By Lorraine Ahearn
Staff Writer
News-Record (Greensboro, North Carolina, USA)
Montagnard leaders who make Greensboro their capital in exile met last weekend to do something that could get them arrested back in their native highlands of Vietnam.
They got together and prayed.
It was a moment of hope, while it lasted. President Bush, the White House had announced, would this week become only the second U.S. president to visit since the American war ended in 1975 and the Communist regime took over the south.
Heads bowed, the Greensboro elders reflected on the leader of the free world’s arrival at a trade summit that in many ways symbolizes Hanoi’s entry into the global community.
For the Montagnards, a racial minority that allied with the United States and fought under U.S. command, would this be the hour? After 31 years of being driven from their mountain homeland, rounded up in "re-education" camps as American collaborators, watching their churches burn and their civil protests be brutally suppressed, would a light finally shine on a cruel, little-known footnote to America’s longest war?
In a word — no.
By last Monday, days before Bush left for Hanoi, the U.S. State Department complied with a key request by a Vietnamese foreign minister: That Vietnam be removed from the roster of countries that are blacklisted for their lack of religious freedom.
"This hurt us a lot," said Y-Siu Hlong of the Greensboro-based Montagnard Dega Foundation. "In reality, nothing has changed in the Central Highlands. People are still oppressed and hungry, people are still in prison and have no freedom of speech or religion. If we don’t do something, it will be genocide."
In explaining last week’s move, the Bush administration’s point man for international religious freedom, Ambassador-at-Large John Hanford III, called Vietnam "a model of progress."
But in a transcript of a press conference after Vietnam was taken off the list of "countries of particular concern," Hanford spoke of the large cities in Vietnam, not of remote areas such as the Central Highlands, closed to foreigners and reporters since civil unrest erupted in 2001.
"There really are two Vietnams," said Mark Manyin, an Asian affairs analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "There are the cities and coast, and then there are areas like the Central Highlands, where nobody knows what’s going on."
Nobody, that is, but the refugees who have escaped through Cambodia and made it to the United States — primarily to Greensboro, with its community of 5,000 or more exiled Montagnards.
From these escapees, the accounts are harrowing, and they suggest that the "two Vietnams" may be the one foreign dignitaries are shown and the off-limits areas under martial law.
Though Hanford last week said all prisoners had been freed, Pleiku native Nglol Rahlan, 50, on Friday brought Greensboro leaders a list of 271 current known prisoners from Pleiku, and 109 from Daklak. Many, he said, were arrested for attending Christian churches.
As recent refugees gathered in the Dega office on Summit Avenue to tell their stories Friday, Bush toured Hanoi. He compared the U.S. war in Vietnam to Iraq, in the sense that lives will not be sacrificed in vain.
But if the eyes of the world are once again on the United States and Vietnam, veteran highland relief worker Kay Reibold reflected last week, another point was critical: That the U.S. remember the thousands of Montagnards who fought and died for the Americans — and the villagers left behind when the U.S. pulled out.
"We’re attempting to build allies around the world," Reibold said. "Now, more than ever, the U.S. must show that it won’t abandon its former allies around the world."
Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com
They got together and prayed.
It was a moment of hope, while it lasted. President Bush, the White House had announced, would this week become only the second U.S. president to visit since the American war ended in 1975 and the Communist regime took over the south.
Heads bowed, the Greensboro elders reflected on the leader of the free world’s arrival at a trade summit that in many ways symbolizes Hanoi’s entry into the global community.
For the Montagnards, a racial minority that allied with the United States and fought under U.S. command, would this be the hour? After 31 years of being driven from their mountain homeland, rounded up in "re-education" camps as American collaborators, watching their churches burn and their civil protests be brutally suppressed, would a light finally shine on a cruel, little-known footnote to America’s longest war?
In a word — no.
By last Monday, days before Bush left for Hanoi, the U.S. State Department complied with a key request by a Vietnamese foreign minister: That Vietnam be removed from the roster of countries that are blacklisted for their lack of religious freedom.
"This hurt us a lot," said Y-Siu Hlong of the Greensboro-based Montagnard Dega Foundation. "In reality, nothing has changed in the Central Highlands. People are still oppressed and hungry, people are still in prison and have no freedom of speech or religion. If we don’t do something, it will be genocide."
In explaining last week’s move, the Bush administration’s point man for international religious freedom, Ambassador-at-Large John Hanford III, called Vietnam "a model of progress."
But in a transcript of a press conference after Vietnam was taken off the list of "countries of particular concern," Hanford spoke of the large cities in Vietnam, not of remote areas such as the Central Highlands, closed to foreigners and reporters since civil unrest erupted in 2001.
"There really are two Vietnams," said Mark Manyin, an Asian affairs analyst for the Congressional Research Service. "There are the cities and coast, and then there are areas like the Central Highlands, where nobody knows what’s going on."
Nobody, that is, but the refugees who have escaped through Cambodia and made it to the United States — primarily to Greensboro, with its community of 5,000 or more exiled Montagnards.
From these escapees, the accounts are harrowing, and they suggest that the "two Vietnams" may be the one foreign dignitaries are shown and the off-limits areas under martial law.
Though Hanford last week said all prisoners had been freed, Pleiku native Nglol Rahlan, 50, on Friday brought Greensboro leaders a list of 271 current known prisoners from Pleiku, and 109 from Daklak. Many, he said, were arrested for attending Christian churches.
As recent refugees gathered in the Dega office on Summit Avenue to tell their stories Friday, Bush toured Hanoi. He compared the U.S. war in Vietnam to Iraq, in the sense that lives will not be sacrificed in vain.
But if the eyes of the world are once again on the United States and Vietnam, veteran highland relief worker Kay Reibold reflected last week, another point was critical: That the U.S. remember the thousands of Montagnards who fought and died for the Americans — and the villagers left behind when the U.S. pulled out.
"We’re attempting to build allies around the world," Reibold said. "Now, more than ever, the U.S. must show that it won’t abandon its former allies around the world."
Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com
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