Vietnamese Groups Plan Rally to Oppose End of Trade Ban : Protest: They want to call attention to continuing human rights abuses in their homeland.

A coalition of Vietnamese groups in Orange County, opposed to a lifting of the trade embargo with Vietnam, plans a rally next week to call attention to continuing human rights violations there.

The Committee for Vietnam Salvation will hold the rally Friday in Westminster’s Little Saigon commercial district.

The trade embargo, which bars U.S. companies from doing business with Vietnam, expires in September unless it is reimposed by Clinton.

The groups cite reports of incidents such as the July arrests of 25 monks and nearly 100 Buddhists in the city of Hue after a crowd tried to block police from entering a pagoda to question the senior monk about anti-government actions.

And earlier this month, the Rev. Thich Huyen Quang, the patriarch of the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, was ordered to stop representing dissident monks and hand over the group’s official seal to the Communist government.

“There seems to be incidents every month and we are in extreme misery hearing that Buddhists in Vietnam are constantly being harassed,” said the Rev. Thich Nguyen Tri of the Bat Nha Temple in Garden Grove.

He and other Vietnamese monks across the United States have added to their weekly services prayers for an end to religious persecution, Tri said.

Monks in Orange County, where there are 17 Vietnamese Buddhist temples, also helped organize a protest in July. About 250 Vietnamese gathered at the Hue Quang Temple in Santa Ana to kick off “Faith Over Oppression,” a worldwide human-rights campaign also sponsored by the Committee for Vietnam Salvation.

“I am Catholic,” said organizer Viet Trong Nguyen of Yorba Linda, “but I recognize the repression of Buddhists in our country symbolizes the repression of all citizens there. We ask President Clinton not to lift the trade embargo until all imprisoned religious, as well as political, leaders have been released, and the Vietnamese Communist government respects human rights.”

Some veterans groups and relatives of Americans missing in action since the Vietnam War have also opposed the idea of lifting the embargo, on the grounds that it is the only leverage the United States has to force the Vietnamese to provide more information.

U.S. business people in Asia, however, have warned that American business will suffer if it is denied the business opportunities in Vietnam that are now opening up to other countries.

Thich Vien Ly, secretary general of the Vietnamese-American Unified Buddhist Congress in the U.S.A., which is based in Monterey Park, estimates that several hundred Buddhist monks and followers are imprisoned in Vietnam and hundreds more are under house arrest because they were involved in dissident activities.

In one of the latest incidents, a group of Buddhists broke a police car window to rescue a senior monk who was being brought in for questioning about the self-immolation of a man three days earlier in protest of religious persecution. The protest resulted in the arrest of six other monks and hundreds of supporters, according to a letter the senior monk sent to the Vietnamese-American Unified Buddhist Congress.

“And all this is happening when there are still countries such as the United States to check on Vietnam’s actions,” Ly said. “Who knows how much worse it can be with no one watching.”