A government-backed mob in Vietnam about a week ago booted nearly 400 Buddhist monks and nuns out of a monastery in the centre of the country, bringing an apparent end to an ugly standoff with complicated origins. The incident has raised questions about the ruling Communist Party’s commitment to progress on religious freedom, but the Bat Nha Monastery narrative is much more complex than simply an “authoritarian government cracks down on the faithful” story.

(Photo: Thich Nhat Hanh at Non Nuoc pagoda north of Hanoi, 20 April 2007/Nguyen Huy Kham)

Some of the basic facts seem pretty straightforward. For nearly three years, the monks and nuns had lived at Bat Nha monastery in Lam Dong province, largely with the blessing of the local authorities via cooperation with local Buddhists, after their leader, the Vietnamese-born, French-based Buddhist zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, visited Vietnam in 2005 for the first time in 39 years. Last year, the local authorities started to put pressure on the followers of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village school of Buddhism. In late June of this year, electricity, water and phone services to the monastery were cut and a mob attacked the group to try to evict them, but they refused to leave. In July, a smaller mob attempted another attack. The government set Sept. 2 as a deadline for them to leave, but that date came and went. Then, on Sunday, Sept 27, the group’s overseas adherents reported that “an unidentified mob” of about 150 people, believed to include plain clothes policemen, violently evicted the 379 resident monastic followers of Thich Nhat Hanh.

(Photo: Monks pray at Dong Pagoda northeast of Hanoi, 26 Nov 2008/Nguyen Huy Kham)

The central government’s line has been that local Buddhists wanted Thich Nhat Hanh’s followers out of their monastery and the government had nothing to do with it. Asked about the incident, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga said in a statement it was “an internal issue between two groups of people following Buddhism at Bat Nha monastery. The dispute was non-violent, nobody was injured or detained.”

But Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village followers said police were involved in the eviction. A local government document from last month obtained by Thich Nhat Hanh’s followers and shown to Reuters stated that the group was not recognised by the state or the official Buddhist congregation and was staying at Bat Nha illegally. The roots of the problem may go back, in part at least, to Thich Nhat Hanh’s late 2007 visit to Vietnam. During that trip, he told Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet that the government should abolish the arm of the police that tracks religious groups and disband the government’s Religious Affairs Committee, which regulates religious activities.

Then, in early 2008, the annual journal of Plum Village proposed that the government abandon Communism, take the word Communist out of the name of the ruling political party and remove “Socialist” from the country’s official name, Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Although the comments may have been made with the interests of the Vietnamese nation in mind, they were resented by the religious police who, from that point on, pretty much had it in for Thich Nhat Hanh and his followers, a Plum Village document detailing the background of the incident said.

The local Bat Nha abbot, Thich Duc Nghi, first welcomed the Plum Village followers, but later appeared to sour on the group. Whether he did so because of pressure from the authorities or for his own reasons is unclear. The Plum Village followers believe he and the head of the religious police teamed up to bring down the Plum Village congregation, or sangha. He has stopped making public appearances, said Hong Kong-based Plum Villager Thich Phap Kham.

(Photo: President Triet at U.N. General Assembly, 25 Sept 2009/Patrick Andrade)

It is interesting to note that President Triet was in Communist ally Cuba when the Bat Nha evictions happened, just after a trip to New York for a United Nations Security Council meeting and a General Assembly debate. At least least two trials of Vietnamese political dissidents scheduled to take place when Triet was due to be in New York were postponed, possibly so that they would not be irritants when he was on American soil. It is also worth noting that in 2004, Vietnam chafed when it was placed on the U.S. State Department’s list of “countries of particular concern” on religious freedom, and took steps to be removed. Two years later, before President George W. Bush visited Vietnam, the State Department took Vietnam off that list, citing progress. The State Department’s 2008 human rights report on Vietnam issued this February noted improvements in respect for religious freedom, saying restrictions had been enforced less strictly than in previous years and participation in religious activities grew.

For now, the Plum Village monks and nuns are still crammed into Phuoc Hue temple in the town of Bao Loc where they have taken refuge. “We still do not know what will happen next, but the monks and nuns are determined to stay together to practice as a Sangha,” Thich Phap Kham said.

