The plan to meet between Cambodian and Thai troops on Monday was aborted and there was no meeting between the commander of Cambodian [army] region 4 with his Thai counterpart from region 2. The Thai commander of region 2 told local Thai news media at the end of last week that there will be a meeting on Monday 13 July between the commanders of Cambodian region 4 and Thai region 2. The goal of the meeting is to improve the tense situation along the border frontline. General Chea Morn, the Cambodian commander of region 4, also made the same comment about this meeting. The cause of the abortion is not yet known. Nevertheless, Cambodia army officials in Preah Vihear temple claimed that the situation along the border frontline is still quiet at a time when it is learnt that Thai troops are carefully strengthening their concrete trenches.
From:
Meeting between Khmer and Thai troops aborted
Monday, July 13, 2009The 'cemetery goods' at Chau Long market
.jpg)
The ‘cemetery goods’ trading began in the 1990’s. At first, the goods were mainly clothes, including relatively new products, and were widely popular. Later on, cemetery goods came to include electronics, consumer electric products, children’s toys and many other consumer goods. The products are gathered from many countries, including the US, South Korea, Japan, Canada and Hong Kong, and carried to Singapore.
In Singapore, they are classified and packaged and then are exported to Phnom Penh or Rong Kloea flea market in Thailand. B.K.A, a big trader of ‘cemetery goods,’ said that nearly ten tons of goods reach Vietnam every day, a level even higher than the volume of Vietnam’s new garment exports.
An Giang Customs Agency said that since the beginning of 2008, the agency has seized 17,000 kilogrammes of used clothes and 4,000 metres of fabric.
VietNamNet Bridge – A huge volume of used goods from the ‘rich countries’ seeps into Vietnam across its border with Cambodia. The trade in seconds, irregulars and second-hand clothing, fabrics and electronic gear, unsanctioned but clearly tolerated, has flourished since the early days of ‘doi moi.’
In Chau Doc, a city in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang province, Chau Long Market has become well known as an entrepot for used goods ‘smuggled’ into Vietnam from nearby Cambodia. The people of the Delta call them ‘cemetery goods.’ According to Lam Van Tuoi, deputy manager of the market, some 275 households now trade in ‘cemetery goods’, including clothes, handbags, footwear and fabric.
The general depot of ‘cemetery goods’
Every morning at Chau Long, big trucks arrive to deliver goods. Bales of goods, one after the other, are unloaded from the trucks and carried to every household before they are delivered to customers.
Every bale of used clothes weighs 100 kilogrammes and sells from three million to over five milliion dong. Customers here are mainly wholesalers who carry the used goods back to their home provinces.
Another market, next to the Tinh Bien border crossing, specializes in foreign made fabric. At Tinh Bien, there are some 300 kiosks; many sell ‘irregular’ fabric or liquidated stocks of imported fabric at very low prices. Some fabric sells for only 3,000-5,000 dong per metre, so cheap that it is called ‘cemetery fabric’.
Like the used clothes, the fabric is sold in bales, each containing 50-120 meters of cloth.
“People purchase the fabric to make clothes or door curtains to sell at markets,” said T, a vendor at the Tinh Bien Market. Customers who purchase goods in big volumes need only provide their addresses and put money down; their goods will be delivered to their doors.
Imported footwear, wallets, hats, ties and children’s toys are also on offer. There are some ten traders of these kinds of products in Chau Doc town. The traders said they travel to Rong Kloea flea market in Thailand to collect goods to resell in Vietnam.
The route of the ‘cemetary goods’
At Tamau Market in Takeo, Cambodia, boats arrive from Phnom Penh laden with second-hand products, irregulars and overstocks: electronic goods, consumer electric products, bicycles and consumer products.
At Tamau market is the transit place, Vietnamese traders collect the goods they have purchased in Phnom Penh, Kompong Som port (Cambodia) and Rong Kloea Market. From there, the gods are carried across the border line to depots in Chau Doc town. From the depots, goods pour out every day to Chau Long Market and other markets in neighboring Delta provinces.
