Steve Harrison, 28 October, 2004 (updates: 22 Feb., 2005, 13 Oct., 2008)
An estimated 150-200 killed and approximately 50 wounded. Those are the numbers for what has become symbolic to Americans for the opression, with extreme prejudice, of an ethnic minority. The terrible slaughter of a then-despised race of indigenous peoples occurred at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, 29 December, 1890.
The incitement that resulted in the massacre was that a relatively new "denomination" of the Ghost Dance religion of the Lakota people had come to be considered dangerous and threatening to the Wasichu, the whites.
In truth, that variation (perversion, spin-off) of the founding tenets of Ghost Dance, as embraced by the Miniconjou mystic Short Bull, eschewed the original non-violent teachings, advocating the total elimination of the Wasichu. The new cult even spawned the production of Ghost Dance Shirts that were advertised as having the power to repel the white man's bullets -- for the time to come when they would rid their land of all Wasichu by their own extreme prejudice.
Still, what happened at Wounded Knee was and is contemptible. It shouldn't have happened. No one ordered a massacre, but the loss of command and control to what became a wanton killing frenzy that included unarmed women and children should rightly be held as a classic example, and a study, of what military commanders MUST NOT let happen. It was an aberration of military discipline, embodying several parallels of circumstance to what happened some 78 years later at Mai Lai.
That sort of slaughter is every bit as contemptible in 2004.
It has happened again, only this time in greater numbers than claimed at Wounded Knee. 280 were killed in one protracted incident; but unlike the travesty at Wounded Knee, it's happening now to a totally disarmed people. In part, again, because their religion has been condemned as threatening to the government.
And a powerful US Senator has, once again, played a key role in cloaking the very existence of that ongoing slaughter.
The indigenous people of concern here are the Montagnards of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But don't let that dampen your outrage and indignation just because it's not Americans pulling the trigger. It is okay for Western Liberals and Conservatives alike to express outrage at inhumane acts, even if that might temporarily align one with any given currently-seated US government. Look it up. It's okay.
The term "Montagnard" is a carry-over from the French colonial period. Montagnard is French for "mountain people." The Montagnards call themselves the "Dega" (some, "Degar") and they have populated most of what is now central SRV for about a thousand years before the arrival of the first Asian ancestors of today's ethnic Vietnamese. Characteristics of prominent Dega dialects suggest they are probably of Malayo-Polynesian descent, but history doesn't go back that far. What is known today is that most of them have embraced the Christian faith.
This past Easter, 2004, the Vietnamese government reacted to a Dega Christian prayer vigil by an outright assault that killed a reported 280 and "disappeared" at least another 26.
This is an ongoing ethnic genocidal pogrom that has decimated the Dega population since the reputed end of the war in 1975. In truth, the war for survival only worsened for the Dega after the departure of US forces in 1973, and worsened further still after the successful take-over of the South by the Northern aggressor NVA in 1975.
The 'Yards (an appellation of brotherhood and affection as they were known by US troops who worked with and loved them) lost about half their male population to combat while serving as US allies during the American involvement in that war. In exchange for their faithful allegiance, the USA promised to help them eventually regain their own national autonomy in the Central Highlands.
Then, in 1973, we (the USA) boogied on home -- leaving them holding the bag as convicted, un-supplied, un-supported and orphaned warriors on the brutally wrong side of history.
Since 1975, while the Vietnamese population of SRV has nearly tripled, the Dega population at large has been cut nearly in half by various means, including forced sterilizations, disappearings, poisonings, and immediate (secret or public) or delayed (incarcerated) executions.
The Dega, having served the USA as famously capable warriors in the fight to resist the Communist takeover of South Vietnam, have paid with their lives at the hands of a vengeful conqueror ever since. 1.5 million and growing in 1960, their population today is estimated at around 750,000. And their numbers continue to decline -- not by disease or other "natural" causes, though a bullet to the head hardly constitutes an unnatural cause of death in a closed and bigoted society like Communist SRV.
Some in polite society call the ongoing SRV program one of cultural leveling. Others more free to express what they've seen, and less despicably polite, refer to it as ethnic cleansing, or more succinctly, genocide.
Three years ago, the Vietnamese government intensified a similar "crackdown" and killed about 400 Dega Christian pastors. An estimated 400 churches have been destroyed since 2000. One Catholic priest, Father Nguyen Van Ly, was arrested in 2001 and sentenced to 15 years for "damaging the government's unity policy" [political correctness at it's logical and inevitable extension] by sending a letter criticizing the SRV government to a US-based human rights commission. He remains behind bars today along with at least 44 other religious leaders.
