BY ANDREW LAM, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
EDITOR’S NOTE: Many observers are convinced that today’s Vietnam is an economic dragon waiting to take off, with Singapore technocrat Lee Kwan Yew playing the role of Hanoi’s new ...... But this vision ignores the depth of popular yearning for something or someone that can fill Vietnam’s spiritual void. So far the one figure who comes closest to meeting it is an aging monk named Thich Huyen Quang, who has been imprisoned without trial since December. PNS editor Andrew Lam, a San Francisco writer and journalist, travels frequently to his native country of Vietnam.
By many a foreigner’s Vietnam 20 years after the war has become a quintessential secular country_a tangle of billboards, flight times, mini-hotels, factories, high-tech night clubs. The real icon of the age, Ho Chi Minh’s true successor, is Singaporean technocrat Lee Kwan Yew, whose blend of soft authoritarianism and free market economics has become East Asia’s new religion.
But a Vietnamese will tell you that this is far too simplistic a picture for a country that is 3,000 years old. Vietnamese are too rooted in spirituality, too informed by religious tradition, to accept the glamour of the cosmopolitan city as a substitute for real religious freedom and civil liberty. If anyone has replaced revered but long dead communist Uncle Ho, it is an aged monk named Thich Huyen Quang, the abbot of the outlawed United Buddhist Church of Vietnam, who has been imprisoned without trial since last December.
Previously nominated for the Nobel peace prize, Quang is a constant thorn in Hanoi’s side as it struggles with the loss of its own ideological direction following the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union. While party bureaucrats appear willing though forfeit communism to embrace the free market economy, millions of Vietnamese, especially the young, are flocking to churches and temples to rediscover their spiritual roots and fill the ideological vacuum. It is this mass base, and the ability to wield religion as a nationalist weapon much as Ho Chi Minh wielded nationalism as a religious weapon, that gives Quang, and the Buddhist and Christian clergy in general, their potential power.
It is why Hanoi, even as it opens it doors to foreign investment and loosens its grip on the society as a whole, paradoxically continues to crackdown on religious leaders. Hanoi knows only too well the tumultuous relationship religious leaders have had with the Vietnamese state stretching back for centuries. Persecute a monk, the history books warn, and the dynasty will fall apart.
Is was, in fact, a monk of Quang’s religious order whose act of self-immolation in 1963 reverberated around the world, ultimately toppling the Diem government.
No mere aberration, that fiery act of defiance sets Vietnamese apart from their Chinese neighbors to the north. While Chinese dissidents brave imprisonment and execution to demand Western-style political change. Vietnamese Buddhists immolate them selves. Their spiritual reference point lies in a Hindu-Buddhist south rather than a Confucian north. When authorities moved to arrest Thich Huyen Quang late last year, a dozen monks and laymen were planning too immolate themselves to protest religious oppression. The last thing Hanoi could afford was to have pictures of monks going up in flames flashed across the global media.
Meanwhile no charismatic leader has emerged from the now much distrusted Communist party. Instead, the thirteen member politburo is driven by internal fighting, with some members reportedly pushing for a multi-party democratic system. To counter such moves, Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet and President Le Duc Anh, once barely visible, now appear frequently on TV. Widely viewed as corrupt, these Marxist-Lininist trained figures light incense sticks and pray in churches at every opportunity.
It is, after all, a headache to run a country with such a bloody past and a precarious present. If Hanoi clamps down harder on society, there will be an upheaval. Yet if it allows a new charismatic leadership to emerge from the ranks of the clergy_or for that matter, from Buddhist human rights activists like imprisoned doctor Nguyen Dang Que or poet Nguyen Chi Thien, who lives under house arrest_it could also prove politically fatal.
At 77 the abbot Thich Huyen Quang’s time is running out. But from the Buddhist perspective, his death could prove catalytic. Two years ago in Hue, some 40,000 people turned out in the largest mass demonstration since the end of the war to protest the arrest of Thich Tri Tuu, abbot of the Thien Mu Pagoda. Tuu was charged with failing to denounce a layman’s self-immolation to protest religious repression.
What Quang and the Politburo both know is that the bloodless Singaporean model will never satisfy the Vietnamese soul. At some point real political change is inevitable. And when it comes, the more the top resists, the fiercer the fires at the bottom will burn.
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