Source: Morning Star News, June 27, 2013
Vietnamese authorities in Kontum Province this month resettled four severely persecuted ethnic Sedang Christian families on new land not far from where their homes and farms had been destroyed last February. This is a rare, positive government response to persecution and an important step in the struggle for religious liberty, if it becomes a precedent.
In mid-February, five Sedang minority families who had become Christians about a year earlier suffered nightly raids on their homes and fields by local people, animists who strongly opposed their conversion and tried to force them to recant Christianity.
First their personal and household possessions were wantonly destroyed; next their houses were damaged beyond use; finally, thousands of coffee plants and fruit trees in their fields, ready to yield crops, were cut down and destroyed. During the raids, some members of the families were beaten, and all were terrorized and forced to flee into the forest under threat of death. Four of the five families, 19 people in all, took refuge in the home of a Christian pastor and his wife.
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