Participants: Lincoln Steed (Host), Robert Seiple
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI000248A
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00:22 Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
00:24 This is a program that brings you 00:26 news, views, discussion and up-to-date information 00:28 on religious liberty developments 00:30 in the United States to be sure but around the world. 00:34 My name is Lincoln Steed, editor of Liberty Magazine 00:37 and my guest on the program is Dr. Robert Seiple. 00:42 Among many accomplishments you were the first ever 00:45 US ambassador-at-large for Religious Freedom, 00:48 quite a privilege and responsibility 00:51 and very significant to our discussion here today. 00:54 Let me jump in with just one case 00:57 that I know you dealt with. 00:59 The little country of Laos, you have visited there 01:02 I know a number of times 01:03 and I had the privilege with Dr. John Graz 01:06 after some of your visits we went there. 01:08 It's still a communist dictatorship 01:11 and religious liberty is a seriously 01:13 contested issue there, isn't it. 01:16 I would soften communist dictatorship. 01:19 Go for it. And the religious freedom. 01:23 We probably had more success there. 01:25 We had more learning's there. 01:28 I started going to Laos well, I had secret missions 01:32 over Laos courtesy 01:34 of the United States Marine Corps. 01:36 In the Vietnam War. 01:37 Yeah, and that had to be dealt with 01:40 but going back starting in 1989 01:43 with World Vision, and going back-- 01:46 Now you were president of World Vision. 01:48 World Vision, US. Yeah. 01:50 And then going back as ambassador 01:53 for the United States and then going back as the head 01:56 of the institute for Global Engagement 01:58 which my wife and I started after the state department. 02:01 So we have a long tenure 02:03 but it takes a long time, two steps forward, 02:07 one step back, two steps forward, one step back. 02:11 They need to know that you're coming back. 02:14 It got so when we made 02:16 may be our 13th or 15th visit 02:18 they would introduce us that way. 02:20 This is Ambassador Seiple or and his wife Margaret Ann 02:23 you know them they bring the whole family over here 02:26 and this is their X number of times over here. 02:29 That was extremely important. 02:31 It meant that we were not simply there in the short term 02:34 we have them at-- 02:36 there're issues at the heart of what we wanted to do. 02:40 We listened to them. 02:41 And they had a lot to overcome that mean America. 02:44 The burden of history. 02:46 The burden of history 02:47 and in the Ho Chi Minh trail unfortunately 02:51 most of it went through Laos. Yeah. 02:53 And we bombed the decants out of there. 02:55 Well, I remember the statistic that we dropped 02:56 more tonnage of bombs on Laos than on Germany in World War II. 03:00 Till four years of World War II. Yeah. 03:02 We have still in Laos about 400 crash sites 03:06 yet to be exhumed, revisited. 03:10 Four hundred crash sites, we lost one plane in Kosovo. 03:15 We lost over 400 in Laos. And we went at war with Laos. 03:19 Well, it impressed me I always telling you 03:21 before this program but when we arrived at the airport 03:24 there was the US Air Force plane there 03:26 and because not much relationship with the US 03:29 but they were there to pick up the remains 03:31 of Governor Dean's brother that just been discovered 03:33 in the jungle after all those years. 03:35 Yeah. So, yeah. 03:37 We worked very close with them that's the point of commonality. 03:41 They've been very helpful. 03:43 We work very closely with, with unexploded ordnance. 03:47 It's our ordnance that came out of the sky 03:50 and did not explode when it hit the ground 03:52 and some of the bombies what they call the bombies 03:55 that have come out of these cluster bombs. 03:57 Little they are about the size food cake. 04:00 A big hand grenade, yeah. Yeah. 04:01 And they get armed as they go. 04:04 Some of them go off on impact, some of them go off 15 minutes, 04:08 15 hours later some of them didn't go off. 04:11 Last year there are about 130 causalities. 04:14 Well, war that was over in 1975. 04:17 We had about a 130 causalities of that war 04:22 mostly children playing out in the woods 04:24 coming across the peace and medal and being hurt by it. 04:28 So that's a difficult chapter. 