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Vietnamese Americans Protest Human Rights Violations

By Associated Press

NEW YORK — A former U.S. Army paratrooper played a Yankee Doodle Dandy medley on a bagpipe opposite the American Stock Exchange May 4, as approximately 250 Montagnards clamored for an end to trade with Vietnam.

The contingent of Montagnards, an ethnic minority from the central highlands of Vietnam, drove from North Carolina, where several thousand now live, to denounce the Hanoi government’s treatment of the Montagnard people.

“Don’t buy coffee from Vietnam anymore,” shouted 56-year-old Yang Prone, clutching a one-pound package of coffee beans. “This coffee costs us our blood and our land.”

The Montagnard Human Rights Organization, which sponsored the trip that originated in Raleigh, says Montagnards are being forced off their land to make room for coffee and tea plantations controlled by Vietnam’s communist government.

The group wants the United States to suspend trade with Vietnam until emigration from the Southeast Asian nation is legalized. In 1998, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, blocking U.S. trade with communist countries that forbid emigration, was temporarily lifted by former President Bill Clinton as he sought to normalize relations between the two countries.

U.S. officials have said the two countries expect to finalize a free trade pact by June, but the process may be delayed by a surge in human rights violations by Vietnam. Human-rights observers say an estimated 700,000 Montagnard people in Vietnam are Christian and are prohibited by the Hanoi government from worshipping.

Today, more than 3,000 Montagnards live in North Carolina, more than any place except Vietnam.

Later in the day, the rally moved to the United Nations building and then to Vietnam’s mission to the U.N., where they called for a boycott by U.S. coffee buyers and businesses of coffee grown on land seized from the Montagnards.

On Thursday, the United States lost its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which probes abuses across the globe; Vietnam and several other countries with poor human rights records retained their seats.