In due outrage at such provable atrocities, US House of Representatives Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) introduced a bill titled the "Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2001" (H.R. 2833). All the act did was to tie future aid to, and trade with, SRV to that government's demonstrable improvement of their horrible human rights track record, especially regarding the abatement of religious repression and improvements to their treatment of who the Vietnamese refer to as the "moi" (savages), the Dega.
The Act passed in the House by a margin of 410 to 1, the one "nay" vote coming from then-Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) who voted against it only in protest, complaining that it didn't have enough teeth. Essentially, a unanimous passage.
The consensus buzz then indicated the Vietnam Human Rights Act was destined to sail through the Senate with easy passage by a similar margin.
But one Senator, alluded to in the Wounded Knee parallel, killed it.
By Machiavellian parliamentary chicanery, Sen. John Forbes Kerry (D-MA) tabled the bill in committee where it languished and died, never having its day to come to a vote in the full Senate.
Senator Kerry stated that he believed a more positive and constructive way to improve human rights and religious freedom conditions in Vietnam was by continued investment, free trade (a Bilateral Trade Agreement), and SRV government access to development funding and resources without the encumbrances of human rights and religious freedom issues being on the table as conditions.
By that solo, unilateral action, Senator Kerry served up wholly unaccountable windfall profits and advantages to the Vietnamese government. By killing the Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2001, he killed the only bargaining chip the US had to oblige the SRV government to treat its indigenous peoples humanely. And they have not.
By that despicable action, Sen. Kerry accommodated wholesale death and destruction for the Dega. Since 2001, NGOs and agencies concerned with such matters are pretty well unanimous in their assessments that human rights abuses and religious persecutions in SRV have continued apace, if not increased. And the trend lines to measure those realities are traced in human blood, not theoretical or abstracted data points.
Senator Kerry got it wrong then, and he's got it wrong now. But going against the will and intelligence of a full and unanimous House, true bi-partisan unanimity, and the vast majority of his Senate peers, did not deter this arrogant Senator from imposing his sense of right-and-wrong (or sense of expediency, corruption or pandering -- take your pick) on the United States at large.
Whatever his motive, be it wrong-headedness or that he may actually be the "not a good man" as Lynn Cheney has appraised him, his actions served as a death sentence for thousands of Dega and other ethnic religious types in SRV.
To further illustrate Senator Kerry's wrongness, a report in Insight Magazine confirms that the human rights and religious freedom abuses in SRV have actually spiraled upward since the US granted normal trade relations to SRV in 2001, a move spearheaded by the stalwart team of Senators John Kerry and John McCain (R-AZ).
One of the logical-conclusion products of Sen. Kerry's covering for the abuses of SRV is a newly released ordinance regarding the practice of religion that is scheduled to become effective on 15 November of this year. In a nutshell, the new ordinance [feel free to apply all the sense of irony you can muster here] does actually IMPROVE the climate for religious freedom in Vietnam by allowing that, "...registered groups will need specific permission to conduct religious activities in designated buildings approved by the government. The state is entitled to ban and monitor any beliefs, and prisoners are not allowed to practice their faith."
This new law even codifies the right to arrest those engaged in unapproved religious activities within their own homes. Christians gathering to worship in the home of a fellow believer, without permit and/or government supervision, is a crime in SRV.
Any Western Liberal who isn't absolutely repulsed by such anti-religious law surely must be every bit the neo-fascist some freedom-of-religion advocates claim them to be.
Recognizing, charitably, that Senator Kerry's notions on how to deal with rogue governments are chronically and toxically wrong and DO NOT WORK, on 15 September, 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell designated SRV as a "Country of Particular Concern" under the provisions of the International Religious Freedom Act.
Let it be lost on no one how significant and damning that designation impugns. This places the SRV, quite correctly, in the company of the world's most notorious human rights-abuser countries: North Korea, Iran, Burma, China, Eritrea, Saudi-Arabia and Sudan.
In a statement by Aaron Groote, press secretary for US Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), he relates that the Senator: "feels strongly that we have not seen the improvements in Vietnam's human rights record that some people claim have been made in the past three years." Accordingly, Sen. Brownback has authored the Senate version of H.R. 1587 (S.2784.IS), the "Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2004," introduced, again, by Rep. Christopher Smith, and again, already overwhelmingly passed in the House on 19 July, 2004.
So, what's the current status of S.2784.IS, the Vietnam Human Rights Act, now that it has been introduced in the Senate?
Unbelievably, it is once again languishing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the very committee chaired in 2001 by Sen. John Kerry, and of which Sen. Kerry is still a senior member.
Even at that, the Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2004 is a mere shadow, a watered-down version of the one so unanimously upheld in 2001. The Smith bill of 2004 calls only for capping non-humanitarian aid at the 2004 level until SRV demonstrates improvements to its human rights and religious freedoms policies. That's it! No strings -- no hidden "gotchas."
