It has been reported recently that eleven Christian prisoners in Vietnam are missing. They should have finished serving their sentences but have not been released and family and friends raised the alarm after they lost contact with their loved ones. All eleven men belong to the Montagnard ethnic group in Vietnam’s Central Highlands and were sentenced between 2011 and 2019 to a combined total of ninety years and eight months in prison for their unregistered religious activities.
Montagnard Christians suffer persecution for their faith (Christianity is seen as a western religion) and also for their ethnicity (fear of tribal separatism). In recent decades hundreds of thousands of people from the Central and Northwest Highlands have become Christians and meet in unregistered house churches – their families and communities often try to force them to renounce their faith and return to Buddhism or animism.
Six of the eleven missing Christian prisoners are members of the Degar Protestant Church and five are members of the Ha Mon Catholic Church. Neither church is government-approved.
Six missing Protestants
Siu Hlom, Ro Mah Pla, Rmah Bloanh and Rmah Khil were accused of “undermining national unity policy” and were charged under Articles 117 and 331 of the Vietnamese Penal Code (“distributing propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” and “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe the interests of the State”).
Siu Hlom was sentenced to twelve years in prison in April 2011, Ro Mah Pla was sentenced to nine years in March 2014 and Rmah Bloanh and Rmah Khil were sentenced to eight and nine years respectively in September 2014. All were also sentenced to three to five years’ probation and they should all have been released by now.
Y Hriam Kpa was arrested in July 2015 and charged with “subversion” for refusing to close the unregistered church he led. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for “undermining national unity policy” under Article 87 of the Vietnamese Penal Code.
The sixth Protestant, Sung A Khua, was sentenced to two years and two months in prison in January 2019. He and his family had previously been expelled from their village and their home was reportedly destroyed after they used it as an unregistered house church and refused to renounce their faith. They were eventually allowed back into the village but in April 2017 he was charged with “deforestation” because he used timber from trees near his home to rebuild it.
Five missing Catholics
The other five Christians (named as Runh, A Kuin, Run, A Tik and Dinh Kuh) are members of the Ha Mon Catholic Church which, like the Degar Protestant Church, is not government-approved, and while most were initially accused of “separatist activities” they were all charged with “undermining national unity policy” under Article 87 of the Vietnamese Penal Code for participating in unregistered church gatherings. Like the Protestants, they were all sentenced to three to five years’ probation following their prison terms and they should all have been released by now.
Runh, a house-church leader, was sentenced in May 2013 to ten years in prison. A Kuin was arrested in 2013 after he attended a prayer gathering in his village and on an unspecified date he was sentenced to nine years and six months in prison. Run was sentenced in November 2013 to nine years in prison, A Tik was sentenced in April 2016 to eight years in prison and Dinh Kuh was sentenced in April 2016 to seven years in prison.
Evangelist found dead
On 8 March 2024 relatives of evangelist Y Bum Bya (not the Y Pum Bya profiled on the Church in Chains website) found his battered body hanging from a tree in a cemetery near his home in Dak Lak province. He was from the unregistered Evangelical Church of Christ in the Central Highlands (ECCCH), which the government has long sought to suppress. Local police had summoned Y Bum Bya to a meeting and he left his village to attend it but when he did not return home his relatives began searching and found his body hanging by a rope. Local authorities declared his death a suicide, but those who found his body reported signs of torture.
Previously, in August 2023, Y Bum Bya was arrested, beaten and charged with trying to “destroy the great national unity” under Article 116 of the criminal code and in December 2023 he was arrested again, beaten by police and forced to renounce his association with the church in front of villagers who had been forcibly assembled.
In January 2024 another ECCCH evangelist, Nay Y Blang, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years’ imprisonment for resisting a government order to close his house church in Phu Yen province and stop holding prayer meetings in his home.
On 28 March 2024 ECCCH pastor and religious freedom advocate Y Krec Bya was sentenced to 13 years in prison followed by five years of house arrest for “destroying the great national unity”. He had been arrested in April 2023 and held for investigation until his trial on 28 March.
Read Church in Chains’ Vietnam Country Profile.
(Asia News, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, International Christian Concern, Morning Star News, Radio Free Asia, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, Voice of the Martyrs Canada)