Priest, 20 Catholics detained in Vietnam—lawyer

HANOI—A parish priest and some 20 other Vietnamese Catholics were detained by police on Friday when they tried to ask local officials to return what they say is church land, a lawyer said.

Tensions between communist authorities and the Thai Ha Redemptorist parish have flared since mid-November when officials moved in to build a sewage reservoir that protesters say is on church land.

“A priest and about 20 Thai Ha faithful were arrested this morning while they were rallying at Hoan Kiem lake (in central Hanoi) to protest the invasion of church properties,” lawyer Le Quoc Quan told Agence France-Presse.

Quan is not representing the detainees but is a member of the parish.

Around 100 people, including the priest and protestors carrying signs, tried to march to the office of the Hanoi People’s Committee — the local government — to file a complaint over what they describe as a seizure of church land.

Security agents moved in to break up the group, detaining around 20 people including Nguyen Van Phuong, the parish priest, and two other parish officials, Quan added.

Police had peacefully dispersed an earlier protest by up to 150 Catholics on November 18.

Demonstrations are rare in authoritarian Vietnam but two protests have been organized since authorities began work last month on the sewage project which will service a public hospital in what, years ago, was a monastery.

Officials began seizing property from Vietnamese churches more than 50 years ago when the communists took power in what was then North Vietnam, after the defeat of French colonizers.

The church says the authorities took over the three-storey monastery building almost 40 years ago and the reservoir project is just the latest example of the state whittling away their property.

According to an online report by the Hanoi Moi newspaper, a mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party, building the modern sewage treatment system will improve the environment for thousands of area residents.

Demands for return of the land are illegal “and can never be realized”, it said.

“Complaints and disputes in land and religious issues have always been the golden opportunities for political opportunists and reactionaries to abuse,” Hanoi Moi said.

Vietnam has Southeast Asia’s second-largest Roman Catholic community after the Philippines, with at least six million followers.