US embassy cable - 05HANOI2973

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 HANOI 002973 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
 
STATE FOR EAP/MLS; DRL/IRF 
 
REF: A) HANOI 2313; B) HANOI 2838 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PREL, PHUM, KIRF, VM, RELFREE, HUMANR 
SUBJECT: RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS COMMITTEE PRAISES RELIGION 
ORDINANCE, NORTHERN PROTESTANTS REACT 
 
This cable was coordinated with ConGen Ho Chi Minh City 
 
1. (SBU) Summary:  The Vietnamese press recently published 
an interview with the GVN official responsible for religious 
affairs in which he highlighted Hanoi's accomplishments in 
the area of religious freedom since it enacted a new law on 
religion last year.  The article, which was intended to 
rebut critics of Vietnam's record on religious freedom, 
failed to address the critical problem of local policy 
implementation, although it did emphasize the positive role 
religious organizations can play in social welfare and 
development.  An official responsible for Protestant affairs 
was more realistic and offered a frank, but not altogether 
encouraging, assessment of the GVN's efforts to implement 
the new legal framework for religion.  A northern Protestant 
leader, while agreeing that there has been some progress, 
highlighted the GVN's continued refusal to resolve property 
issues and to register sub-congregations.  End Summary. 
 
Chairman Thi's Interview 
------------------------ 
 
2. (SBU) On November 4, the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) 
published an interview with Ngo Yen Thi, Chairman of the 
GVN's Committee for Religious Affairs (CRA), reviewing the 
past year's implementation of the Ordinance on Belief and 
Religions. (Note: The ordinance went into effect on November 
15, 2004, but its Implementing Decree was not released until 
March 1, 2005.  End note.)  Thi asserts in the interview 
that, since the adoption of the Ordinance, "the religious 
life in Vietnam has obviously changed."  Listing a number of 
examples of religious events that occurred during the past 
year, Thi also seeks to both rebut international criticism 
from those who "have for long held unfair views about the 
religious situation in Vietnam, writing letters to 
authorities at various levels or airing information on the 
Internet" and marginalize those who "have tried to undermine 
the great national unity and to cause political instability 
and social disorder." 
 
3. (SBU) The VNA article specifically highlights the 
following items as proof of the improvement in Vietnamese 
religious life:  1) the existence of numerous sanctioned 
activities by recognized religious organizations that are 
allowed to choose their own leaders as approved by the 
State; 2) the GVN's decision to permit the Catholic Church 
to establish several new dioceses and to create "favorable 
conditions" for Protestants to establish new congregations; 
3) the "smoothness" with which individuals are allowed to 
join religious professions when registered with local 
authorities; 4) the renovation and/or construction of many 
places of worship; 5) the decision to permit seminaries to 
train priests on an annual, rather than biennial, basis; and 
6) the granting of land-use rights to many religious 
organizations, including a theological seminary for the 
Southern Evangelical Church of Vietnam (SECV) in Ho Chi Minh 
City, the Vietnam Buddhism Institute in Hanoi and several 
chapters of the Protestant Church in the Central Highlands." 
Chairman Thi is also quoted as saying that, "by the end of 
September this year, Protestants in the Central Highlands 
and the southern province of Binh Phuoc had 50 congregations 
legally recognized and 282 places of worship legally 
registered."  Thi further claims that the GVN permitted 
religious organizations to print and publish 4,314,000 
copies of their own prayer books, bulletins and reviews 
through the State publishing house, and also to expand their 
international outreach efforts. 
 
4. (SBU) In addition to this often-heard litany of GVN 
accomplishments in religious freedom, the article is 
noteworthy for emphasizing the contribution of religious 
organizations to the "Great National Unity" by their 
involvement in socio-economic development in the areas of 
education, medicine, disaster relief, and in social welfare 
for the elderly, orphans, lepers and people living with 
HIV/AIDS. 
 