Tamau is but one of many cross-border transit places. There is a depot in Prekchray (Cambodia’s Kandal province). This is a huge, metal-roofed house containing many tens of tons of old fabric and clothes. Prices there are cheaper by 500,000 dong per bale, so a lot of Vietnamese traders come to Prekchray.
The ‘cemetery goods’ are also carried on boats from Phnom Penh through Bac Dai border crossing, and then carried along the track to Dong Thap in Long An province, enroute to HCM City, where the goods are re-sold in Ba Chieu, Tan Binh and An Dong Markets.
Wastes, too, are being brought to Vietnam
‘Cemetery goods’ are selling well in Vietnam because many Vietnamese consumers are happy to buy dirt cheap products.
Traders said that the quality of the illegal imports has deteriorated. Previously, every 100 kilos of shirts (400 shirts on average) had 170 first-class shirts, but now there are only 100. (‘First-class’ products mean the ones which still look new and have acceptable quality). It’s the same for jeans. Only 20 pairs of jeans are found ‘relatively good’ in every 50 kilos of the products, according to Tuan, who has been trading goods from Phnom Penh.
The threat embodied in these imports, says an environment official in An Giang province, is that Vietnam is becoming the place which consumes the refused products of the rest of the world’s countries.
Cross-border traders say that nowadays liquidated fabric from China’s textile factories have been carried to Cambodia to be re-exported to Vietnam.
Tuoi tre newspaper has reported that this kind of fabric has been purchased by private garment workshops which make low cost clothes, blankets, pillow cases and window curtains for sale in rural areas. Besides, the fabric is also used to make uniforms for workers and as lining for other products like handbags and seat cushions.
To ‘renew’ overly old products, the fabric is reportedly treated with chemical substances which are harmful to human health. Besides, used products may bear the germs of their original users.
From:
Stop thief! Teens swipe girl's donation jar
LOWELL -- Police are looking for two young teens who went into a Broadway Street convenience store and stole a donation jar that was placed there by a 10-year-old girl who was raising money for poor children.
Officers were called to P&S Convenience, at Willie and Broadway streets, after a passing motorist saw a clerk chasing someone down the street last night about 9:15 p.m.
Store owner Peter Nhim said the clear plastic container had been chained and locked to the store's counter, but that one of the boys yanked on it hard enough that the plastic container broke free.
He chased the boys through the parking lot behind his store and saw them escape down Cross Street, toward Fletcher Street.
"I'm so upset right now. She worked hard on this thing," Nhim said of his 10-year-old daughter, Chresina, who was collecting the money. "Even kids put their change in there."
Nhim said there were $5 and $10 bills in the container.
He said his daughter was raising money to buy school supplies for poor children in Cambodia, since she had been there and met students who barely had any supplies.
She came up the idea on her own, and Nhim agreed to support it by putting a jar on his store's counter.
The jar was made of clear plastic, and bears a picture of a young girl, about 8 years old, holding a younger child.
"She was so happy," Nhim said of his daughter. "Right now if I called her she would cry."
The boy who grabbed the jar
From:
China actions 'appropriate'
THE Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement Saturday supporting China's actions in the restive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where, according to the Chinese government, unrest between Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese has left 184 dead.
"The government of China is taking appropriate measures to address the problem and restore social order," the statement said in reference to China's crackdown in Xinjiang.
In the wake of the riots in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, Chinese state media have reported that many mosques in Urumqi were closed Friday, and that public assembly without police approval has been banned.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs called these government actions China's "exclusive internal affair".
Rebiya Kadeer, the president of the World Uighur Congress, wrote in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that deaths in Xinjiang are likely much higher than reported by Chinese state media, saying her sources claim 400 Uighurs have been killed in Urumqi.
Uighurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim minority in Xinjiang, have long complained about discrimination and the suppression of their language and culture.
Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong told the Post that the ministry issued the statement "to show Cambodia's stance that China is a friendly country".
Relations between China and Cambodia, however, have not always been so friendly. In a 1988 essay, Prime Minister Hun Sen called China "the root of everything that was evil in Cambodia", referring to China's support of the Khmer Rouge.
