When a Vietnamese delegate visited Greensboro to see the refugee community, he faces protesters in the form of Montagnards émigrés. 

Below is an article written by Lorraine Ahearn and published by News Record:

On the first-ever official visit to Greensboro, capital of the Montagnard community in exile, a delegation from the Vietnamese government asked to see the "refugee camps" where ethnic tribesmen live.

That telling request from Politburo officials set the tone for a three-day tour last week, a peculiar tango between party-line propaganda by the visitors, and simmering distrust by the emigrants they came to study.

The presence of the delegates, here as guests of the U.S. State Department, touched off an uproar among transplanted highlanders, who picketed the visitors from the moment they arrived at the downtown Marriott.

Surprised, American tour organizers got a close-up view of a fierce, historic animus that pre dates even the Vietnam War, when Montagnards fought under U.S. command.

"We've never had protesters," said Beth Robertson, executive director of the Piedmont Triad Council for International Visitors. "There was no precedent for this. But other visitors haven't had the impact on our local community."

On paper, the "fact-finding tour" by the 10 party officials from the Central Highlands presented an opportunity that does not exist in Vietnam, just about the world's last dyed-in-the-wool communist regime, unless you still count Cuba. And that opportunity is, the chance to hear dissenting views of religious persecution and socioeconomic privation, without anyone being hauled off to prison.

The reality? Tour organizers said the visitors, crossing 12 time zones to get here, wanted no face-to-face meetings with their exiled countrymen in Greensboro, who began settling here in 1986 and now number more than 5,000.

Instead, the visitors toured the DSS and Lutheran Family Services, a resettlement agency. From the window of a passenger van, they looked at Montagnard churches and a Buddhist temple. They ate lunch at Golden Corral.

Though their hosts suggested visits to neighborhoods such as Glenhaven and Heritage Apartments — Asian immigrant clusters that are the closest thing the city has to "refugee camps" — these were turned down as "security risks."

Asked last week whether the Hanoi government viewed any of the Montagnard emigre protestors as legitimate, ranking delegate Van Nam Mai said the groups should be condemned by Vietnamese and Americans.

"We came here to study the situation," Mai, a Politburo member who is the Vietnamese equivalent of a U.S. senator, said through an interpreter. "We don't meet with them. It is a separatist organization."

Mai spoke specifically of the Montagnard Federation of Kok Ksor, a Spartanburg, S.C., resident whom Hanoi blames for fomenting an Easter 2001 uprising in the Highlands, and widespread civil resistance by minorities in 2004.

Yet the protesters who followed the delegates' itinerary — from the hotel to City Hall to a meeting at UNCG's Center for New North Carolinians — represented a broad spectrum of opposition to the communist government that has controlled all of Vietnam since the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Some of the protesters, in fact, were not even Montagnards. Driving all night from Philadelphia to stand in the rain outside the Greensboro Marriott was Quoc Dam, president of the Vietnamese Movement for Freedom, a group opposed to government repression.

The Vietnamese emigre disputed statements by the visiting delegates that there is freedom of religion in Vietnam, and freedom of speech.

"If the country is so free right now," he said, "there is no need for them to imprison dissidents and those who stand up for human rights."

Representatives from the Raleigh-based Montagnard Human Rights Organization recorded and filmed the delegates' statements. Both at a UNCG forum and in a News & Record interview, Mai disputed claims of government oppression.

Although there has been mounting evidence of Catholic and Protestant churches being burned in the Highlands, particularly since 2001, Mai said the government had closed churches only because they did not meet building codes.

He also called reports that the Highlands have been under martial law, closed to outsiders including journalists, "incorrect."

"We have received many delegations including from the U.S. Congress and U.S. Embassy consulates," Mai said. "We have had many international journalists, and there have been positive statements."

Yet in one of the Central Party's own publications, Mai included the following in an article on achievements in his first five years in the Highlands, a strategic area now named "Tay Nguyen":

"Hundreds of organizations," he wrote, "from province to grassroots levels have been discovered and eliminated and thousands of illegal persons related to FULRO (the long defunct Montagnard freedom front) have been seized, educated and converted."

Despite Mai's insistence that the Highlands are open to the press, most information that comes from the remote area is under government control. The exception has been cell phone and e-mail messages to emigres in the U.S. These reports, scattered and difficult to verify, paint a worrisome picture.

On the same day the Vietnamese delegation left en route to San Francisco, the Rev. Y Hin Nie, pastor of the Montagnard International Bible Church, said he received word that a minister from Gia Lai province had been beaten to death in prison.

According to the Greensboro pastor, Kpa Klo had been arrested in Pleiku in 2004 during a prayer service at his house. The widow of the father of six, Y Hin said, had been contacted by the Cong An, the government security police, to pick up her husband's body.

While seeking and gaining preferential trade status in the past two years with its former enemy, the U.S., Hanoi repeatedly denied claims by the Montagnard Federation that more than 350 Montagnard Christians had been imprisoned for practicing their religion.

Yet Kok Ksor's South Carolina-based group has not been the only organization to level such charges. In 2006, the Montagnard Dega Association, based in Greensboro, identified 271 political prisoners being held.

And despite Vietnam's removal from a human rights blacklist on the eve of a U.S. trade deal, three major human rights groups released scathing reports on religious persecution and human rights violations in Vietnam: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Commission On International Religious Freedom.

In the face of what Montagnards in the U.S. fear will be the ultimate genocide of a racial minority in Vietnam, tribal leaders said they had no wish to speak to the delegates — even if they had been invited.

"It would just be propaganda, a picture they could show back in Vietnam, to say 'See? They all agree with us,'" said Rong Nay, executive director of the Raleigh human rights group.

"The Montagnards are considered a long-term enemy of the Vietnamese government. And the government has a long memory about the war."