ABOUT RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. Mar. 25, 2000.

The VCP regime acted without mercy against the Catholics, Protestants and Buddhists right after it assumed control over the northern half of the country in 1955. It crushed every protest with rough hands and had no fear of being condemned by the free world as no information could leak out of its bamboo curtain.

Since 1975, however, the VCP has had less free hands to act at its will against the religions in South Vietnam. It had to carry out the religious policies in the South with wariness, but that didn't mean less brutal. During the last two decades, the Communist regime has been trying to restrict religious actvities by every ruse they might have thought up.

All the five major religions in Vietnam - Buddhism, Catholicism, Hoa Hao Buddhism, Cao Dai and Protestantism - have been under tight control of the regime. But it is Hoa Hao Buddhism that has borne the heaviest weight of oppression.

Last year, on the 60th anniversary of the official establishment of the Hoa Hao Buddhism, about one million worshippers rallied in the Hoa Hao Holy Land, An Giang province, despite efforts of the VCP to discourage and to forbid the pilgrims from gathering at the site.

On the 24th day of the Second Moon this lunar year (March 30, 2000), the Hoa Hao worshippers will commemorate the date when Prophet Huynh Phu So, the prophet and founder of the Hoa Hao Church, was last seen before he disappeared in the hands of the Vietnamese Communists. That was on April 16,1947. The Hoa Hao Church (independent) in Vietnam is calling Hoa Hao people to rally to the Ancestors Temple for services in memory of the Prophet.

The Communist authorities refused to grant permission for the memorial services to the organizers, not even to the state-controlled Representatives Committee of Hoa Hao Buddhists, established in May, 1999 by the VCP government and presided over by faithful ranking Communists.

The assassination of the Prophet Huynh Phu So and many thousands of his followers in 1947 turned the Hoa Hao into the most fervent anti-Communists. During the Vietnam War, curfew was not imposed on the rural areas of An Giang province where most of the population are Hoa Hao Buddhists.

The Hoa Hao Buddhists under Huynh Phu So were fighting the French Colonialism in Southern Vietnam since 1945 along with many other forces that included the Cao Dai, Dai Viet, VNQDD, Binh Xuyen Gang... and the Viet Minh (abbr. Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or VN Alliance for Independence, the pre-1945 label of the Vietnam Communist Party). The Prophet Huynh was a member of the Nam Bo (Cochinchina) Administrative Committee.

The accurate details of Huynh Phu So's missing are not known. One of the followers who saw him last before he disappeared is Mr. Phan Thanh Nhan, 84, now a resident of Garden Grove, California. He joined a small group of young Hoa Hao in a bold raid to rescue the Prophet but their effort failed.

Because of the attempted rescue, 15 of Phan Thanh Nhan's extended family members were massacred, and he was the only survivor. His family members were part of the 115 Hoa Hao followers, who were stabbed to death and buried in the three mass graves at My Ngai village, Cao Lanh district, Sadec province (now Dong Thap province). According to Mr. Nhan, 1,232 Hoa Hao followers were killed and buried in 17 mass graves in the area during the "1947 Great Purge."

In many political orientation classes for the VCP Public Security officers recently, the instructors acknowledged that the murder of Prophet Huynh Phu So was true. According to the instructors, a Viet Minh battalion commander shot him to death. Then he dismembered the Prophet Huynh, burying parts of his body at different places far apart, because the Viet Minh commander was afraid that the Prophet would revive.

In a new effort, the Hoa Hao independent Church is demanding an explanation from the VCP top leaders on the fate of the Prophet and other missing Hoa Hao believers. Of course, the top leaders keep silent.

In that bloody year, thousands of Cao Dai followers were also executed by the Viet Minh. A few years later, the Communist cadres in Danang area were telling people that the mass killing was prompted by a mistake in a coded message sent by the central level. According to their explanation, "Uncle Ho" told his staff to send a message to the local Communist authorities ordering them to "bam sat" the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. Because of poor signal reception due to bad weather, they said, the radio operator accidentally missed the letter "b" in "bam sat," so the word became "am sat."

"Bam sat" means "closely watch" whereas "am sat" is to "assassinate." However much nonsense the explanation might be, many credulous people fell for it, just as many in the press corps of the most prosperous countries who fell for similar lies about Vietnam and the war.

In the last few weeks, the VCP authorities have increased their threatening campaign against the Hoa Hao independent church. Mr. Le Quang Liem, one of the prominent Hoa Hao leaders living in Saigon, said in a letter sent from Vietnam early this week, that he had escaped several attempts to harm him.

Many times members of the Communist secret police have deliberately rammed their motorbikes against him in disguised traffic accidents. Thank God, he just got out of fatal injury at a close shave.

Other sources in Vietnam last week also confirmed that small boats carrying Hoa Hao preachers to villages in the Mekong Delta region had been attacked the same way with intended collisions by secret police strong motor boats.

Such tricks are not rare in the Vietnam Communist regime. Last year, the Catholic priests Nguyen Ngoc Lan and Chan Tin were victims of similar collisions that wounded them badly. In the early 1980s, former Hanoi ambassador to the United Nations Dinh Ba Thi was put to death when his car collided with a truck in Phan Thiet. Rumors were running that Mr. Thi, who was a key figure in the spy scandal in UN headquarters that resulted in his being expelled from the U.S.A., was slain in order to silence the witness and head off any harmful disclosure of the nasty scandal.

Last month in the conference "Religions and the State in Vietnam" held by Friedrich-Ebert Foundation and Initiative Democracy for Vietnam in Wuerzburg, Germany, all speakers strongly castigated Hanoi for its human rights records, particularly its religious intolerance. They are Dieter Schanz, advisor to the SPD Party, Dr. George Evers from the Catholic Research Institute Missio, Falko vol Sadern from Democracy Movement for Vietnam, Ven. Thich Nhu Dien from the United Buddhist Church, and Mr. Tran Van Cac from the Free Vietnam Alliance.

Meanwhile in a hearing that he chaired on March 10, US Representative Christopher Smith harshly criticized the Human Rights Report released by the US State Department as seriously inadequate, in the part regarding Vietnam. According to him, such reports used to be a product of the guerrilla warfare between human rights advocates in the State Department and their colleagues whose only concern is to avoid harm to relations between the United States and a certain disgusting dictatorship.

Rep. Smith cited the Hoa Hao Buddhism case as an example. The Human Right Report considers the establishment of the state-controlled Representatives Committee of the Hoa Hao Buddhists as an improvement on religious freedom in Vietnam. That's contrary to what he has learned on his trip to Vietnam, said Smith.

He argued that what if the US government sets up a 11-member committee to run the Catholic Church or other Christian churches in the United States? No one would expect such establishment to be promoting more religious freedom in America.

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