By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
In spite of pleas from Vietnamese Americans, human rights activists and veteran's groups, Senator JOHN KERRY (D-MA) successfully sabotaged the Vietnam Human Rights Act (Senate Bill HR-2833). By doing so Kerry literally facilitated the communist Vietnamese efforts to exterminate the Christian hill tribe peoples living in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam.
The Bill was designed to sanction communist Vietnam for its calculated sterilization, terrorism and genocide of the hill tribe people commonly known to westerners as the MONTAGNARDS.
MONTAGNARD hill tribesmen are ethnically unrelated to the Vietnamese. The Central Highlands region has been the home of the MONTAGNARDS for at least a 1,000 years.
As late as 1970 there were an estimated 3,000,000 Montagnards in various tribes living in the Vietnam region. As a direct result of Vietnam's ongoing campaign of ethnic extermination, the total population of Montagnards is now BELOW 650,000. This unadulterated genocide has taken nearly two thirds of the Montagnards in only 34 years, including more than half the male population.
Internal Vietnamese government documents recently obtained by Human Rights Watch support eye witness testimony from Montagnards detailing long-standing incidents of torture and murder of Montagnard Christians which resulted in Vietnam's arbitrary confiscation of Montagnard lands.
In an ongoing terror campaign since 2001, Vietnamese authorities are forcing Montagnard Christians to stand in front of their entire village and renounce Christianity. The Christians are then forced to pledge to cease all contacts with outside groups.
To seal their loyalty, the Christians are forced to drink rice wine mixed with goat's blood.
"They asked us to drink goat's blood, but we never saw any goat," one traumatized young villager told Human Rights Watch. "We wondered where the blood was from. If we didn't drink it, they would beat us."
The villager suspected that Christians are being slowly poisoned. "We didn't know if it was from a chicken or a dog or what. I am afraid I will have health problems in the future."
Human Rights Watch described the excessive use of force by security forces in Plei Lao, Gia Lai province in March 2001, when several hundred troops surrounded and entered the village late at night to break up an all-night prayer meeting. In a confrontation with villagers, security forces fired into the crowd, killing one villager. They then burned down the village church.
One villager described what happened: "First the police ordered some Vietnamese civilians to ransack and destroy the church with axes. They used a cable tied to a vehicle to topple it and the soldiers used their gun butts. Then they forced the ethnic Jarai to burn it," he said. "Everyone was crying-for the dead and wounded, and for the church."
Representative Chris Smith, R-NJ, authored the bill, which linked US aid to Vietnam to "substantial progress" in Vietnam's human rights record. Smith's bill, the Vietnam Human Rights Act, passed the House by an overwhelming 410-1 vote in 2001. But it never got a hearing or a vote in the Senate, where it was blocked by the then-chairman of the East Asian and Pacific Affairs subcommittee -- John Kerry.
Kerry, with the backing of Sen. John McCain, explained his opposition to the human rights act by insisting that the carrot of "engagement" will do more to nurture human rights in Vietnam than the stick of sanctions.
In July 2004, the House again passed Smith's bill, this time by 323 to 45. As in 2001, says Smith, the message of the bill is that "human rights are central -- they are at the core of our relationship with governments and the people they purport to represent."
With the Vietnam Human Rights Act stalled again by JOHN KERRY, the communist are free to continue its ethnic cleansing of the Montagnard Christians in the Central Highlands region in an attempt to wipe out all opposition to Vietnam's theft of Montagnard land and resources. Human Rights Watch -- VII. REPRESSION OF ETHNIC MINORITY PROTESTANTS