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In four villages in Vietnam's Lai Chau Province a few weeks before Christmas, 19 police agents destroyed house churches belonging to ethnic Hmong Christians. Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom also reported that high-level authorities in the northwestern province threatened to "kill all Christian leaders."

The threats, according to the center, come after a year in which police beat to death three Hmong Christians. Among them was the 10-year-old child of a church leader.

Center director Nina Shea reports that human-rights abuses in Vietnam worsened in the past year. Vietnam's constitutional guarantee of religious freedom comes with excessive fines, surveillance, raids, torture, and church closings for religious bodies that do not submit to its extreme controls.

As Shea noted in congressional testimony last October, the Communist controls explain "why advocates of freedom of speech and freedom of religion are arrested for such vague offenses as 'inciting social disorder,' 'disrupting national unity,' and 'violating Vietnamese values and traditions.' "

Some 15,000 Hmong Christians from northwest provinces have fled to the Central Highlands in the past six years. There they found relative safety until a peaceful protest—or an "uprising," according to some sources—by numerous tribal groups in February 2001 led to a government crackdown. Troops uprooted Hmong highlanders and forced them into desolate lands. Authorities continue to use the protest as a pretext for raiding house churches.

The government campaign against unregistered house churches endangers more than 250,000 Hmong and other tribal (Montagnard) Christians. By contrast, in 2001 the government granted official recognition to—and clamped tight controls on—the Southern Evangelical Church of Vietnam, which represents about two-thirds of the country's 1.1 million evangelicals.

Including 5.2 million Catholics and other denominations, according to Operation World, Christians overall number 6.5 million, more than 8 percent of Vietnam's population.

Persecution is not limited to outlying areas. Police without a warrant last August raided a prayer meeting in the home of Pastor Bui Van Ba, general secretary of the Full Gospel House Church organization in Ho Chi Minh City.

The authorities beat Ba and others, violently shoved his wife around until she passed out from chest injuries, and bashed another pastor's head against a concrete wall—butit was Ba who was arrested for "resisting an officer doing his duty."

Rights groups have urged the State Department to designate Vietnam as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). That could lead to economic sanctions.

But Robert Seiple, former ambassador at large for international religious freedom, says "There's nothing to be gained by embarrassing the Vietnamese publicly, or by forcing them to shut down their human-rights dialogue with us because they've been embarrassed."

Seiple says Christians should urge their elected representatives to keep religious freedom on the agenda in all U.S. talks with Vietnamese officials. Thus U.S. officials must convey that the issue is not going to go away and must be resolved for Vietnam to have profitable international relations.

"We have to be persistent and consistent in terms of the talking points and agenda," Seiple says. "The dripping water will someday erode the rock, and all of us need to be part of that constant drip."

As part of that effort, politely request information about what steps Vietnam is taking to ensure religious freedom: H. E. Nguyen Tam Chien, Ambassador of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the U.S.A., 1233 20th Street N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036 (Fax: 202.861.0917).

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April 2004, Vol. 48, No. 4