Buddhists Decry Fate of Monks

About 20,000 Vietnamese Americans, most of them refugees who have settled in Orange and Los Angeles counties, on Sunday joined in what was billed as the largest celebration of Buddha’s 2,542nd birthday in the United States.

Amid traditional bright flowers festooned around a huge, smiling baby Buddha, booming drums, and a covey of caged doves, there was a strong modern-day undercurrent--polite but forceful protest against the persecution of Buddhist monks in Vietnam. “We will try to ring the bell so loud it will go all the way to Vietnam, so they hear our message. Nobody can stop religious freedom,” said Tony Quach, 42, an auto mechanic from Garden Grove, as he watched several men parade a huge, brass bell across the colorful gathering in the central courtyard of Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana.

Quach escaped to California on a fishing boat 24 years ago, and he and others said they were keenly aware that there are elderly monks from the independent Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam who have been imprisoned, kept under house arrest, or housed in re-education camps for decades. The monks belong to the same independent church whose members immolated themselves in 1975 to protest loss of freedom.

In 1982, the church was officially banned by the Vietnamese government. There are an estimated 65 million practicing Buddhists there today, but only the state-sanctioned church is allowed to conduct services, according to Penelope Faulkner, vice president of the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights and a staff member at the International Buddhist Information Bureau in Paris.

The first speaker at the event was Vo Van Ai, president of the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights, who flew in from Paris to deliver hopeful news. After years of urging the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva to examine imprisonment and persecution of monks by the Communist government, the Vietnamese ambassador to the U.N. consented Friday to an independent U.N. inquiry. Ai received a standing ovation from the crowd.

Thich Nguyen Thi, leader of the 500-member Pagoda Bat Nan in Santa Ana and one of the organizers of Sunday’s celebration, said he would urge his congregation to gather first-hand evidence from friends and relatives back home of harassment. For instance, he said, the aging patriarch of the independent church, Thich Huyen Quang, is weak and ill after being imprisoned in a dank hut, and was not receiving medication. Three school friends of Thi’s have been in labor camps in northern Vietnam for more than 10 years, he said.

“If Buddhists in Orange County and elsewhere don’t explain what’s really going on behind the facade of religious freedom there, the U.N. observer will never know,” he said.

In 1995, the monitoring group Human Rights Watch/Asia said at least two dozen Buddhist leaders had been arrested since 1991. Hanoi still exerts tight control over dissent and worship, according to the State Department’s 1995 Human Rights Report. There were nearly 100 Buddhist monks on hand for Sunday’s event, from places such as Boston, Montreal, Denver and Houston.

Tibetan monks in dark wine robes sat with their shaved heads bowed next to fellow devotees from Los Angeles in shining saffron robes. Wrinkled older men and women, young children in bright dresses and bow ties, and others in the crowd bowed as the monks filed by with hands clasped in prayer, reciting ancient chants and prayers.

The speakers not only repeated the familiar stories of Buddha’s birth from a lotus flower, his meditations under a tree, and his teachings on pure living, but used them as an analogy for freedom today.

For many children and others, the event was first and foremost a happy day, a day to eat only vegetarian food--Buddha would not hurt any creature, and enjoy other customs, such as the releasing of doves and pigeons that ends the festival.

“It’s fun. The best thing is they let go of all the birds,” said Kathy Tran, 10, of Midway City in Orange County.