Catholic-Communist Land Fight in Vietnam

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HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Quietly, Vietnam’s Catholic Church is challenging the nation’s government more boldly than it ever has since the communists took power over five decades ago.

For several weeks, church leaders and their followers in Hanoi have been gathering daily to pray in front of the old Vatican embassy, one of many church properties taken over by the government after 1954.

The church wants the government to hand back the 2.5-acre lot in central Hanoi, where such land is worth millions of dollars.

“It is a tragedy for us that our holy land was taken away,” said Father Nguyen Khac Que, a member of the Hanoi diocese who helped organize the prayer vigils.

Although the dispute could raise church-state tensions, it also offers dramatic testimony to how much church-state relations have improved in Vietnam recently.

Had church leaders dared to make such a public challenge just five years ago, police would almost certainly have jailed them.

“There is now a sufficient feeling of comfort on both sides that the church feels it can air its grievances publicly and the state feels it can tolerate them,” said Peter Hansen of the Catholic Theological College in Melbourne, Australia.

The matter could come to a head Friday, when the church plans to hold its biggest vigil yet, despite requests from city officials to stop the gatherings.

Hanoi city officials, who control the property, did not respond to requests for interviews.

Church officials say they have documents showing the land belongs to the diocese. But Hanoi officials maintain a former priest voluntarily turned the property over to the government in 1960, according to Duong Ngoc Tan of Vietnam’s national Committee for Religious Affairs.

“This whole matter of returning land is very complicated,” Tan said.

After the revolution, property was confiscated not just from the church but from wealthy landowners and capitalists. It was then used by the government or turned over to others who have held it for decades.

Church leaders are careful to refer to the gatherings as prayer vigils rather than demonstrations — a loaded word in a country where public protests are generally forbidden.

They are holding vigils at three churches, but the focal point is St. Joseph’s — the largest cathedral in Hanoi — which routinely draws up to 2,000 people for services that spill into the courtyard.

During the vigils, hundreds of parishioners at a time gather nearby in front of the old Vatican Embassy, a French-style villa now used as a youth sports center.

During their first vigil, just before Christmas, parishioners wheeled a Virgin Mary statue into the villa, pushing her in a cyclo, a traditional Vietnamese rickshaw. The statue had once been located next to the old embassy but it was later relocated to the nearby cathedral.

Local authorities have since locked the gate, which parishioners have adorned with white roses. Now the faithful light candles and gather on the sidewalk, occasionally blocking traffic on the narrow street.

On a recent Sunday, a priest carrying a cross led about 500 people to the site, where they prayed, chanted and sang.

There were no uniformed police in sight.

“I could never have imagined doing something like this in the past,” said Pham Vu Thuc, 51, a lifelong member of St. Joseph’s.

“Things have changed a lot since we’ve become more connected with the outside world,” she said. “We have the Internet, we’ve joined the World Trade Organization. Now Vietnam has to follow the rules of the international community.”

While relations have improved between the church and the national government, Father Que said, conflicts still arise with local governments.

“They once put a discotheque right next to the diocese headquarters,” Que said.

Vietnam’s Catholic Church, which counts 6 million members, was established by missionaries and grew during French colonial rule in Vietnam. It is the second-largest faith in predominantly Buddhist Vietnam.

Vietnam’s Catholic Church has always been regarded with suspicion because of its close relations with the French government and the former South Vietnamese government, which fought a U.S.-backed war against the communists.

For years, Vietnamese Catholics faced persecution, finding it difficult to get jobs or enter universities. Hundreds of thousands fled to southern Vietnam.

Many others stayed behind, and their churches remained open. But the government restricted their activities and took over property next to sanctuaries, including seminaries, schools and medical clinics.

Over time, church-state relations have begun to thaw. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited the Pope last year, and the two sides have considered restoring diplomatic relations.

The Vietnamese government also approved a new law on religion several years ago that made it easier for unrecognized Protestant faiths to register with the government.

All this has emboldened Catholic leaders.

“We can speak out now,” said Father Que. “Things are more democratic now.”

Besides, the dispute in Hanoi is not about ideology, Que said. “This is a dispute over valuable land.”

Vietnam pledges to improve human rights, US ties

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WASHINGTON (AFP) — Vietnam pledged Wednesday to improve its human rights record and work with former battlefield enemy the United States to strengthen investment, trade and people-to-people ties.

“We have differences, but for the sake of future development of relations, we have to tackle the differences, try to find a good solution with wisdom,” said the new Vietnamese envoy to Washington, Le Cong Phung.

“Otherwise, we cannot solve the problem or we may even make it worse,” he told reporters at a rare press conference at the embassy here, a day after presenting his credentials to President George W. Bush.

Phung said Bush raised the issue of human rights and democracy at their meeting but also acknowledged that the two countries “realized the differences” and would try to resolve them through a “constructive, respectful attitude and candid way.”

“I can assure you human rights is improving … In 2008, (it) will be much better when compared to 2007. That is what my government is going to do, try to make our people (lead) happy lives,” he said.

The United States and Vietnam have a twice yearly human rights dialogue, in which Washington raises questions on religious freedom and democratic reforms in the rapidly growing Southeast Asian nation.

