alt.war.vietnam

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Vietnam: 2007 Revision of Internal Training Manual 'Concerning the Task of
the Protestant Religion in the Northern Mountainous Region 01/02/2008

In 2006, an internal religious affairs training manual covering the
northern highland provinces was leaked from the government Committee on
Religious Affairs (CRA). This document implicated the government in a plan
to 'resolutely subdue the abnormally rapid and spontaneous development of
the Protestant religion in the region' (p. 44). After widespread
international criticism, the government undertook to revise the manual,
and a new edition was provided to foreign diplomatic officials in 2007.

Although the revised version involves a lessening of the inflammatory
language which was more characteristic of the 2006 manual, there is no
change to its core objective to 'solve the Protestant problem' by subduing
its development. It retains a suspicious tone about the politically
nefarious nature of religion and its potential to cause instability among
ethnic minorities, which provides the context for this response. Whereas
the 2006 manual provided specific legitimacy for local officials to force
renunciations of faith among members of less well-established
congregations, the 2007 edition imposes an undefined and arbitrary
condition of stability upon the freedom of a congregation to
Therefore, the treatment of any congregation deemed not to 'stably
practise religion' is implicitly left to the arbitration of local
officials, who had previously been mandated to force renunciations of
faith. Without a full and unconditional prohibition on forcing
renunciations of faith, the amended manual does not go far enough to
address the problems in the 2006 original.

Of further concern is the fact that despite the promulgation of a policy
framework for the registration of congregations in 2004-05, the training
manual still uses the terminology of 'pilot projects'. This indicates a
severe deficiency in the normalisation process of Protestant congregations
in the northern highlands, and brings into question the efficacy of
Vietnam's current policy framework for religious activities.

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