(Photo: Monk prays at Bai Dinh pagoda in Ninh Binh province, 17 May 2008/Nguyen Huy Kham)

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The Serbian Orthodox Church’s Bishop Grigorije of the diocese of Zahumlje and Herzegovina is not only a prominent figure in the Church who’s seen as a possible candidate for Patriarch. He is also a major vinter whose operations have earned praise and good money for quality wines.

His Tvrdos Monastery, located in Trebinja in southern Bosnia, produces 500,000 bottles of wine per year and exports it to Serbia, Montenegro and even further afield to Germany, the United States, Switzerland and other countries. “It is a very good business, but it is very difficult,” he said during the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God late last month. “It is good, but it is very difficult because we have wine from Italy, France, Spain.”

(Photo: Bishop Grigorije leads service at Trvdos Monastery, 28 Aug 2009/Adam Tanner)

The Trvdos Monastery also has a minority partnership with a Serbian-American investor who owns 440 hectares of Trebinje land, of which 200 are now vineyards, an unusual tie up between the Church and profit-seeking investor (click here to see that story).

The monastery’s wine, which they sell for six euros a bottle but can retail for 30 euros in a restaurant, was available in ample amount during a late morning feast of fish and vegetarian dishes. Believers from Trebinje, Bosnia’s southernmost town of about 30,000 people, crowded onto benches around long tables to enjoy the meal.

Although other Serbian Orthodox monasteries and churches grow wine (and monks and priests privately say food and wine is one of the few indulgences afforded them), Bishop Grigorije said the Tvrdos operation is the largest.  “Wine, it is very good for people, it is so good,” said the bishop, who as a boy picked grapes in this largely Serbian region of southern Bosnia. “If you drink wine, and you don’t drink too much, you will be so happy and so healthy.”

“If you drink bad wine, you are going to feel bad.  All the southern people, Italians, French, Spanish are so much happier than the Germans, the Czechs, as they are drinking so much wine!”

The Trvdos Monastery wine production came to a halt in the 1990s Bosnian war and restarted a decade ago. Every year they are boosting production by 15,000 bottles and they recently took out about a two million euro loan to buy a series of shiny new Italian Defranceschi 30,000 litre wine storage tanks, Grigorije said. After some time in those tanks the wine goes into hundred-year old barrels to acquire the wine’s hardy, full-bodied flavour.

In grape-growing and wine-making, you have to have a little faith, Grigorije said, because so much depends on uncontrollable factors such as the weather: “The most difficult thing is if we won’t have grapes – it is in the hands of God.”

(Photo: Lunch at Tvrdos Monastery, 28 Aug 2009/Adam Tanner)

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The 1996 murder of seven French Catholic monks in Algeria, called the Martyrs of Atlas because of the Atlas mountains where their monastery was located, was not the work of Islamist militants as officially stated at the time, according to testimony by a retired French general to an inquiry into the killings.

(Photo: Lyon Cardinal Philippe Barbarin — with red sash — visits monks’ graces, 20 Feb 2007/Larbi Louafi)

In fact, he told a closed-door inquiry in Paris, Algerian troops in a helicopter inadvertently gunned down the Trappists when they strafed an isolated camp they believed belonged to the radical Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that was battling the Algerian state at the time. When they landed to inspect the scene, the troops found the bullet-ridden bodies of the monks who had been kidnapped two months beforehand. Algeria then concocted the story that the Islamists had slit the monks’ throats to hide their fatal blunder.

The inquiry also heard from a Trappist who went to Algeria to identify the bodies. He said he had to insist on having the sealed coffins opened so he could identify the bodies. When his wish was finally granted, he found the coffins contained only the men’s heads and was urged by the French embassy not to divulge this. He told the inquiry he suspected the bodies were disposed of to hide the evidence they had been gunned down.

Here is our news story on this.

The monks have been honoured as Christian victims of Islamist militancy. They were clearly victims of the bloody war between the GIA and the state. The GIA has a sordid part in this story, as they apparently abducted the monks after the Trappists had been kidnapped by Algerian agents in a complicated plot. But if these testimonies are correct, the monks did not die at the hands of Islamists who slit their throats, as the official Algerian explanation has it.

(Photo: Lyon Imam Azzedine Gaci prays at monks tomb, with Cardinal Barbarin at his side, 20 Feb 2007/Larbi Louafi)

These testimonies added weight to persistent but less well sourced reports about the role of the Algerian authorities in the killings. They also raise potentially explosive questions about the purported role of France in helping to hide the truth. If secret French defence documents are made public, as the families of the victims demand, some very embarrassing facts may come to light.