04:31 They were in some sense 04:34 I mean, they had a communist dictatorship 04:35 and then in 1975 when everything else fell 04:39 they picked up this communist dictatorship. 04:42 They were against the monarchy and they won the monarchy lost. 04:46 This was the Pathet Lao guerrillas wasn't it? 04:48 Pathet Lao, yeah. 04:49 Spent a time in the jungle now they are gonna 04:51 spend their time in the house of parliament. 04:53 At least they didn't do with the Cambodians 04:55 did with the whole attack on their own populists. 05:00 Remember in Cambodia that-- 05:02 Oh that's was-- The genocide was-- 05:04 That was a terrible thing. 05:06 And the movie, The Killing Fields 05:08 depict that very well. 05:10 I happened to see that for the first time 05:13 and sometime in the mid till 1980s 05:18 in Kampuchea in Cambodia in Phnom Penh 05:22 and its, its scary 05:25 but a third of the population were wiped out. 05:27 Now, I happened to think that 05:29 spillover of the war in the Vietnam 05:32 there was a crossfire that hurt Laos. 05:35 There was a crossfire that hurt Cambodia 05:38 and as much as that happened I think that those places 05:44 we should have sent a high level delegation 05:45 over there and apologize. Yeah. 05:47 No, you know apologize, apologize are very tricky. 05:51 You know, there's something 05:52 that I read in the paper all the time. 05:54 We don't apologize. 05:55 Yeah, apologies are very tricky in foreign policies 05:58 especially when there is a communist government 05:59 that comes in. Yeah. 06:01 And that's also a part of problem. 06:02 It's true, it's not a simple as a Christian 06:04 we understand then they but 06:06 it can throw a wrong signal sometime. 06:07 But I think there needs to be a little recognition 06:10 of what was done in the past sometimes that. 06:12 Well I have a chance to apologize 06:13 to the to the Laotians. 06:17 They asked me they wanted to know 06:19 how many bombs dropped on 06:21 from my plane dropped on their country. 06:24 They wanted to know. 06:26 And I was very honest in upfront 06:28 and I feel this way 06:30 so it was not an easy thing to do-- 06:32 not a hard thing for me to do. 06:33 Involve no compromise I thought that we needed 06:36 to apologize to the Laotian people. 06:39 Now that made a very difficult in terms of religious freedom 06:43 because Christianity was a western religion, 06:46 it comes from the same people that dropped Agent Orange 06:49 on their towns. Yeah. 06:52 And so it was a very hard place to get folks 06:57 to see this in their own best interest. 07:00 Took a lot of time 07:02 and we spent a lot of time with them during that. 07:04 So you put a positive spin which is good 07:07 because you did progress there 07:08 but you say that there is reason for hope in Laos. 07:11 But you know when I was there the things were pretty tight. 07:15 For example, there were people in jail-- 07:17 again I know you helped release 07:18 some of them for merely giving out Christian literature 07:21 that could get you a long prison term. 07:24 You know, it's a communist country 07:26 and we always think of communist countries 07:28 as centrally held together but they're not. 07:32 And you go out into the countryside 07:34 you go on to instead of Vientiane now down-- 07:37 Yes, this was always out of this. 07:38 I noticed out of Vientiane then there will be problem. 07:41 Yeah, then you get people king for a day 07:43 or whatever who were trying to do there own thing 07:46 and even they didn't get the word 07:47 or don't care about the word. 07:49 So we have provinces in Laos 07:52 that aren't any better today than they were ten years ago. 07:56 But overall and in terms of the direction 07:59 that government wanted to go 08:02 and their appreciation does for helping them get there 08:06 not just in terms of religious freedom 08:08 but religious freedom gives you that cache 08:12 it eliminates the black eye in the public arena. 08:16 So if you wanted and they very much wanted 08:18 to have those favorite nation treatment they needed that. 08:23 I mean China had it, Vietnam had it 08:25 and they're trying to sell their goods 08:27 and they got to this horrendous essential tax on it. 08:30 But that made them a non-player in the trade. 08:35 So they wanted that and we knew that they wanted that 08:39 and we said look, this comes from good behavior. 08:41 And let me define good behavior its religious freedom. 