"The authorities in the village and district let a group of 'brothers' [cadres and villagers] plunder all our land — they beat us all up in the Ta-phin People’s Committee office and in the rice fields. Numerous petitions to the province haven’t helped, so I brought our petition here to Hanoi to see if they can help," Cam said.
"They produced papers saying I was renouncing my religion and told me to sign them. When I didn't sign they beat me and others."
Cam said a police officer told him: 'Your God is the God of the French and the Americans...It's not the religion of Uncle Ho [Chi Minh]. If you don't put up an altar to the ancestors, you don't have the rice fields of the ancestors.’ "They told me to sign and renounce my religion, but I did not sign and did not quit my religion," he said
Tr’ang A Xa, chairman of the village People’s Council, denied the beatings. "They don't have altars in their homes for Thien [an ethnic Vietnamese deity], and that is wrong," Tr'ang A Xa said in an interview.
"You want to follow a religion, you have to register and get the permission of the local authorities, get agreement from relatives -- and if they don’t agree, you can't do it."
In the northern province of Thai Binh, village officials looked on as a protestant preacher and his assistant were being assaulted by ten people on 14 May.
The preacher, Nguyen Van Cam, said in an interview that the police officers stopped the two as they spoke with a female follower and invited them into the Dong Lam village administrative offices in Tien Hai district, about 100 kms (60 miles) southeast of Hanoi.
"They invited us to the office where they beat brother Dien, a believer who was with me. They had us report about our relation with a woman named Ms. Liet and sign a paper promising not to go to her anymore. We refused, and they said, 'You’ll see what we can do to you with our hands,' " he said.
May 14, he said that a group of 10 people they didn’t recognise surrounded them and began to beat them with sticks at about 8pm, about 100 meters from the village administrative office.
Though they called for help before falling unconscious, the several local officials looked on "watching without doing anything," said Cam.