But after Hun Sen ousted Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a 1997 coup, China was the first country to recognise Hun Sen's rule, delivering to Cambodia military cargo valued at up to US$2.8 million, according to Julio Jeldres, Norodom Sihanouk's official biographer.
Since 2006, China has pledged $880 million in loans and grants to Cambodia. China also built and financed the more than $30 million Council of Ministers building.
The Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh said Sunday that it welcomed Cambodia's statement of support but declined to comment further.
From:
Hun Sen's rule by order: "Spoiled youngsters" [most of whom are sons on high-ranking CPP officials] had to be dealt with Hun Sen's personal order
Officials say new disciplinary measures will help address the problem of juvenile delinquency.
FOLLOWING a directive issued last month by Prime Minister Hun Sen, the government has launched a crackdown on juvenile delinquency that will target "spoiled youngsters" in a bid to maintain social order, an Interior Ministry official said Sunday.
According to a list of disciplinary measures to be posted in towns across the country, young people will be more closely monitored and could face more serious charges if caught engaging in crimes.
"We have just begun to gradually implement the disciplinary measures after the prime minister called for action against spoiled youngsters,"
Ministry of Interior spokesman Khieu Sopheak told the Post Sunday, referring to a directive on June 24 ordering ministries and law enforcement officials to crack down on "gangster activity".
'Big brothers' disciplined
"We see that nowadays young people's acts are sometimes entangled with crime and the destruction of culture and tradition," Khieu Sopheak said.
"If we do not have any measures to cope with [young people], our society will definitely become chaotic, and children of the next generation will imitate such a lack of discipline."
Khieu Sopheak said most of the young people that the ministry has picked up so far were "big brothers" associated with criminal gangs.
"In the past, we have gathered thousands of young people who were acting immorally and causing trouble to society. Having gone through rehabilitation, some young people are sent back to their parents.... However, in some serious cases, they are sent to the court," he said.
The new disciplinary measures are being tested in pilot programmes in the country's more densely populated areas, though Khieu Sopheak said it would likely be taken to small villages.
"We thought delinquency only happened in the cities, but now this culture of immorality has become widespread."
Him Yun, vice president of the Khmer Youth Association, told the Post Sunday that he welcomed measures to control delinquency, but he warned authorities not to use the directive as a front for their own bullying.
"While we approve measures to cope with problematic youngsters, local authorities should implement measures effectively," Him Yun said.
From:
China actions 'appropriate': From a repressive regime to another
.jpg)
Ministry of Foreign Affairs expresses support for China's broad crackdown in Xinjiang province, calling it an 'internal' decision that will 'restore social order'.
THE Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement Saturday supporting China's actions in the restive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where, according to the Chinese government, unrest between Uighur Muslims and Han Chinese has left 184 dead.
"The government of China is taking appropriate measures to address the problem and restore social order," the statement said in reference to China's crackdown in Xinjiang.
In the wake of the riots in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi, Chinese state media have reported that many mosques in Urumqi were closed Friday, and that public assembly without police approval has been banned.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs called these government actions China's "exclusive internal affair".
Rebiya Kadeer, the president of the World Uighur Congress, wrote in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that deaths in Xinjiang are likely much higher than reported by Chinese state media, saying her sources claim 400 Uighurs have been killed in Urumqi.
Uighurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim minority in Xinjiang, have long complained about discrimination and the suppression of their language and culture.
Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong told the Post that the ministry issued the statement "to show Cambodia's stance that China is a friendly country".
Relations between China and Cambodia, however, have not always been so friendly. In a 1988 essay, Prime Minister Hun Sen called China "the root of everything that was evil in Cambodia", referring to China's support of the Khmer Rouge.
But after Hun Sen ousted Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a 1997 coup, China was the first country to recognise Hun Sen's rule, delivering to Cambodia military cargo valued at up to US$2.8 million, according to Julio Jeldres, Norodom Sihanouk's official biographer.