Angered by what it sees as a breach of promise by Hanoi to embrace reforms when it joined the World Trade Organization more than a year ago, the US House of Representatives has passed binding legislation that will tie US foreign aid to Vietnam to its human rights record.

Vietnamese Americans, a growing political force in the United States, have also been prodding lawmakers to exert more presssure on the communist government in Hanoi to improve human rights.

But Phung said it was unfair to compare the rights record of Vietnam, which went through about four decades of war after independence from France in 1945, with that of the United States, an independent nation for more than two centuries.

“We cannot have harmonized positions because our conditions and circumstances are different,” he said, adding however that he was prepared “to talk to every Vietnamese American” to understand their feelings.

Despite differences, he said Vietnam and the United States “are in the best times of their relations.”

Hanoi, he said, was determined to enhance economic, trade and investment cooperation with the United States.

Washington lifted a trade embargo in 1994 and restored full ties the next year, two decades after the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam war.

Total trade between the two countries jumped to about 10 billion dollars in 2007, with US investments in Vietnam worth around 5.6 billion dollars, Phung said.

He also said that Vietnam was inviting US groups to establish universities, colleges and training centers in Vietnam to build a pool of human resources that could complement foreign investments fuelling the economy.

Hanoi would also send more students for higher education in the United States.

There are about 6,000 Vietnamese students in the United States at present and “I will not be surprised that in the next few years, the number may be up to 10,000, maybe more,” he said.

Rising inflation unsettles Vietnam’s workers

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For five days in November, 13,000 Vietnamese workers at a South Korean-owned factory producing athletic shoes for Nike went on strike for travel allowances and better food in the canteen.

The owners of Tae Kwang Vina, one of Nike’s 10 contract producers in Vietnam, agreed a VnD70,000 ($4.50) a month travel allowance and improved food.

It was a quick and relatively painless end to what Erin Dobson, a director of corporate responsibility communications at Nike, called the beginning of “strike season” in booming Vietnam.

Communist-ruled Vietnam is experiencing rapid industrialisation, with hundreds of thousands of young people leaving villages and family farms to join factories producing everything from shoes and clothes to electronics goods for the global market.

But young workers are also beginning to flex their collective muscles, especially as rapid inflation erodes the value of their wages, and tales of others winning instant riches heightens aspirations.

In recent years, factory workers have shown an increased willingness to walk off the job to press for more money, often in the form of allowances and bonuses.

In 2006, workers went on strike 400 times at different factories, including at 300 foreign-invested enterprises, businesspeople say.

“These strikes are evidence of how rapidly Vietnam is growing,” Ms Dobson says. “The workers have a feeling of empowerment.

Ms Dobson says industrial action in factories often occurs towards the end of the calendar year, as managers prepare their wage offer for the year ahead.

Part of the problem is that rapid inflation is squeezing workers at the bottom of the wage scale. Officially, inflation is running at 9 per cent a year, fuelled partially by higher prices of rice and other food, which has tracked higher oil prices.

Jonathan Pincus, chief economist at the United Nations Development Programme, says that factory workers are grappling with inflation as high as 15 per cent, since they spend a large proportion of their monthly income on food.

“At the minimum wage, workers are finding it difficult to make ends meet without working lots and lots of overtime,” Mr Pincus says.

At the same time, factory workers are bombarded with media tales of Vietnam’s new rich enjoying luxurious lifestyles.

“You’ve got this very hot environment, where people are getting rich all of a sudden in land or stock,” says Fred Burke, a partner at Baker & McKenzie in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s business capital.

“People who are working hard in factories are saying, ‘Hey, I should get a little more of this myself.’”

Workers have the right to unionise, though factory-level unions must affiliate with the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour, an arm of the Communist government. Traditionally, the federation was seen as doing little to help workers, especially in state-owned enterprises. “Like state-sponsored unions anywhere, their main purpose is industrial peace,” Mr Pincus says.

In recent years, the confederation appears to have grown more responsive to its members. “They tend to try to work things out before it comes to strikes, but it isn’t completely top-down,” says Mr Pincus.

In theory, Vietnamese workers have a legal right to strike only if intensive efforts to resolve disputes through mediation have failed, and they obtain permission from senior union officials.

But in reality, illegal strikes are becoming more frequent, and sometimes have the tacit support of the labour bureaucracy.

“Workers are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the law, and knowledgeable about what is going on in other places,” says one executive of a multinational company that sources in Vietnam. “News travels like wildfire with SMS.”

While the government has responded to the salary squeeze by raising the national minimum wage – and will do so again in January – Hanoi is reluctant to raise it too much, as civil servants’ pay scales are also linked to the minimum wage.

All this means that factory owners, managers and the multinational companies that buy from Vietnamese factories need to ensure that small grievances among workers are dealt with before they erupt.

Many businesspeople say effective communication between factories and workers is essential.

That has been a problem in Asian-owned factories, where managers may not speak very good English or Vietnamese, generating confusion and resentment.

“A lot of it is down to communications – making sure that workers know they are getting what they are entitled to,” says Mr Burke.

At the Tae Kwang factory, Ms Dobson says, workers generally earn about 20 per cent more than the minimum wage, and the factory also provides transport that some workers use to get to work. However, she concedes that the factory “probably could have done a better job communicating regarding wages”.