Word: buddhists
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...most forgotten United Nations fact-finding missions on record was the seven-member delegation that journeyed to South Viet Nam last October. No sooner did the mission arrive in Saigon to investigate Buddhist claims of religious persecution than the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown. Whether the Buddhists had been victims of the Diem regime, or consummate political agitators-or both-overnight became a neglected question. Though every presumed Buddhist immolation had made front pages for months, editors barely noted or even read the 250-page U.N. report when it was published in December...
...bitter controversy over the small band of U.S. correspondents in Saigon and the extent to which they may have distorted the news and helped shape Washington's Viet Nam policy. In a recent Senate speech, Dodd suggested that the press had deliberately buried reports of all the Buddhist immolations* that have occurred since Diem's overthrow. Now, in a letter accompanying republication of the U.N. study by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Dodd declared that some of the mission's findings raise "doubts about the authenticity and spontaneity" of the Saigon suicides that preceded the coup...
Dodd argued that "any objective person" reading the report "would have to conclude that the accounts of massive persecution of the Buddhist religion were, at the best, vastly exaggerated, and at the worst a sordid propaganda fraud. We were told that the Diem government was guilty of such brutal religious persecution that innocent Buddhist monks were driven to commit suicide in protest. Now it turns out that the agitation was essentially political." Concludes Dodd: "What this all adds up to is that the American people have once again been grievously misinformed by some of their newspapers on a foreign situation...
First task of the Front, in an area under guerrilla influence, is to indoctrinate the populace. An estimated 4,000 propaganda squads follow Red guerrilla units into villages. The Front even publishes 30 crude newspapers. New fly sheets appear daily, accusing the Americans of everything from introducing whores into Buddhist monasteries to gouging out, frying and eating children's eyeballs. The Front uses harsher methods: more than 10,000 local government officials have been assassinated in the long war, usually by beheading...
...issue building permits for any more. Climaxing a long campaign against the English-speaking government elite and the Tamil-speaking Hindu minority (almost one-quarter of Ceylon's 10.6 million people), Mrs. Bandaranaike ordered that all official business must be conducted in Sinhala, the language of the Buddhist majority...