Intervention of Kok Ksor before the 1st Congress of Radicali Italiani, 4-7 July 2002

Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends: let me at the outset express my respect and sincerest sympathy for the non-violent initiative of Mr. Marco Pannella, whose generosity is as big as his moral and physical strength.

I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to Italian Radicals for inviting me here in Rome to their first Congress.

On behalf of the 600,000 Montagnard people inside the Central Highlands, I would also like to extend - their thanks to you - for your friendship with my people.

As you may know inside the Central Highlands of Vietnam our people are today suffering oppression and martial law enacted by Vietnam.

Since 1975, our people have continually suffered greatly at the hands of the Vietnamese communist government

and it is only recently, and thanks to the help from the Transnational Radical Party - that the plight of our people has been brought to the ears of the international community, the United Nations and the European Parliament.

I would also like to thank the TRP for the opportunity that will give me the opportunity to be at the UN in Geneva next week to present a report on the violations of civil and political rights in Vietnam before the Human Rights Committee,

and would also like to thank Marco Perduca and Matteo Mecacci for their work and assistance.

In 1975, our homeland became a military restricted zone and only in 1993 the provinces in the Central Highlands were opened. Our people have always felt that we have been forgotten.

So I cannot thank you enough for helping our indigenous people's cause to become known here in Europe.

I experienced the brutality of violence first hand - during the Vietnam War. I fought with the US Special Forces and US Army it is not a secret.

I was wounded, I have seen so many of our people die. Our hill tribe people were trapped in the politics of the Vietnam War - a war we never understood.

Over one quarter of our entire population would die. 40 percent of our male population died in the Vietnam War.

In 1975, the Communist regime started it revenge of forced assimilation and confiscation of our ancestral lands. That brutality continues today.

Today the Vietnamese regime continues to arrest and torture our Christian pastors, they destroy our churches and the Montagnards have been deprived of their land and condemned to poverty.

If we protest we are arrested, tortured, imprisoned or even executed. Recently our refugees in Cambodia have been shocked with electric prods, beaten and sold back to Vietnam for bounties paid by Hanoi.

My uncle, a Montagnard Senator, was executed by the Communists in 1975. My mother was hospitalised last year in 2001 after being beaten by Vietnamese security forces. 1000 of our refugees suffered in Cambodian refugee camps.

In February of last year, thousands and thousands of Montagnards carried out a series of peaceful demonstration to denounce the systematic violation of their fundamental human rights and religious persecution directed against our people.

Last year, for the first time, we decided to organize ourselves in a non-violent way, using one of the methods that is also the method that the Transnational Radical Party uses in its campaigns.

We demonstrated peacefully asking to the Vietnamese Government to respect our rights and its own laws its own Constitution! Something, I understand Marco Pannella is doing today here in Rome with his dramatic thirst strike.

I would also like to thank Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino for having engaged the Montagnards in another non-violent action.

In fact, in December of last year, dozens of Montagnards that live in the United States, refugees in Cambodia

and 170,000 more people in the Central Highlands participated in the Satyagraha for the inclusion of women in the afghan government and fasted for 1 day.

Nonviolence is also one of the reason for which I became a member of the Transnational Radical Party, because I believe that it is the instrument that can allow us to play by the rules calling on other to respect the rules.

There almost 100 other U.S.-based Montagnards that are willing to join the TRP in the future, I hope that the next time that we meet, I will be able to confirm their decision to become members with their name and their money.

It is a substantial amount of money but I know that the cost of globalising freedom and democracy is high. Very high.

In conclusion, I would like to say that if something is happening today for the Montagnards, it is because at the beginning of last year we were able to brought our case to the public.

Our struggle has been going on for years now, but nobody knew it - before it was covered by the BBC and Reuters- we were clandestine.

Today, thanks to power of information, we have been able to reach out to thousands of people.

If their reaction will be similar to the one of the Transnational Radical Party, there is hope that the situation of civil and political rights in Vietnam will change. Thank you very much