Mission & Justice

Thomas Bell; 27/4/08

Vietnamese babies are being bought or stolen from parents to be sold for adoption in the West, according to a US Embassy investigation. In some cases hospitals sent babies to orphanages after their parents were unable to pay medical bills. In another, a grandmother sent a girl for adoption without telling the parents. The report by the US Embassy in Hanoi said: “In five provinces, we discovered unlicensed, unregulated facilities that provide free room and board to pregnant women in return for their commitment to relinquish their children upon birth.”

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28/3/08

The Mekong River, the world’s 12th largest waterway, crossing six countries, may soon be tamed by a cascade of mega dams, but critics say the plan will harm the fish stocks millions of people rely on. Plans for a series of Mekong dams have been made and scrapped several times since the 1960s, but now, with oil above $US100 dollars ($108) a barrel, the projects look more appealing than ever to their proponents. The river’s future will be a key issue when prime ministers of the Mekong countries meet at the weekend in the Lao capital Vientiane for a summit with the Asian Development Bank. The 4800km river originates in the Tibetan plateau of China, where it is called the Lancang, before running through Yunnan province, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam to the South China Sea. To the development lobby, the river is a dream of hydropower potential for an energy-hungry region. To environmentalists, such plans are a nightmare.

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Lan Nguyen; 21/3/08

A new controversy has erupted in Vietnam over Church property. After those at the start of the new year in Hanoi, protests concerning a building owned by the Sisters of the Vinh Son Charity Order have broken out in Ho Chi Minh City. Since 17 March a few hundreds of them have been gathering every day to pray in front of their seized property which local authorities would like to turn into a hotel with night club. The property in question on Nguyen Thi Dieu has belonged to the Order since December 1959 after the French Red Cross transferred ownership to the sisters. The nuns opened a day care center that operated till 1975 when the communists came to power. Eventually the archdiocese of Saigon and the Order had to agree to let the local government use the facility as a school for kindergarteners. Over the sisters’ protest the authorities took ownership of the building in 1997 by simple administrative fiat (75083/QD-UB), arguing that the property was in the state of absentee-landlord. Soon, the property was rented out in order to financially support local government and converted to a dancing club. In 2007, police raided the club and reported that the property was actually being run as a brothel. The club was shut down.

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20/3/08

The Federal Government will seek clemency for an Australian woman convicted of heroin trafficking who has been ordered to face a firing squad in Vietnam Sydney woman Jasmine Luong had been seeking to reduce the life sentence she was handed by a lower court in December. But judges at the Court of Appeals in Ho Chi Minh City instead accepted that she should face the firing squad for trying to smuggle 1.55kg of heroin into Australia. Luong, an Australian of Vietnamese descent, was arrested at Ho Chi Minh City’s international airport as she tried to board a flight to Australia on February 13 last year. Customs officials said they found the heroin in her shoes and luggage. The Government plans to strongly support any appeal for clemency.

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Ed Ruggero; 18/3/08

Forty years ago, American soldiers conducted a helicopter assault against Pinkville, their name for a string of tiny villages that were a staging ground for Viet Cong guerrillas. The soldiers were told by their officers that the only Vietnamese they would encounter were VC combatants who might pose as civilians. In time, most Americans would come to know Pinkville by its other name: My Lai. Over the next few hours that day, some soldiers engaged in an orgy of violence, herding unarmed villagers — women, babies, old men — into clearings and ditches where they were machine-gunned. “It was a Nazi kind of thing,” one of the men would later admit. Pfc. Paul Meadlo was told to guard a group of women and children. His lieutenant, William Calley, a baby-faced college dropout, told Meadlo, “You know what to do with them,” according to Meadlo’s testimony at Calley’s court-martial.

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16/3/08

The government of Laos has denied that thousands of ethnic Hmong face persecution in the forests of the land-locked country, a day after an exclusive Al Jazeera report showed showing hundreds of starving Hmong living in constant fear of attack. “The Hmong in Laos are not at all persecuted,” Yong Chanthalangsy, spokesman for the Laos ministry of foreign affairs told Al Jazeera on Friday.”We do not consider those in the films as our enemy,” he said, referring to video footage shot in secret by Al Jazeera correspondent Tony Birtley. “On the contrary we are helping them to reintegrate with the mainstream of society.”

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16/3/08

To the villagers who survived the My Lai massacre and many of the Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, all the anniversaries of the atrocity are important. But commemorations tomorrow, 40 years after the event, seem especially urgent to many of the Americans who have travelled to Vietnam to attend. Some see parallels between what happened here on March 16, 1968, and events in Iraq, the site of another controversial war that has drawn US troops to a faraway corner of the globe. “We’re supposed to learn from the mistakes of history, but we keep making the same mistakes,” said Lawrence Colburn, whose helicopter landed in My Lai in the midst of the massacre.

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13/3/08

Al Jazeera’s correspondent Tony Birtley travelled in secret to the jungles of northern Laos in search of the last fighters of the CIA’s “secret army”, a remnant from the days of the Vietnam War. This is his account of his journey. The dead of night - a rendezvous on a dirt road on the fringe of a dense jungle. I couldn’t see the faces of my guides, but I could see their guns and I could feel the apprehension as they ushered me into the undergrowth and the start of what would turn out to be an unforgettable journey. There were six of them, all ethnic Hmong; a rugged, tough people used to harsh conditions. But a people, I was soon to discover, living in fear.

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Bruce Grant; 10/3/08

While it is understandable that the Rudd Government wants to create the impression that it is “business as usual” with our important ally the United States, it should not miss the opportunity of a change of government to examine what went wrong with the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration is still trying to make Iraq seem like a success. The Rudd Government can adopt the more realistic position that it was a mistake, costly not only in lives and property, but in the security of the Middle East, in Afghanistan and America’s standing in the world. It need not flaunt this position, but it does need to hold it.

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3/3/08

Catholics in a northern province hope the first funeral Mass in their remote town, after more than 40 years, is the start of improved pastoral care for the future. Although the temperature dropped below freezing on Feb. 15, Father Pierre Pham Thanh Binh, pastor of Sa Pa parish, drove his old car 70 kilometers, up mountainous roads, to get to Lai Chau town, 470 kilometers northwest of Ha Noi. He drove to Lai Chau province from his parish in Lao Cai province to celebrate Mass and administer the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick for 12 elderly Catholics. The service was held at Anna Nguyen Thi Bon’s house, in Sang Thang village, after which Father Binh returned to his parish.

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