Vietnam: Analysis of the revised 2007 Internal Training Manual ‘Concerning the Task of the Protestant Religion in the Northern Mountainous Region 01/02/2008
In 2006, an internal religious affairs training manual covering the northern highland provinces was leaked from the government Committee on Religious Affairs (CRA). This document implicated the government in a plan to ‘resolutely subdue the abnormally rapid and spontaneous development of the Protestant religion in the region’ (p. 44). After widespread international criticism, the government undertook to revise the manual, and a new edition was provided to foreign diplomatic officials in 2007.
Although the revised version involves a lessening of the inflammatory language which was more characteristic of the 2006 manual, there is no change to its core objective to ‘solve the Protestant problem’ by subduing its development. It retains a suspicious tone about the politically nefarious nature of religion and its potential to cause instability among ethnic minorities, which provides the context for this response. Whereas the 2006 manual provided specific legitimacy for local officials to force renunciations of faith among members of less well-established congregations, the 2007 edition imposes an undefined and arbitrary condition of stability upon the freedom of a congregation to operate.1 Therefore, the treatment of any congregation deemed not to ‘stably practise religion’ is implicitly left to the arbitration of local officials, who had previously been mandated to force renunciations of faith. Without a full and unconditional prohibition on forcing renunciations of faith, the amended manual does not go far enough to address the problems in the 2006 original.
Of further concern is the fact that despite the promulgation of a policy framework for the registration of congregations in 2004-05, the training manual still uses the terminology of ‘pilot projects’. This indicates a severe deficiency in the normalisation process of Protestant congregations in the northern highlands, and brings into question the efficacy of Vietnam’s current policy framework for religious activities.
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