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Like echoes that will not be quieted, scenes from a war that ended nearly 30 years ago are now being replayed at the airport in Raleigh, North Carolina. Clutching white plastic bags of travel documents, bleary-eyed Montagnard refugees from the Central Highlands of Vietnam stream down the arrival-lounge escalator to be met by white-haired American ladies wearing housedresses and blowsy men waving American flags. Joyful members of North Carolina's 3,000-strong Montagnard community are on hand, as are relief workers from Lutheran Family Services who bustle about, counting heads and arranging transportation that will ferry the refugees to their new lives in the land of pickup trucks and strip malls.
In the coming weeks, nearly 900 Montagnards are expected to arrive from two refugee camps in Cambodia to similar North Carolina welcomes. The outcasts carry not only American visas and medical records but chilling stories of persecution that continue to reverberate long after the end of the Vietnam War. The Montagnards had fought for the losers in that conflict, side by side with Green Berets (who later helped arrange their relocation to North Carolina near the American special-forces base at Fort Bragg). In Vietnam, old scores are being settled to this day. The refugees say they are being forced from their birthplaces by the Vietnamese—a people ethnically, linguistically and culturally distinct from the Montagnards. Vietnamese from the north have systematically moved onto and taken Montagnard land, and the government has repressed the highlanders' religion in an attempt to weaken and perhaps eradicate them.
Along with their livelihoods, the highlanders say their culture is being ransacked. Beginning in the 1950s, Protestant missionaries, primarily from the U.S., won converts among the Montagnards, and today some estimates put the number of Christians at some 70%. The communist government in Hanoi views any religious movement as a potential political rival. Only a few churches have been granted official status, and congregations without state approval worship at their peril. Even hill-tribe Christmas celebrations, which are held without interference in other parts of Vietnam, are subject to harassment. Leh Ksor, 35, a new resident of Raleigh, recalls how police two years ago used tear gas to break up a Christmas pageant in a highland village near the Cambodian border. Parents, coughing and wheezing, grabbed their children and fled in terror, only to be beaten by waiting police.
Crackdowns have increased in the past year after some 20,000 Montagnards held a week of protests against religious persecution. One night last year, a 16-year-old named A'Noul (she asked for her full name to be withheld) was at home in a village in Dak Lak province when three vans roared up and two dozen Vietnamese police spilled out. They burst into her house, swept books and clothes onto the floor and said, as A'Noul recalls, "'If you don't give us your Bible, we will take you and put you in prison.'" She adds, "The police said, 'You don't worship God, you only worship the American government.'" After the police raids, which took place less than a week after the mass demonstrations, the frightened girl fled her hometown and settled in the U.S. Hundreds of others face a similar fate. "We are fighting for religious freedom," says Y Mphiap, 29, who, with his pregnant wife and three children, left Vietnam and recently arrived in Greensboro. "The government closed down our churches and keeps calling in our pastors for questioning."
Hanoi officials claim the refugees' stories are fabrications. The government denies access to the Central Highlands by journalists and representatives of humanitarian aid organizations. But recent reports by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department corroborate Montagnard accounts. "This is a systematic crackdown," says Mike Jendrzejczyk of Human Rights Watch. "And it's still going on."
American churches have rallied in support of the Montagnards. The White House has granted special refugee status to the 900 currently in Cambodian camps, which speeds their emigration to the U.S. But Washington is powerless to do anything for those who remain in the highlands. Y Mphiap, who fled Vietnam last year, says tribes staged the mass demonstrations to attract international sympathy. Overseas diplomatic pressure was supposed to force Hanoi to give back their land, he says. Instead, secret police rounded up protesters and put them in jail. Y Mphiap and 22 of his fellow villagers headed for the jungle. Three were caught and sent to prison; the rest made it to Cambodia. Says H'Mren, a 49-year-old refugee: "If we stayed in our village, we would die. If we ran, we might die too, but it was better to die free."
A'Noul, the teenager whose home was invaded by the police, got word from her family this February that her brother and brother-in-law had been arrested. For now, all she can do is try to build a life in North Carolina. "When the highlands have freedom, I will go back," A'Noul says. She does not expect to return anytime soon.
- BARRY HILLENBRAND/Raleigh
- The Montagnards are still paying the price for taking the wrong side in the Vietnam War