08:45 It's good for you, it's good for you. 08:48 And that's the other thing we learned in Laos. 08:50 You got to find the point of communality 08:52 vested self interest. 08:53 You're interested in security. 08:56 And they looked at what happened 08:58 to Germany and East Germany. 09:00 They had 700,000 Vietnamese going school 09:05 in East Germany when East Germany "fell." 09:09 And in you know in Europe they feel it fell 09:12 because of the wrong of the church 09:13 whether that's right or not that's all they felt. 09:16 Yeah. So here comes somebody. 09:18 It was someone's tick that 09:20 the entity was tittering on the abysm 09:22 and may be the church may be 09:24 John Paul II helps sort of tip them. 09:27 Well there are bigger issues that play. 09:28 That's probably true but in their mind 09:31 the church is something to be weary off. 09:34 They ascribe more power to the organized church 09:38 than we would ever do in this country. 09:40 Well you're getting very closely and we don't other times 09:43 talk about may be in other program 09:44 it's an issue that concerns me. 09:46 There is the danger of any religion 09:48 but I know it from observing my own culture 09:51 and my own religion the religious outreach 09:55 can become an extension of your cultural 09:57 and even your political identity 10:00 and that you're really are as happened in India 10:04 for example with the British Empire. 10:05 The missionary endeavor was really the, 10:08 the advanced party of colonization. 10:12 It shouldn't have been but it functioned that way. 10:15 No, we don't have to look any further 10:17 than our own country. No. 10:19 And the role of the moral majority 10:22 in trying to establish a relationship 10:24 between religion and the state and it failed in my mind 10:32 and we're still seeing the results of that failure 10:34 and spin offs 10:36 because man in the White House took president "our Father, 10:40 who art in heaven." Yeah. 10:42 And in the most supreme irony 10:45 why we would focus on that power structure. 10:50 The pledge is saying it. 10:51 Changes the course of rivers in the hearts of kings, 10:55 why not focus on that. 10:57 And yet there was a great irony back around that period. 11:00 Attorney General Ashcroft who is a great musician 11:03 I remember seeing a video of him 11:05 singing a song that I think he composed. 11:07 No king but Jesus in American 11:11 well that we need to keep that in mind 11:13 but we shouldn't mix our faith 11:15 with our political structure and projection. 11:20 So let me, but tell me again on this program once 11:23 after I visited there I remember 11:25 explaining it from my perspective 11:26 but the dynamic in Laos 11:28 is complicated by not history generally 11:31 but a secessionist tendency out of Vientiane 11:35 that you alluded to with the Hmong tribesman. 11:38 Did you find that that's still part of the dynamic 11:41 that makes religious expression complicated? 11:45 In certain parts of Laos 11:47 where you have the Hmong 11:50 and normally there are on borders. 11:53 Well, they are in Vietnam too, of course. 11:55 Well, sure, they cross borders. 11:58 But this is why they've become problematic. 11:59 They're sort of the, the Kurds of Southeast Asia, right. 12:03 Well, borders are important. Yeah. 12:06 I mean, where does China have its conflict? 12:08 Honk Kong, Taiwan, Tibet. Right. 12:11 And then the Uyghurs in Western China. Why? 12:14 It's the, you mess it with my borders. Yeah. 12:18 And the Hmong tend to be on the borders. 12:21 There was a time when they were more Hmong in Thailand 12:25 in the refugee camps. 12:27 More Laos in Thailand in the refugee camps 12:29 than we are in Laos. 12:31 Laos is a country of six-and-half million people. 12:34 So it says, it says something 12:36 about the dispersions given the conflict. Yeah. 12:39 But yeah you get out into the hinterlands 12:42 and each tells that which is right in their own eyes 12:45 that becomes-- 12:46 Now the way I heard it many of the Hmong are Christians 12:52 and of course they have the separatist ambitions 12:54 that really probably had nothing to do with their religion 12:56 but the fact that they have separatist views 13:00 they're seen as the threat by the state 13:01 and then they're Christians so it sharpens 13:04 the government's interest in religious activities. 13:08 I see our time is getting by and we want to take a break 13:11 before we come back and continue the discussion 13:13 so we will be back shortly, thank you. |
Revised 2014-12-17