It was unconscionable for Senator Kerry to stonewall and kill this life-saving legislation in 2001. It would be even more indictable should the Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2004 meet the same despicable fate, now that it has been so abundantly and murderously demonstrated that "constructive engagement," by whatever appeasing moniker, simply doesn't work with that dark ages Communist system. If the United States hopes to continue staking any claim to representing the universal moralist and humanitarian, that must not happen.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman in this present 108th Congress is Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-IN). Contact info for Sen. Lugar and all Committee members can be found by visiting the SFR Committee roster web page at: http://foreign.senate.gov/about.html.
All decent human beings are urged to contact as many members of that Committee as possible. Express your outrage that the Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2004 should not be withheld from a full vote on the Senate floor for so much as one more day.
There is an ongoing Wounded Knee massacre afoot today in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. And for decades that murderous regime's prime Western Civilization apologist-at-large has been the Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry. Please don't let the fact that he is [was] campaigning to become the next President of the United States deter you from acting today on this matter of vital human life importance.
These are not abstract considerations regarding freedoms or privileges, like tax breaks or school vouchers or even same-sex marriages; these are quite literally matters of life and death to the Lakota of the Central Highlands of SRV, the Dega. Every day is measured in innocent lives sacrificed to partisan politics, fussed about in relatively lavish comfort thousands of miles away from their Wounded Knee killing fields.
If you would feature yourself to be humanitarian enough, honorable enough, to have cried out "STOP!" at Wounded Knee, surely, a nicely written plea of "Do It Now" to Sen. Lugar and other SFR Committee members would not be considered a misguided act of impertinence.
The Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2004 MUST be passed to the full Senate -- immediately. It's far from a cure for the damnable evil that is SRV, but it's a measure that could help stem the genocide against the Montagnards to some degree, and at soonest.
On this score, count this Army Infantry veteran of the War in Vietnam a bleeding heart liberal. If that's the label for FINALLY starting to do right by our blood brother 'Yards, then label away.
... Alright... that's enough.
Get over it, lock-and-load and Let's Roll on this. You know what to do and you're cleared in hot.
Steve Harrison
Addendum -- As of 22 February, 2005, the status of The Vietnam Human Rights Act (S.2784) is still "Read twice and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations." In other words, like its predecessor, it is still languishing in committee.
The Bill, like its predecessor, languished and died in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Here is the last word on it from Govtrack.us: "This bill never became law. This bill was proposed in a previous session of Congress. Sessions of Congress last two years, and at the end of each session all proposed bills and resolutions that haven't passed are cleared from the books."
As of October, 2008, this Bill has not been re-introduced, nor has any similar Bill been brought forth in the House or Senate.
References and Sources:
"Kerry and McCain Shield Communist Vietnam's Slaughter of Christians"
David Thibault, CNSNews.com -- 20 May, 2004
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/5/20/92912.shtml"Kerry (D-MA) Inaction Kills Human Rights Legislation"
Copyright 2002, Green Berets for Human Rights
http://www.gb4hr.net/Pages/Kerry%20Stalls%20Human%20Rights%20Legislation.htm"H.R. 2833 -- To promote freedom and democracy in Viet Nam" (aka Vietnam Human Rights Act)
U.S. House of Representatives -- 5 September, 2001
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.02833:"Survival of former U.S. allies depends on Vietnam Human Rights Act of 2004"
Thomas P. Cadmus -- 30 September, 2004
http://montagnard-foundation.org/MRelease-04-30September.htm"Persecution in Vietnam"
Sukalaya Kenworthy -- Posted to "Insight Magazine" 12 October, 2004
http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/10/11/Commentary/Persecution.In.Vietnam-750415.shtml"The Legacy"
Jack Kinsella - Omega Letter Editor -- 18 October, 2004
http://www.omegaletter.com/articles.asp?ArticleID=3833"Who Are The Montagnards And Why Are They Dying?"
Tom Segel in "American Daily" -- 29 July, 2004
http://www.americandaily.com/article/4463"Wounded Knee" -- http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm
"Massacre at Wounded Knee -- 1890" -- http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/knee.htm
Copyright 2004 by Stephen L. Harrison. All rights reserved.
Steve Harrison served in S.E.A. as a Army Infantry officer and fixed-wing reconnaissance and FAC (Forward Air Controller) "Birddog" pilot in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, June 1968-69. Awarded Purple Heart, Air Medal w/ V-Device and a free ride home to boot. He is also creator and webmaster of Yankee Air Pirates and the Dega-Montagnard Photo Gallery.