Viewing articles tagged 'prisoners'

The church they closed Most of us are Christians, and the state has decided that one form of our Christianity is not a religion at all but a political conspiracy in religious dress. That decision, written into a prime minister’s instruction in February 2005, is the legal hinge on which most of the last twenty-five years of persecution in the highlands turns. This page... Explainer 155 views Read More February 2001: the highlands stand up On Friday, February 2, 2001, eight hundred people from four communes walked out of their villages at four in the morning and reached Pleiku at half past eight. By mid-morning there were thousands of them outside the provincial hall. The next day the same thing happened at Buon Ma Thuot, and over the following twelve days at Ea H’leo, at Ayun Pa,... Explainer 145 views Read More Easter Week 2004 On the Saturday and Sunday of Easter 2004, people came out of their villages in thirty-nine communes across seventeen districts of Gia Lai, Dak Lak and Dak Nong. They came on farm tractors with trailers behind them, packed with food for five days, because they meant to stay. They were asking for four things: their land, the right to worship, the... Reference 126 views Read More The prisoner records: what they are and how to search them Our records hold 337 Dega by name, men and one woman imprisoned for their faith, their land or their people in five provinces, arrested between 2001 and 2006. This page explains what the records are, where they came from, what they show, how they compare with the lists kept by others, what the gaps mean, and how to search them for somebody, incl... Reference 142 views Read More If a family member is detained What to write down and what to try, in the first hours and the weeks after, in Vietnam and in Thailand. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. It is what families who have been through it have told us mattered, set beside what the law says and what happens in practice. Checklist 113 views Read More The years between, 2005–2022 Between the Easter protests of 2004 and the attacks at Cư Kuin in 2023 there were no mass demonstrations in the highlands, and the world mostly stopped looking. The pressure did not stop; it changed shape. Instead of breaking up crowds, the authorities went village by village: meetings at which families were made to renounce their church, arrest... Reference 87 views Read More Our defenders and prisoners These are the records of highland people imprisoned for their faith, their organizing or their testimony, whose cases are well enough documented to set down in full: pastors and deacons of the house churches, a man who wrote down the names of other prisoners, a man who met American diplomats. Most were convicted of “undermining national unity.”... Reference 66 views Read More Ha Mon: the Catholic movement the state calls an “evil way” In a village on the Krong Poko, in the last years before the water came, a Bahnar woman named Y Gyin said that the Mother of God had appeared to her and had told her people to gather, to pray, and not to let themselves be moved. Within four years the reservoir was over the ground she named. Within eleven the state had run public denunciation mee... Explainer 72 views Read More The highland Catholic Church under the Socialist Republic On March 27, 1975, in a town that had fallen eleven days earlier, the French bishop of Kon Tum consecrated a Vietnamese successor so that the diocese would not be left headless when he was expelled. Within eighteen months the minor seminary, the major seminary and the school that had trained highland catechists since 1908 were all shut, and the... Explainer 88 views Read More