Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'srv'
Viewing articles tagged 'srv'
6 articles
Hà Mòn: the Catholic movement the state calls an “evil way”
Hà Mòn is a Catholic movement among Dega in Kon Tum and Gia Lai that grew from reports of the Virgin Mary appearing at a village that was to be flooded for a dam. The state treats it as an “evil way” religion, and since 2010 its followers have been pressed to renounce it, arrested and given long prison sentences.
The Evangelical Church and registration
Most Dega Protestants belong to congregations the state does not recognize. The largest state-recognized Protestant church is the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South), and the choice put to highland house churches for twenty-five years has been the same: join it, or be treated as “Dega Protestants,” a label the state treats as political separat...
The highland Catholic Church under the Socialist Republic
The Catholic Church came to the highlands with the Kon Tum mission (see The Kon Tum mission), and today many tens of thousands of Bahnar, Jarai, Sedang and other highlanders are Catholic. After 1975 the church lost most of its priests and has worked since under close control. It has been treated more gently than the house churches, but not left...
Forests, logging and the sacred groves
The highlands were forest country, and the forest was ours: farmland in rotation, hunting ground, the place of the spirits and the dead. After 1975 the forest became state property, managed by state forest enterprises and cleared for settlers and coffee. What remains is being handed back in small pieces of poor land, while logs cut across the bo...
Re-education and the forest, 1975–1992
After April 1975 the leaders of the highlands went to prison, and the men who had fought with the Americans went either to the re-education camps or to the forest. For seventeen years a remnant of FULRO fought on from Cambodia while their families lived under suspicion at home. Most of what happened to the prisoners was never tried in any court,...
Schools, language and the university gap
Most Dega children start school in a language they do not speak at home, often taught by teachers who do not speak theirs. Fewer finish secondary school than their Vietnamese neighbors, and very few reach university. The UN Human Rights Committee has expressed concern that minority communities in Vietnam “suffer from discrimination, including wi...
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