Police arrested monks and other leaders of an outlawed Buddhist church who tried to deliver food and blankets to flood victims in southern Vietnam, a human rights organization said Tuesday.
"They're using this rescue mission for the flood victims as an excuse," said Penelope Faulkner, a spokeswoman for the Vietnam Com-mit-tee on Human Rights. "They're really arresting the major church activists."The committee, based in Gennevilliers, France, is run by Vietnamese expatriates opposed to Hanoi's efforts to control Buddhists.
Vietnamese officials did not immediately respond to the report.
The activists arrested Saturday and Sunday included five monks and leaders of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, Faulkner said. They had tried to help people forced from their homes by floods in the Mekong River region.
Faulkner said police intercepted 10 church vehicles loaded with food, blankets and medicine and arrested an unknown number of the 360 church members with the convoy.
Police also raided the homes of three church activists and arrested them, she added. No formal charges have been filed.
Vietnam banned the Unified Buddhist Church after setting up the state-controlled Vietnam Buddhist Church as an umbrella group for the country's Buddhists in 1981. Unified Buddhist Church clergy and followers complain of systematic government repression.
Faulkner said she learned of the arrests from church members who phoned from Vietnam.
Nearly three-fourths of Vietnam's 72 million people are Buddhists, according to the U.S. State Department, but the Vietnamese government says only 6 million people practice Buddhism.
The United States and other Western nations have expressed concern over Vietnam's treatment of religious believers.