Hanoi - Hundreds of Catholics massed Friday in downtown Hanoi, singing and praying, after the government sent police and earthmovers to clear a disputed piece of property and turn it into a public park. Priests said construction crews arrived at 4 am Friday to break down walls and clear structures on the site of Hanoi's former papal nunciature, next to St Joseph's Cathedral in central Hanoi.
Parishioners and priests staged a months-long vigil on the site last winter to demand the land be returned to the church.
"At 4 in the morning, about 200 police and two construction machines appeared at the site," said Father Nguyen Van Khai, a priest from nearby Thai Ha parish who is staying at the cathedral. "At about 4:30, they destroyed the wall and the other monuments on the site. They are blocking the whole neighbourhood. We cannot go out."
"We are clearing the land to build a library and a park, to serve the whole community," said Nguyen Thinh Thanh, chief of the secretariat of Hanoi's People's Committee. "We did not have to ask for the parish's permission, because that land belongs to the state."
Since 8 am, several hundred parishioners have gathered in the street in front of the site, watched by dozens of uniformed and plainclothes police.
"We are fighting for peace and justice," said Father Khai. "We are ready to die."
Police have closed streets to traffic in a one-block radius around the nunciature, but parishioners and students at the adjacent Catholic seminary were entering and exiting the area on foot.
Thanh said no punishment would be sought against Catholics who had gathered to pray at the site unless they took "extremist actions," in which case police would be asked to deal with them.
Last December the city's archbishop led hundreds of parishioners in a vigil on the site that lasted several months. Parishioners built a shrine to the Virgin Mary and for a time erected a cross on the site, and parishioners camped there every night.
The site, enclosed by a high fence, contains a grassy field and an elegant colonial building, the former nunciature, which housed the Vatican's representative in Hanoi before Vietnam became independent from France in 1954. The Communist government later took over the property, but the church says it still owns it.
The vigil ended with an agreement between the Hanoi city government and the parish to negotiate a settlement. Thanh said the government had informed the parish in advance of Friday morning's moves, but priests said they had no warning.
The conflict over the nunciature is one of two land disputes in Hanoi between the local government and the Catholic Church. The other is at Thai Ha church, where Khai is a pastor.
At Thai Ha, parishioners last November began breaking down walls and occupying a plot of land adjacent to the church which was expropriated by the government in the early 1960s. The land was assigned to three state-owned companies.
After one of those companies, the Chien Thang garment company, was privatized and moved to sell the land for a profit, the church objected. Prayer marches and vigils beginning August 14 led to the arrest of three parishioners on August 28 for destroying property and to an open conflict between a crowd of parishioners and police.
Police announced Wednesday they had arrested a Thai Ha parishioner, Pham Chi Nang, 50, accused of destroying property on the site. They issued an arrest warrant for another protestor, Nguyen Dac Hung, 31.
At a government press conference on August 29, Hanoi's People's Committee explained that a 2003 decree rules out reconsidering land disputes from before 1991 involving the old "socialist land management policies."
Catholicism is entrenched in Vietnam, having arrived in the 1600s, and at least 6 million Vietnamese (in a population of 85 million) identify themselves as Catholics. Hundreds of churches around the country had property confiscated by the government between 1954 and the country's turn to a free-market economy in the 1990s.
If the government accommodates the demands of the churches in Hanoi, other churches around the country could take it as a signal to reopen their old property claims.
The land disputes have soured the mood between the Vietnamese government and the Vatican, which had discussed normalizing relations in recent years. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung visited Pope Benedict in January 2007.
