“And I had foreign officials saying, "Why do you Americans care so much about religious freedom?" They'd never run into this with any other governments.”
–John Hanford, former Ambassador-at-Large at the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom
Chalk that up to the Pilgrims, or perhaps James Madison. After all, he established religion as the first freedom in the Bill of Rights. Since then, religious liberty has been an American institution. But it wasn't until 1998 that Congress commanded the US to promote religious freedom around the globe. And, in a world where religious intolerance and abuse is on the rise, the secular-minded State Department is conflicted over this mission of freeing the faithful and punishing the persecutors. Often, the promotion of religious freedom is sacrificed on the altar of strategic and economic worship.
Segment 1: Ray Suarez and Tom Farr discuss the whys, hows and trade-offs in promoting international religious freedom. Listen to this segment.
Guests: Tom Farr, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and former Director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom and Saba Moritz, a Baha'i from Iran.
Listen to Ray's full interview with Tom Farr.
Segment 2: Sean Carberry travels to Pakistan, where violence against minority faiths is on the rise, to measure the gap between the laws and the practice of religious liberty. Listen to this segment.
Guests include Asma Jahangir, Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; Jerry Firestein, Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Pakistan; Shireen Mazari, Spokesperson for the Movement for Justice political party; and Mohammed Ibrahim, Senator from the Northwest Frontier Province.
Segment 3: Ray Suarez explores how officials in the US Office of International Religious Freedom sought to further religious liberty in Vietnam. Listen to this segment.
Guests include Robert Seiple, former Ambassador-at-Large at the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom; John Hanford, Sieple’s successor at the Office of International Religious Freedom; and William Inboden, former Special Advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom.
Segment 4: Matt Ozug travels to Vietnam, to look at what US diplomatic pressure has yielded for that nation’s faithful. Listen to this segment.
Guests include Rev. Nghia Trung Tran, General Secretary of the Vietnamese Presbyterian Church; Nguyen Van Kien, Vietnam-USA Society; Michael Michalak, US Ambassador to Vietnam; Quang Nguyen, Mennonite Pastor; Le Quoc Quan, Human Rights Attorney; and Father Peter Nguyen, Catholic priest.
Segment 5: Ray Suarez examines the efforts of lobbying groups to win the ear of a US government balancing the promotion of religious freedom in China with a host of other interests, from trade and finance to security. Listen to this segment.
Guests include Anne Yang, Volunteer for Falun Dafa Practitioners Association; Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA); Ping Yu, Falun Gong Practitioner; Tom Farr, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs; Scott Flipse, Director of East Asia Policy and Programs at the US Commission on International Religious Freedom; and Dennis Wilder, former Senior Director for East Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
*Correction: The date of the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue was misstated in this segment. It took place in July, not August 2009.
The First Freedom / Executive Producer: Aaron Lobel / AAM Producers: Monica Bushman, Sean Carberry, Matt Ozug, Monica Villavicencio and Chris Williams / Interns: Natalie Friedman, Alex Taylor and Jake Yarmus / Photo Credit: Matt Ozug
Music heard on this broadcast:
“Vindaloo” by Four Piece Suit
“Rhytm (Arabi)”
“Magic Lantern” by Pham Duc Thanh
“Heer” by Junoon
“Missionary Man” by Eurythmics
“Islamabad Calling” by Carlos Peron
“The Whale Song” by Modest Mouse
“Day Dream” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
“In Christ There is No East or West” by John Fahey
"Desert Capriccio" by Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma
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Tension between Faith and Finance in Capital Hill
As we heard of this hour the promotion of international religious freedom is a foreign policy priority that can clash with other interest whether is trade, finance, or security nowhere is this tension more pronounce than in the case of China; while the foreign policy establishment struggle to strike the right balance in dealing with China. There’s no shortage of lobby groups in Washington, pushing the government to take a tougher line on China’s treatment of religious groups from house church Christians, Uyghur Muslims to Tibetan Buddhists, and followers of Falun Gong.
This past July thousands of Falun Gong practitioners descended on the national mall in Washington to rally for their cause.
“This is the letter sign by 61 Congressmen to President Obama urging him to pay more attention to the persecution still ongoing after one decade in Chine.” Anne Yang is the volunteer for the Falun Dafa Practitioners association.
Followers like Anne describe Falun Gong as a spiritual movement that combined the element of Daoism, Buddhism, meditation, and traditional Chinese exercises call Qi Gong. Chinese government called as an evil cult, they view the group’s ability to attract large numbers of believers as a threat to national security. Chinese authority bans the group 10 years ago and began a brutal crackdown on practitioners.