CRA Protestant Affairs Perspective 
---------------------------------- 
 
5. (SBU) On November 4, Nguyen Van Thong, the central 
Committee on Religious Affairs' Director for Protestant 
Affairs, gave Poloff his own assessment of the current 
status of the Ordinance on Religion as it pertains to his 
area of responsibility.  Thong opened by noting that the GVN 
and the United States take different approaches to religion 
in Vietnam.  Without apparent irony, he added that he 
recognizes how "U.S. extremists use Protestantism to advance 
U.S. strategic goals" because he read the bible while a POW 
in a U.S. Army prison camp during the war.  There are now 
fifty-eight officially recognized Protestant organizations 
in Vietnam, he noted, adding that of these, the Evangelical 
Church of Vietnam North (ECVN) and the SECV represent 
roughly 80 percent of Vietnamese Protestants, or about 
500,000 believers.  While Thong lauded both the ECVN and 
SECV for "serving both God and the State," Vietnam's other 
fifty-six Protestant organizations have "not been as 
helpful" to the GVN.  In particular, Ho Chi Minh City's New 
Life Fellowship (NLF) congregation under Pastor Eric Dooley 
and the Mennonite congregation under Pastor Quang had both 
willfully broken Vietnamese law rather than "preach the word 
of the bible."  Creating a new Protestant sect, as the NLF 
did, is a crime under Vietnamese law; however, the 
Mennonites went even further and actively distributed 
political materials to the public, a major crime.  Other 
groups have been equally problematic for the GVN, Thong said 
(NFI).  (Note:  ConGen HCMC will provide an update septel on 
the New Life Fellowship.  End Note.) 
 
6. (SBU) According to Thong, the CRA is planning to assemble 
the leaders of the fifty-six "intransigent" Protestant 
groups in Ho Chi Minh City in the near future in order to 
explain the context of the Ordinance on Religion, e.g., that 
groups operating under its auspices must: 1) follow their 
State-sanctioned charters, 2) obey the law and 3) 
"understand their commitments to the State" when expanding 
contacts with groups outside Vietnam.  If Protestant 
organizations operate within these tenets, they should have 
the right to assemble and worship as they please when 
officially registered and/or recognized, he said. 
 
7. (SBU) When challenged about the difficulties faced by 
local Protestant congregations seeking to officially 
register and be recognized, Thong averred that the GVN has a 
consistent policy to allow groups to register at the 
grassroots level in order to achieve eventual recognition. 
In effect, the GVN policy is first to register small groups 
and then recognize new sects when large enough and 
structured enough to have their own national charter.  Thong 
asserted that next year the GVN plans to use this process to 
recognize a number of Protestant sects that existed in the 
south before 1975 and which have since been seeking 
recognition, including the Baptists, the Seventh Day 
Adventists, the Christian and Missionary Alliance and 
others.  However, registering Protestant groups is extremely 
difficult because of the "bewildering divisions" amongst 
sects, noting that the Baptists alone have eight separate 
organizations in Vietnam.  Thong stated with some 
exasperation that "it is nearly impossible to satisfy all 
members of such groups," which thus makes it very hard to 
institute a national charter to legalize a specific 
organization.  The grassroots approach is an informal CRA 
policy that attempts to circumvent this problem in the short 
term, without provoking the normal GVN solution to 
complicated problems, which is to create an even more 
stifling bureaucracy. 
 
8. (SBU) Thong also admitted that some local officials are 
"allergic" to implementing GVN policy on Protestantism for 
historical reasons.  In fact, a number of local leaders do 
not adhere to regulations, he acknowledged.  Despite this 
and the other problems listed above, Thong asserted that the 
GVN is determined to enforce the Ordinance on Religion and 
there has been some progress in implementation, delays 
notwithstanding.  Since the Ordinance was promulgated, for 
example, the CRA has helped publish millions of religious 
documents, including enough bibles for all believers to own 
their own Vietnamese copies.  Also, there has been 
significant progress in property rights issues, such as the 
case involving the ECVN Hanoi congregation's church.  While 
the GVN has not issued a land-use certificate for the church 
property to the congregation because Vietnamese law forbids 
individual churches to control their properties, the GVN has 
made clear, under its "new policy of openness," that it is 
willing to resolve the problem by issuing a certificate 
directly to the ECVN, once all land disputes with squatters 
within the property are resolved. 
 
