Mission & Justice

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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26/2/08

Ethnic H’Mong Catholics in a northern district have been harshly affected by prolonged cold weather that has killed thousands of their cattle. Local government media reported heavy snowfall covering Lao Cai province’s Sa Pa district from late January to mid-February. The temperature reportedly dropped to minus-2 degrees Celsius for many days in the area, 400 kilometers northwest of Ha Noi. About 2,000 cattle, 20 percent of the district total, had reportedly died from the cold weather as of Feb 20, media reported. Cattle are major assets to H’Mong people, who use them for drawing plows in the fields or offer them to their children when they marry.

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J.B. An Dang; 2/2/08

The archbishop of Hanoi confirmed yesterday evening that the Vietnamese government is restoring to the Catholic Church the use of the building that housed the apostolic nunciature. In an open letter addressed to the priests, religious, seminarians, and lay faithful of the archdiocese, the archbishop emphasized his appreciation for the solidarity shown “not only by the faithful of the archdiocese of Hanoi, but by the entire world”. Since last December 18th, thousands of Vietnamese Catholic faithful had protested in daily prayer vigils before the former nunciature of Hanoi, to ask the government to return it to the Church. The building had been confiscated by the communist leadership in 1959. In these 40 days of protests, the archbishop continued, “We have lived a new Pentecost. We have been united and devoted ourselves to the prayers, despite challenges and hardship”.

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Quynh-du Thon-that; 31/1/08

January 31, 1968, was just like any other first day of Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year. My family, like other residents of Hue, had spent a great deal of time preparing for the most important event of the year. The ancestral altar of lacquered timber with inlaid mother-of-pearl had been carefully prepared. Its brass candle holders and sandalwood burners gleamed and our home was decorated with red gladioli and golden blossoms. At the stroke of midnight, as fire crackers exploded everywhere around the city, my father lit incense and ceremoniously welcomed the spirits of our ancestors back to this earthly world.

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