Ladies and Gentlemen, Honorable and Distinguished members of the European Parliament and fellow Radicals,

I speak to you today under the gravest of circumstances - as the land of my birth, the central highlands of Vietnam - is under martial law.

Thousands of Vietnamese government soldiers patrol our ancestral homelands persecuting our villagers and hunting our refugees who try fleeing Vietnam.

Over the past year bounties have been paid for our captured refugees as Vietnam and Cambodia defied international law and sold, kidnapped and shocked with electric torture, hundreds of our people.

These human rights violations would force the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to cancel the repatriation agreement with Vietnam leading to 900 of our refugees being granted asylum in the United States.

As you may know the Vietnamese government recently denied the European Union delegation access to visit imprisoned religious leaders in Vietnam.

International monitors however, are also banned from access to our homelands in the central highlands which are under martial law.

For 2000 years however, we the Montagnards or Degar peoples - indigenous peoples of South-East Asia have inhabited the “Central Highlands” of southern Vietnam.

Here we lived in village communities where we practiced traditional agriculture, hunting and fishing, until invaders came and began persecuting us.

It is a persecution that never ended and on 23 April 2002 Human Rights Watch stated in a press release: - “The Montagnards have been repressed for decades. This has got to stop”.

In April 2002 Human Rights Watch also documented in a 194 page report titled “Repression of Montagnards” numerous cases studies of torture, beatings, arrests and killings of our people.

The origins of this repression stems from several historical factors -beginning with communist revenge because many of our people had allied themselves with the United States military during the Vietnam War.

Today the current communist regime carries out this revenge against us by exploiting our homelands like indigenous peoples all over the world have suffered under modern encroachment.

In the year 2002 our people face continually official policies that force us from our ancestral villages to make way for government controlled coffee plantations.

They also persecute us for being Christian.

Both the US State Department and Human Rights Watch report “official policies” where authorities force us to actually drink animals blood while renouncing Christ.

Human Rights Watch reported in April 2002:

“Confidential government directives issued between 1999 and 2001 show a centrally directed campaign and special bureaucratic infrastructure to target and suppress Christians in ethnic minority areas in the northern and western highlands”.

The government also kills us in devious ways.

The official policy of “Fixed Field, Fixed Residence” which makes our traditional agricultural practices illegal - condemns us to poverty.

First they confiscate our ancestral lands and force us on to small infertile plots of land and we cannot grow enough food.

UNICEF reported in 2001 that our children suffer the worst rates of malnutrition and poverty in Vietnam.

UNICEF Stated “children belonging to ethnic minority groups generally find themselves at the bottom of the economic ladder from the day they are born.”

After we have no land the government says we are poor – we have too many children.

Then they say to our women we must get surgically sterilized.

Of course our race of people feel threatened.

So in an expression of dissent in February 2001, thousands of our people in the central highlands stood up and peacefully demonstrated.

However, instead of solving the grievances of our people the Hanoi government sent in thousands of troops, tanks and helicopter gun-ships to suppress the demonstrations.

In the first few weeks alone hundreds of our people were beaten and tortured with electric prods.

Last year while burning the village church in Plei Lao the Vietnamese soldiers shot and killed a Montagnard Christian named R’mah Blim.

Last month on August 25, 2002, a Vietnamese security agent used a machete to hack to death the Montagnard Christian Y-Preo Nie’s at Buon Hok village in Daklak province.

Even my innocent relatives were targeted for revenge.

After the February 2001 demonstrations my step-brothers were forced to denounce me on Vietnamese television.

While my 80 year old mother refused to denounce me she was beaten by Vietnamese police and hospitalized with broken ribs.

In April 2002 my 18 year old niece was gang raped by authorities because she tried fleeing Vietnam.

In the last two months police and soldiers have stepped up repression and imprisoned 55 more of our people.

The Vietnamese government has sent hundreds of their security forces dressed as civilians into the Central Highlands in order to monitor activities of our people.

Dogs are used to hunt down our refugees who have escaped into the jungles.

It is now however, common knowledge that Vietnamese security forces state they will execute Montagnard refugees “RIGHT ON THE SPOT” without any question.

Right now thousands of our Montagnard people are currently missing or hiding in the jungles.

Bodies are reported now floating on the Gia Lai river.

The Vietnamese communists have not stopped there however.

Since 1993 I have been attending the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations but this year - the Vietnamese Ambassador publicly accused me of being a TERRORIST while I was addressing the United Nations Human Rights Commission as a delegate of the Transnational Radical Party.

Vietnam is now trying to hijack the principals of democracy and free speech in the UN and trying to force the entire Transnational Radical Party out of the United Nations by getting their consultative status revoked.

In the name of democracy Vietnam must not succeed.

In the name of our imprisoned leaders, our Christian pastors who remain in prison, our children who suffer malnutrition, our people who have suffered electric shock torture, our people who have been murdered and disappeared, our farmers who have been forced off their lands,

On behalf of them all - we the Montagnard Foundation respectfully ask the European Parliament the following:

- To consider the concluding observations on Vietnam made by the 75th Session of the UN Human Rights Committee on 26 July 2002 namely item 19: I quote “The state party should take immediate measures to ensure that the rights of members of indigenous communities are respected.

Further

- Non-government organizations and other human rights monitors should be granted access to the central highlands.”

- We ask the European Parliament re-consider the granting of future European Aid earmarked for Vietnam, namely consider the written declarations submitted to the European Parliament by Marco Pannella of the Transnational Radical Party on 13/09/2002.

- We ask the European Parliament to use every reasonable means possible to ensure the Transnational Radical Party retains its consultative status to the UN and that that democracy is pursued for all the oppressed peoples - in Vietnam, in Laos and in Burma.



On behalf of the Montagnard Degar people I thank you.