Practitioner's Perspective 
-------------------------- 
 
9. (SBU) On November 7, Reverend Au Quang Vinh, Chief Pastor 
of the ECVN's Hanoi congregation, gave his own perspective 
on progress in religious freedom for northern Protestants 
since the promulgation of the Ordinance on Religion.  Some 
of the points made by Thi and Thong are correct concerning 
significant progress in the specific areas of publication of 
religious materials, transfer and appointment of pastors and 
reconstruction of places of worship, he acknowledged.  These 
are all much improved areas and, speaking generally, there 
have been some advances in religious freedom.  However, 
there remain significant problems for ECVN Protestants that 
the GVN has so far failed to address despite the new legal 
framework on religion, he averred. 
 
10. (SBU) The biggest problem facing the ECVN is the 
persistent lack of trained ministers and the GVN's refusal 
to allow the ECVN to construct new training facilities, Vinh 
continued.  Although the ECVN hopes to build a new training 
center on the Hanoi church property mentioned by Thong 
above, the GVN refuses to issue a land-use certificate to 
the Hanoi congregation to make this possible.  When asked if 
the GVN actually offered to issue this certificate to the 
ECVN vice the congregation itself, Vinh explained that 
technically, under the ECVN's charter, all church properties 
must be owned by the central organization, but this makes it 
impossible to actually renovate any properties because the 
local authorities require individual congregations to 
present land-use certificates to qualify for permission to 
renovate their churches.  Caught in a catch-22, the ECVN has 
thus continued to insist that the GVN issue certificates 
directly to individual congregations like the Hanoi 
congregation.  To complicate matters further, Vinh said that 
the GVN has consistently raised the canard of squatters in 
ECVN properties, but has deliberately delayed legal 
resolution of such disputes.  In the case of the Hanoi 
church, for example, the squatter in question is the son of 
an ECVN pastor who died five years ago.  The son refuses to 
move out of his residence despite an initial court decision 
against him, and the case has been on appeal for years with 
no apparent hurry on the part of the authorities to resolve 
it.  Thus Vinh concludes that the GVN's "offer" to give the 
land-use certificate to the ECVN directly once the case is 
resolved is doubly disingenuous. 
 
11. (SBU) Pastor Vinh noted that registration of sub- 
congregations also remains a significant problem, as only 
one sixth of ECVN's sub-congregations have successfully 
registered since they first began applying under the new 
rules.  In many cases, these applications are long past the 
official deadline for adjudication, but have received no 
official response.  In other cases, particularly in the 
Northwest Highlands, officials have given "ridiculous" 
responses.  For example, in Khun Ha commune in Lai Chau 
Province, a Hmong congregation's June application to the 
People's Committee received a response from the Provincial 
Party Committee which stated that all Protestant 
congregations operating in the province are illegal and that 
there is no grounds for anyone to say that the GVN has 
established conditions for the legalization of these groups. 
The letter concluded that any reports of a purported GVN 
legalization policy are incorrect, but the point is moot as 
no Hmong people are Protestant anyway.  (Note:  The letter 
made deliberate use of the term "Vang Chu" rather than 
"Protestant," which is a deliberate reference to an outlawed 
Hmong militant sect based in Laos.  See Ref A.  End Note). 
In addition to these kinds of problems, Vinh also noted that 
many ethnic minorities are still actively encouraged to 
renounce their faith by officials who threaten to refuse 
land-use certificates and microfinancing to individual 
believers. 
 
