Y Lan & Joshua Lipes/Radio Free Asia
Thich Quang Do, 87, who is the head of a banned Buddhist church in Vietnam expressed gratitude to the international community for advocating for his release from house arrest and reaffirmed his commitment to democracy activism in the one party communist nation.
In this file photograph taken on July 27, 2007 Vietnam’s dissident Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do sits inside the Thanh Minh Zen Monastry in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photo: Aude GENET/AFP/Getty Images)
Do is the leader of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), and said he was honored by recent calls for U.S. President Barack Obama to push for his freedom when he meets with Vietnamese leaders on the sidelines of two regional meetings in the Philippines and Malaysia this week.
Do is staying at the Thanh Minh Zen Monastery in Saigon, where he has been under effective house arrest since 2003.
Do said that since the UBCV’s late patriarch Thich Huyen Quang’s death in 2008, he had taken up the call for Vietnam’s communist government to “transition from authoritarianism to democracy,” and would carry on with his mission, despite his continued house arrest.
Obama is scheduled to meet with Vietnamese leaders on the side of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit and the U.S.-ASEAN and East Asia Summits in the Philippines and Malaysia this week. Do, a 16-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, has spent more than three decades in detention for his peaceful advocacy work. He was sent into internal exile in northern Vietnam for 10 years in 1982 for protesting the creation of a state-sponsored Buddhist Church and in 1995 was sentenced to five years in prison for organizing a rescue mission for flood victims in the Mekong Delta.
Released in 1998 due to international pressure, Do was later placed under house arrest at the Thanh Minh Zen Monastery, where his communications are monitored and he is denied freedom of movement. Vietnam was put on the U.S. state department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern in 2004 but removed it from the blacklist two years later amid improving diplomatic relations.
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