The murders shocked France at the time and has weighed on French-Algerian relations ever since. A Catholic-Muslim delegation from Lyon, led by Cardinal Philippe Barbarin and Imam Azzedine Gaci, visited the monastery in February 2007 to promote interfaith understanding.

(Photo: Thousands attend Paris memorial service for the slain monks, 25 May 1996/stringer)

For French speakers, here are links to French reports on this:

L’armée algérienne mise en cause pour la mort de moines français - Reuters France

Tibéhirine : un témoin dénonce une «bavure» — Le Figaro

Tibérihine menace les relations franco-algériennes — Le Figaro

L’armée algérienne aurait tué les moines de Tibéhirine, selon un militaire français — Le Monde

Moines de Tibéhirine : le rappel des fait — Le Parisien

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DECANI, Kosovo - A visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to one of the best known monasteries in Kosovo has again revealed a deep split in the church. A veteran of Balkan complexities from his U.S. Senate activism against Serbian aggression during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Biden visited the 14^th century Decani monastery on Thursday afternoon to highlight the importance protecting the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

(Photo: Fr. Janjic with U.S. Vice President Biden at Decani monastery, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

Father Sava Janjic, sometimes called Decani’s “cyber monk” because of his embrace of the Internet, warmly welcomed the vice president, who had first visited there in 2001. “This is his second visit to this monastery which is one of the most important Serbian Orthodox sites in Kosovo,” Fr. Sava told Reuters in fluent English. “We sincerely believe his visit will help the preservation of Serbian Orthodox heritage in Kosovo and generally help the position of the Serbian people in Kosovo.”

However, the diocese overseeing Kosovo, which the church considers the cradle of Serbian Orthodoxy, issued a strong statement condemning the visit. “The U.S. vice president is visiting Kosovo as an independent state, to confirm forceful secession of Serbia’s territory and its hand over to Albanian terrorist who were not punished for numerous crimes against Serbian people, Serbian property and Serbian cultural and religious heritage,” the diocese said in a statement. “Does Joseph Biden want to confirm with his gesture that Decani is an American base in Kosovo, the same as Camp Bondsteel?”

“The Decani monastery unfortunately has become known for its acts against Serbia’s interests, becoming in a sense a base for anti-Serbian acting in Kosovo as confirmed by this visit.”

(Photo:Heavily armed U.S. Secret Service agents during Biden visit to Decani, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

The harsh words were the latest as the church seeks to sort out how to deal with Kosovo’s declared independence last year. The conservative acting church leader, Metropolitan Amfilohije Radovic, told Reuters in an interview last year that Serbs were treated so poorly in majority Albania Kosovo that future war was inevitable.

Fr. Sava did not want to address the latest controversy publicly, but noted the church leadership, the assembly of bishops meeting in Belgrade, had blessed the visit the day before Biden arrived. His monastery has in the past favoured a more moderate approach that includes dialogue with ethnic Albanian Kosovars, who are mostly Muslim.

Security was tight. In addition to Italian soldiers who normally guard what is the biggest Serbian Orthodox monastic brotherhood worldwide (with 30 monks), many secret service agents accompanied Biden inside the compound. Some heavily armed agents remained on guard as he went inside for talks, although a few took a tour of the church to admire its magnificent frescos.

Biden said he tried to bolster the monks by contrasting the often bitter racial tensions in the United States between blacks and whites when he started his professional career in 1968 and today when he serves as number two to the first black U.S. president barck Obama.

“I told the story to Father (Sava) today. They were down a little bit, they are feeling a little isolated, but wondering whether Europe is going to walk away,” Biden told Reuters and a few other reporters in an interview on Thursday night. “It’s going to take some time but we’ve got to stick with it.”

(Photo: U.S. officials at Decani church during Biden’s visit, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

At the end of his three-day visit to Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, Biden said real integration among ethnic groups in the Balkans could prove even more difficult than it had been to end the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. “What we are talking about now is real integration, not just the elimination of carnage and brutality, but there is where it really gets hard and it’s going to take time,” he said. “Things are drastically better than when I was last here, with a long way to go and in a sense the hardest piece to go.

