnamese regime has also forced many Hmong to recant their beliefs in Christianity through threats, torture, and imprisonment.

"Under current recognition rules, a church, especially House Churches, in the Central Highlands and in the North, such as in Dien Bien Province, cannot be recognized unless it has an ordained pastor in charge." And, of course, preachers can "be ordained as pastors [only] following GVN-sanctioned refresher training[.]" According to the "2008 Internal 'Training Manual for the Task Concerning the Protestant Religion," "it is not acceptable to be apolitical; religious leaders are expected to affirm actively both the Party and the State." This means that church leaders (i.e., Pastor Siu Y. Kim) and their followers must place communism over God and accept the state's control of all religious activities. According to the U.S. Consulate, "Pastor Kim ... is sincere in his approach to working with the government as a legal SECV pastor" (04HOCHIMINHCITY 303).

The Second Front: The Chameleon "Pastor" Siu Kim in North Carolina

According to Vietnam government statistics and the United Nations, the Montagnards are among Vietnam's poorest inhabitants; yet "Pastor" Siu Kim has made five or six trips to the U.S., some reportedly paid for with taxpayers' dollars by the State Department, and others by the communist government, to engage in propaganda here. During these trips he met with Montagnards and religious leaders in North and South Carolina, Texas, and other states, regaling them with fairy tales about religious freedom under communism in the Central Highlands. With relative ease, he was able to meet with State Department officials, the staff of Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator John Kerry (a key advocate for communist Vietnam), as well as religious figures and other institutions and groups that influence U.S. policy decisions. Siu Kim's trips also include visits to Canada, Thailand, and Malaysia.

After initially being invited as a guest speaker in 2001, Siu Kim succeeded in entrenching himself as pastor of the First Montagnard Alliance Church (FMA Church) in Raleigh, NC. He then ingratiated himself with the Rev. Michael (Mick) Noel, South Atlantic district superintendent of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, who, like a true colonialist, exerts heavy-handed control over the FMA and other C&MA-linked churches. Disregarding both the bylaws of the FMA Church and required consultation with Church elders and the congregation, the Rev. Noel then anointed Siu Kim as pastor of the FMA Church.

Using the Church as a bully pulpit, Siu Kim began attacking leaders of the Montagnard Community, especially former jungle resistance fighters and other Church pastors and elders, reportedly issuing veiled threats that if anyone opposed him they might not be allowed to return to Vietnam to visit their relatives, or if they did, accidents could befall them or their relatives. This spread fear throughout the community, for the Montagnards are aware that he was and still is part of the draconian religious police apparatus in the Central Highlands. Montagnards now residing in North Carolina report that while Siu Kim was pastor of the "Potemkin" communist-controlled church in Pleiku, they saw him participate with police and government officials in the burning of a Church in Lao Village, Chu Se District. He also allegedly joined police officials in raids on villages in Plei Tot Pioch and throughout the Chu Se District area searching for Montagnards who had participated in the mass protests against religious persecution in 2001.

Preaching with venom from the pulpit, Siu Kim has verbally attacked the members of the Montagnard Human Rights Organization, stating that "MHRO works for the devil." MHRO helped more than 1,000 Montagnards who fled persecution in the Central Highlands and found refuge in the camps of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Cambodia to come to the U.S. They also assisted 174 Montagnard families with 913 children in reuniting with their loved ones who had previously been granted asylum in the U.S. Since Siu Kim's takeover, 60% of the Church's congregation no longer comes to services.

But meanwhile, in the State Department, "the band plays on!"

Michael Benge spent 11 years in Vietnam as a foreign service officer and is a student of South East Asian politics. He is very active in advocating for human rights, religious freedom, and democracy for the peoples of the region and has written extensively on these subjects.

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