12. (SBU) Pastor Vinh identified the recovery of church 
properties in provinces with Protestant traditions and the 
registration of new sub-congregations in areas without a 
Protestant history as the most critical focus for the ECVN's 
efforts to improve its relations with the GVN under the new 
Ordinance on Religion.  Thanh Hoa, Nghe An and Thai Binh 
provinces all used to have large churches that served as a 
base for sub-congregations in neighboring areas.  These 
churches would resume such a role if the ECVN could recover 
the properties.  Vinh also explained that new congregations 
in areas less prone to discrimination against Protestants 
(unlike Lai Chau) might play a similar supportive role for 
Protestants in harsher neighboring areas if they are allowed 
to register and build churches.  But this is also 
problematic.  For example, following a recent visit by the 
Ambassador (Ref B), local officials told the Quang Ninh 
Province congregation that they can now register with the 
local CRA, but only as an "independent" congregation. 
Although this is an improvement on previous official 
refusals to accept their registration application, this 
independent status would prevent the congregation from ever 
actually building a church, which Vinh explained is the 
whole point of registration in the first place. 
 
13. (SBU) Summing up, Pastor Vinh stated that progress on 
religious freedom for Northern Protestants has been slow, 
despite some advances.  He noted that the ECVN as a whole 
feels that the SECV and southern Protestants have generally 
received far better treatment from the GVN, and he expressed 
the hope that the Embassy will continue to encourage the GVN 
to treat the ECVN Protestants more equitably. 
 
Comment 
------- 
 
14. (SBU) Chairman Thi is correct that Vietnam has made some 
advances in religious freedom since last year's promulgation 
of the Ordinance on Religion, particularly in southern and 
central Vietnam.  His explicit recognition of the positive 
role that religious institutions can play in Vietnam's 
social welfare and development is also welcome.  However, 
his interview glosses over the critical problem the GVN 
faces with implementation of its religious policies at the 
local level. 
 
15. (SBU) The comments of Thi's subordinate on the 
"intransigence" of house church organizations and their 
"bewildering number" demonstrates that suspicion and 
ignorance of religion runs deep among GVN officials, even at 
the central level.  In fact, at the provincial and local 
level, while there clearly are plenty of obstructionists, 
there also are quite a number of officials who take a far 
more helpful and open view of Protestantism than Protestant 
Affairs Director Thong. 
 
16. (SBU) While Thong argues that "informally" encouraging 
house church organizations to register at the local level 
would avoid "bureaucratic complications," this approach runs 
counter to the letter and intent of the legal framework on 
religion.  That legal framework clearly stipulates that any 
organization that operates in more than one province has the 
right to apply for registration directly to the central- 
level CRA and to receive a reply within 60 days.  Similarly, 
Thong's approach of arguing that there can only be one GVN- 
recognized organization representing a particular 
denomination (i.e., Baptist or Mennonite) also appears to 
run contrary to the legal framework on religion.  Under the 
law, any religious organization can apply for registration 
and recognition, so long as it meets certain legally-defined 
criteria. 
 
17. (SBU) Thong already may be implementing this more 
restrictive approach to registration and recognition.  One 
Baptist house church leader -- one of the most moderate in 
HCMC -- recently complained to ConGen HCMC that he was told 
by Thong that he could not apply for national registration 
until every one of his churches was registered at the 
provincial level.  Thong also was pressing this leader to 
engineer a merger of the four major Baptist groups in 
southern and central Vietnam so that the CRA would not be 
burdened with administering multiple groups.  Thong 
apparently was insistent, despite our contact's noting that 
there were serious personality and operational differences 
between the Baptist house church organizations. 
 
18. (SBU) That said, Thong's statements demonstrate that he 
knows he is under pressure to implement the Ordinance on 
Religion.  In addition to improving operating conditions for 
house churches, the GVN is keenly aware that it must 
register and recognize churches if it is to seen as abiding 
by its May 2005 exchange of letters with the United States 
on religious freedom issues.  Pastor Vinh's pessimistic 
assessment reflects the disappointment felt by Protestant 
leaders in northern Vietnam at the GVN's inability or 
unwillingness to implement the new legal framework on 
religion faster and more evenly, particularly in comparison 
to their SECV colleagues in southern and central Vietnam. 
Nevertheless, even Vinh still agrees that the GVN has made 
at least some progress in religious freedom since the 
promulgation of the Ordinance on Religion, if not nearly as 
much as Chairman Thi may claim.  End Comment. 
 
MARINE