“This is a process … it’s going to take a while,” he told reporters covering his visit.”

Here’s the Reuters TV report on Biden’s visit to Kosovo and Serbia:

Here’s a YouTube clip showing Decani and Fr. Sava, who calls Kosovo the “Serbian jerusalem.”

Click here or on the image above to view an audio slideshow from the Namo Monastery.

Dressed in black robes and headcaps, the monks at the ancient Syriac Christian Orthodox monastery of Mor Gabriel in southeast Turkey sat gravely for dinner one recent cold night. Led by their bishop, they said their prayers in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and ate their meal of meat and rice in sepulchral silence, the clinking of forks and spoons resonating in the bare white room.

On the face of it, little has changed in a life of meditation and prayer at the Mor Gabriel Monastery since it was built in AD 397; but the monks feel the cares of a changing Turkey, beyond their walls, weighing upon them. A land dispute between neighbouring villages and Mor Gabriel is threatening the future of one of the world’s oldest monasteries, and a Reuters multimedia team had travelled to the remote monastery to cover the row.

Once supper was over, they said prayers again and we filed into an adjacent room, where the monks started conversing about Turkey’s rocky path to join the European Union and “Ergenekon”, a shadowy group suspected of plotting a coup in a case that has consumed media attention in faraway Ankara and Istanbul. In the words of Saliba Ozmen, the bishop of the city of Mardin, Turkey is changing and even the Syriac monks of southeast Turkey can feel its ripple effects.

The Mor Gabriel row has placed under the spotlight freedom of religion and other rights for non-Muslim minorities. The case also crystallises what many here view as a battle for the soul of modern Turkey — a clash between the authoritarian and stony Turkish state that emerged after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and an increasingly vibrant, diverse and democratic society striving to rid itself of the strictures of the Kemalist national and world view.

Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim though its constitution is secular, a “laïcisme à la turque” understood more as the submission of mosque to state. In practice, Turkey’s Christians, who include Syriacs, Greek Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics, have long suffered discrimination at the hands of the state.

At the same time, the ruling AK Party, which draws its constituency from the pious Anatolian heartland, has incurred the wrath of the secular establishment for what critics say is a hidden campaign to Islamise the country of 70 million. Recent battles over attempts to lift the Muslim headscarf at universities sparked a debate over public space of religion.

Some speak of the need to reinvent the state as Turkey becomes more democratic with EU-linked reforms. Founder Kemal Ataturk’s slogan of “Happy is he who can call himself a Turk” — which for decades has summoned the notion of a single Turk nationhood — lives alongside an increasingly assertive Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian and Christian identity.

Bishop Ozmen said he saw no clash between Muslims and Christians in Turkey despite the Mor Gabriel land dispute and a spate of violent attacks against Christians over several years. “Turkey is changing and those who resist change are feeling the pain of change,” the soft-spoken Ozmen said at his residence in the monastery of Deyrulzafaran, Saffron Monastery in Arabic. “Multiculturalism is our best guarantee for the future.”

(Reuters photos of Mor Gabriel by Umit Bektas)

The death of Russian Orthodox Patriach Alexiy II and talk about his possible successor got Aleksandras Budrys, a correspondent in our Moscow bureau, to reminiscing about how he covered Alexiy’s election in 1990 for the official news agency TASS. Here’s his account of reporting on religion near the end of communism in Russia:

(Photo: Patriarch Alexiy II, 30 April 2000/Vladimir Suvorov)

As a TASS correspondent for religious issues, I was the first to report the election of Patriarch Alexiy II in early June 1990. The scoop was made possible because I was allowed to stay in monk’s cells at the monastery where the vote took place while all the other journalists were sent away.

The election process took a little less than three days. On the first day, all the hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church gathered at the refectory church at the Holy Trinity and St Sergius monastery outside Moscow.

The press was only allowed to attend the start of the meeting and was then directed to leave the church. Since they were told the election would take more than a day, the reporters returned to Moscow. But I was allowed to stay at the monastery, as by the time I had developed good relations with the Patriarchate’s Foreign Relations Department and its spokesman.

The council meeting was interrupted only once, when one of the candidates to the post (one of the then metropolitans, Filaret of Kiev and All Ukraine, who is currently the head of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church) left the gathering without saying a word after discovering that he was not in the running.

