HANOI, Sept 10 (AFP) - Vietnam has launched a campaign of intimidation against the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam since an official burned himself to death earlier this month, the church said Monday.
Security police detained three church youth leaders and took others in for questioning in a bid to find the names of 13 officials who had vowed to stage similar protests, the church's Paris office in exile said in a statement.
Ho Tan Anh, 61, an official in the outlawed church's youth wing, marred the communist authorities' National Day celebrations on September 2 by burning himself to death in a public park in Vietnam's third city of Danang in protest at the continued detention of top church leaders.
Police confirmed the protest but not the identity of the protestor.
Three days later police in the commercial capital of Ho Chi Minh City detained church youth leader Vo Tan Sau and two other offifials from Anh's home province, the church said.
Officers also placed the officials' families under effective house arrest in an attempt to intimidate them into divulging the names of the 13 other would-be protestors, it said.
Despite the clampdown, the church's ageing patriarch Thich Huyen Quang ordered supporters to travel to Anh's home to hold a memorial service for the dead official, it added.
Quang has been held under house arrest for the past 19 years at a remote pagoda in central Vietnam.
His deputy, Thich Quang Do, a nominee for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, was placed under renewed house arrest in June after announcing a fresh campaign for his release.
Anh's protest was the second time this year that religious dissidents have resorted to self-immolation.
In March, a member of the outlawed unofficial leadership of the Hoa Hao sect torched herself to death in the Mekong Delta.
The tactic has particular resonance here because of its use by Buddhists during the Vietnam War in their battle against staunchly Catholic South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.
Vietnam's communist authorities recognize just five official religious leaderships. All other religious groups and rival leaderships remain banned.
Last week, the authorities also detained at least a dozen of their secular critics in what New York-based Human Rights Watch described as the largest and most systematic effort to intimidate Vietnamese dissidents in a long time."
The dissidents had sparked the regime's anger by seeking permission to set up an independent anti-corruption body to campaign against widespread graft in communist party ranks.
The communist regime's human rights record was placed squarely back on the US political agenda Thursday when the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a Vietnam Human Rights Bill alongside a landmark trade agreement signed in July last year.
The renewed clampdown on dissidents comes as Vietnam hosts a major international meeting of Asian and European trade ministers.