US travel ban proposed for Vietnamese officials behind religious persecution
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is being urged to impose a travel ban on government officials in Vietnam who commit religious persecution as among sanctions to punish the country for its dismal religious rights record. The State Department for the first time last year blacklisted Vietnam as a "country of particular concern for egregious, ongoing, and systematic abuses of the freedom of religion and belief." The designation carries with it the possibility of sanctions if the Vietnamese government fails to address concerns about religious freedom abuses.
Following consultations with Hanoi, the State Department will recommend actions against Vietnam to Congress and President George W. Bush this week, officials said. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a 10-member panel jointly appointed by Bush and Congress, has proposed "rendering inadmissible for entry into the United States any Vietnamese government official who was responsible for or directly carried out such violations." The commission did not identify them but they could include Cabinet and other high ranking officials.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice , the commission also called for up to one million dollars in US allocations for programs that will directly promote freedom of religion and belief and related human rights in Vietnam.
Although Bush has the authority to waive any action against Vietnam, the Commission "firmly believes that to do so would effectively render meaningless" the US legal process, said the letter, a copy of which was made available to AFP.
It would also "undermine our nation's commitment to the promotion of freedom of religion or belief throughout the world," the commission said.
"These are not economic sanctions, but targeted responses that directly address the problem," said Binh Vo, president of the non-partisan Vietnamese-American Public Affairs Committee, which promotes involvement of Vietnamese-Americans in the political system.
The Vietnamese communist government imposes strict controls over religious organizations and treats leaders of unauthorized religious groups with intense suspicion, branding many of them as subversives, US-based Human Rights Watch charged.
Targeted in particular are ethnic minority Christians, Mennonites, and members of the independent Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam. There are hundreds of religious prisoners in the country, Human Rights Watch said.
While relations between the Vatican and Vietnam have warmed in recent years, at least three Roman Catholics remain in prison.
They include 64-year-old Father Pham Minh Tri, who has been imprisoned for the last 18 years, despite suffering dementia for most of the past decade.
"The Bush Administration needs to send a strong message to the Vietnamese government that the US will not tolerate this kind of persecution," said Brad Adams, Asia Director of Human Rights Watch, in an "open" letter to Rice.
Those behind violence against religious believers, including by civilians acting in concert with government officials, should be investigated and punished, he said.
Such incidents include the violent suppression of the April 2004 protests by Montagnards in Vietnam's Central Highlands, and reports of torture, beatings and killings of ethnic minority Protestants in both the Central and Northern Highlands, he said.
The US blacklisting had made the Vietnamese authorities more sensitive to the appearance of the regimes policies on religion, but has not significantly altered its repressive policies, Vo said.
Many religious leaders such as Pastor Nguyen Hong Quang and Buddhist leader Thich Quang Do remain in jail or under virtual house arrest.
According to a Vietnamese Catholic priest, Chan Tin, a few dissidents released by the government as part of the Lunar New Year amnesty this year were only "released" but are not truly "free," Vo said.
Agence France Presse - March 13, 2005.
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