I was allowed to spend the night in a cell with monastery novices and most of the day in another cell close to the refectory church along with the priest holder-of-the-keys and the Metropolitan of Vienna and all Austria Iriney . The latter had decided not to sit with others, preferring to stay with us and drink church wine, smoke St Moritz cigarettes — a foreign brand that was a rarity in Russia — and tell jokes that had nothing to do with religion.

In the early hours of the third day, June 7, we were all summoned to the refectory church to hear the solemn announcement of the election of Metropolitan Alexiy of Leningrad and Novgorod as His Holiness Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

When I phoned in the news to TASS, the duty editor asked me to swear to God that it was really Alexiy who had been elected. I said I could not, as I was not baptised back then.

(Photo: A 27-tonne bell is installed in belltower at Holy Trinity and Saint Sergius monastery, 4 Sept 2002/Alexander Natruskin)

Last month I visited Mount Athos, a self- governing monastic state in northern Greece where some 1,500 monks live according to rules which have changed little in the last millennium. Athos’ 20 monasteries are considered by the world’s 300 million Orthodox as perhaps the second most holy site of their faith, after Jerusalem. They are home to breathtaking religious art and thousands of manuscripts dating back to the Byzantine empire, as well as priceless relics, like fragments of the True Cross, believed by the Orthodox faithful to have performed countless miracles.

(Photo:Simomos Petras monastery at Mount Athos/Daniel Flynn)

For many Orthodox it is the fulfilment of a long-held dream to visit the rugged Holy Mountain — but not if you a woman. Women are completely banned from the 300 sq kilometre peninsula and any breach of this strict rule is a criminal offence in Greece punishable by up to two years in prison.

The all-male Greek Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, a favourite stop for top Greek and foreign dignitaries such as Prince Charles but completely close to women, has long been a haven for those forsaking earthly pleasures to seek God.

You can imagine the shock, then, when Greeks learned that one of its main monasteries, the Vatopedi monastery dating back to the late 10th century, was conducting suspect land-swap deals with the Greek state.

According to Greek media, Vatopedi had nearly clinched a deal to exchange Vistonida Lake in northern Greece — which it claimed through 1,000-year-old documents — for  prime real estate elsewhere in Greece. The deal reportedly would have meant a substantial loss to the state.

It then emerged that the wife of a conservative government minister was the notary agent in the deal. The minister resigned over this and other suspect real estate dealings and the swap was suspended pending a judicial probe.

This and other scandals, as well as unpopular new taxes, have brought the government’s popularity to a 4-year low, for the first time falling behind the Socialist opposition, and analyst say snap elections may be called as early as next year.

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who swept to power in 2004 vowing to fight corruption, has seen some of his closest aides implicated in suspected wrongdoing, threatening his 152-seat majority in the 300-seat parliament.

Conservative deputies have said the swap had started before New Democracy came to power and the monastery asked for light to be shed on the case to absolve it of any wrongdoing. “We are certain in our belief that all actions of the Holy Monastery have been legal and completely transparent,” Vatopedi said in a statement.

Monks on Mount Athos have expressed shock, saying that if the allegations are true, they do not speak for all 20 monasteries or the many ascetics living in medieval isolation from the modern world.

But pictures of Vatopedi Abbot Efraim socialising with senior Greek politicians, as well as official documents pushing the property deal published in Athens dailies, clashed with the image of Athos monks living in poverty, toiling in the fields and praying.

“From a natural paradise and a way for the faithful to find Heaven, Athos has become a tax and real estate haven,” said senior Leftist Coalition party member Alekos Alavanos.

The question now is how serious a blow all this is to the government.  The major liberal daily Ta Nea had this to say on its front page last week: “Karamanlis sinks in the Vatopedi swamp.”

N.B. — the above picture, from Ta Nea’s front page last week, shows Abbott Efraim under the red-lettered headline “Revelation” (in the original Greek, apocalypse) — “Vatopedi Monastery — they gave a lake, they took building plots.”

The separistist movements at the heart of the Georgian crisis have split the Georgian Orthodox Church as well. As our correspondent Oliver Bullough reports from Abkhazia, the monks at the Novy Afon monastery have declared independence from the Georgian church and now work more closely with fellow Orthodox from Russia.

“Are we supposed to be Georgians? We have nothing in common with them,” Father Vissarion, the head of the rebel state’s church, told him.

Read the full feature here.