“And also I have here a resolution introduced by Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking member of foreign affair committee in the house together with several others of Congressmen.” Anne Yang
Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced house resolution 605 in June, the resolution calls for an immediate end to the campaign to persecute, intimidate, imprison, and torture Falun Gong practitioners although the bill has more than 60
co-sponsors is currently stall in the house of foreign affair committee.
The practice of Falun Gong is unfamiliar to most Americans and some of their claims about the treatment of practitioners in China have been disputed, as a result the Falun Gong lobby hasn’t found the level of sympathy house church Christians or Tibetan Buddhists have in the US.
Even so Falun Gong practitioners have managed to win the ears of some in the Congress. Representative Dana Rohrabaher “Our principle were that God has given rights to every human beings and that we are in the side of everyone especially the Falun Gong and other who are being imprisoned and being repressed in China that we are on your side, have courage, the American people are with you, our hearts are with you, our basic institution were found on basic principle who are with you.”
The crackdown on the Falun Gong has been especially severe because the faith is expressly outlaw in China but is by no means the only group facing religious persecution in the country, Tibetan Buddhists, Catholic Protestants, Uyghur Muslims, all suffer repression to variant degrees, most religious groups though have lobby in US to advocate on their behalf. Their hope is that by leaning on State department and Congress, the American government will speak up.
Congressman Frank Wolf has been a long time advocate for human rights and religious freedom in particularly in China, “Word zones are very important and when follow with action very very important and so I think Chinese descents tell me that when people advocate for them, their lives actually get better, so it goes to being release to all the within, they began to get the meals that they didn’t get, they began to get health care that they didn’t get, so yeah I think the more you advocate, pushes it makes a big difference.
Ping Yu, Falun Gong practitioner whose mother is in prison in China holds out hope that American advocacy will make a difference for her. “China really cares all the America sacrament especially for human rights part and I know one case a girl who collecting 20 Senators signatures and her mother gotten release after 3 weeks, so this is kind of last hope, last for us.”
But Tom Farr who serves for years as director for the State department office on international religious freedom says that while they were does yield result; religious lobby can only do so much. “For example when Uyghur Muslims are throwing to jail or abused or Tibetan Buddhists are tortured which these kind of thing happen unfortunately fairly routinely in China, then groups will gear in action and send letters to State Department and call their member of Congress sometime these things work and the individual is sprung from jail the problem is a reactive approach and is like try to empty the ocean one eyedropper at a time. It is a victory when it happens but doesn’t address the structure of oppression and persecution.”
Making even more difficult to get to those structure issues is the fact that religious freedom and human right more broadly is just one of the many items on the agenda. When the two countries meet, the strategic economic dialogue that took place in DC in July was two days of meeting between high level of Chinese and American officials. The meeting covers 80 topics climate change, counter terrorism, and the global economic recovery and his opening remark President Obama touches religious belief as well “Just as we respect China’s ancient remarkable culture, its remarkable achievement. We also strongly believe religion and culture of all people must be respected and protected, that all people should be free to speak their minds and that indeed ethnic religious minority in China as surely as it includes minority within the US.”
But Uyghur, as human right advocates had hope president or Secretary of State would have taken a tougher line, on the first day of the talk, they staged a protest outside the White House, “We really hope that the US government could help that doesn’t have to be much, just say something, you know their words count for something put aside economy, put aside everything else money, greed, whatever and help innocent people.” Still at the end of two days, both sides agree to meet to discuss human rights issues before the end of year.
“It’s counter productive to have separate bilateral human rights discussion with China, and then have economic discussion, then security discussion because China will understand that what we really want is more trade, more cooperation on nuclear issue, all those things are important but we don’t want to see these spiral of human rights from our other interest.” Scott Flipse, the director of East Asia policy program at US commission at the international religious freedom “We are trying to push US government to do to intervene these things so that China gets the message that human rights is not just soothing that we kind of interested in but is important to all the other interest that we have the China. These are many important issues that the American president and American administration must engage the Chinese on.”
Denis Wilder was the national Security Council senior director for East Asia affair during the second term of Bush Administration, “ And therefore there’s always going to be the balance that has to be struck between pressing Chinese on freedom issue and having a healthy engagement with Chinese on these other issues.” The way to struck the right balance he said is to put the conversation in term of China’s own interest “One of the way is to not look religion as something that is dangerous to the communist party, but try to talk to them about the health that it brings us to society, people of faith are good citizens and that if you allow people of faith to practice their faith in China, you will have a much more stable situation then if you confront faith.” And with officially atheist communist government in China, this means slow progress at best and while that might be all the US government can do under the circumstances that’s not enough to satisfy those suffering religious persecution in China and the lobbyists championing their cause in Washington.”