Since 2006, China has pledged $880 million in loans and grants to Cambodia. China also built and financed the more than $30 million Council of Ministers building.
The Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh said Sunday that it welcomed Cambodia's statement of support but declined to comment further.
From:
Deportees at border cite fears
NEARLY a fortnight after their deportation by Thai immigration authorities, Khmer Krom asylum seekers staying in Banteay Meanchey province say they are suffering from hunger and fear as they encounter the uncertainty of life in a strange country.
Since their July 2 deportation, 33 of the 56 deported have left the border, counting on friends and relatives across the country for food and shelter.
But the remaining 23 deportees, born and raised in southern Vietnam, have no family in the Kingdom and are now living in limbo at a small pagoda outside Poipet town. The deportees did not want their exact location to be published.
Several deportees told the Post Friday that the group had endured harsh living conditions since arriving in Poipet. Despite aid from a Christian charity, they said they have been forced to survive on a single meal a day, drink pond water and sleep on the floor in cramped living quarters with no mosquito nets.
"We can't leave the house and can't go to the market, let alone go to work to try and sustain ourselves. It's dangerous out there. We can't trust anyone," said deportee Nguyen Van Hai (names have been changed).
Worst of all, said Pham Van Thanh, another deportee, was the constant fear of repatriation to Vietnam, where Khmer Krom claim they face restrictions of freedom of expression and religion.
"What we are most concerned about is that Cambodian authorities do not allow us to stay here and will send us back to Vietnam," he told the Post.
"If we are sent back, we will be jailed."
The 56 Khmer Krom fled southern Vietnam for Thailand between six months and six years ago and were awaiting the results of their asylum applications when arrested as illegal immigrants by Thai police and detained at Bangkok's Immigration Detention Centre on June 12.
The Khmer Krom said they had been living in isolation from the rest of Thai society and had received no news from home prior to their arrest.
"We have absolutely no contact with our families in Vietnam. We have no idea what's happening to them now. It's likely that they're being spied on," said Vu Van Ba, another of the deportees.
Nguyen Van Hai said it had been hard to live a normal life in Thailand.
"We could not do anything there. No work, no business, and we were under surveillance at all times," he said
At the time of their deportation, the Bangkok office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was in the middle of processing their asylum applications. The deportees said they were angry the UNHCR had been unable to intervene after their arrest.
"UNHCR did not provide any assistance when we were in Bangkok," Pham Van Thanh told the Post. "When arrested by the Thai police, we called UNHCR officials in Bangkok asking for intervention, but their hands were tied."
Sara Colm, a Human Rights Watch researcher, said Sunday that the deportation might put an end to the group's attempt to seek asylum abroad.
"It's difficult for the refugee process to be completed now that they have been deported to Cambodia," she said, noting that UNHCR Cambodia will not consider the asylum claims of Khmer Krom.
She said that UNHCR operates according to Cambodian government assurances that all ethnic Khmers - including those from southern Vietnam - have the automatic right to Cambodian citizenship, making it technically impossible for them to claim refugee status while staying in the country.
Article 4 of the 1996 Nationality Law also states that any person with one Khmer parent can become a citizen.
But the difficulty facing the deportees is that the government does not seem willing to grant them the rights of citizenship enshrined in law, with one official saying they face deportation to Vietnam.
"We do not have any principle of providing these people with shelter or accommodation," said Try Narin, the governor of Poipet town. "I have asked local authorities to find them, and if we [do] we will send them back to their homeland."
UNHCR's office in Phnom Penh could not be reached for comment Sunday.
From:
Govt 'rejects' Thai Web site
THE Ministry of Foreign Affairs plans to send a diplomatic note to Thai officials this week voicing its disapproval of a Web site launched by Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva that claims parts of Cambodia as "lost" Thai territory.
Ministry spokesman Koy Kuong said Sunday that officials had decided to "reject" the Web site, which launched July 4, and would send the note "early this week".
The site, www.ilovethailand.org, features a video that includes a green map of the Siamese Empire at its most expansive. As images of Thai kings appear on the screen, sections of the empire turn dark red before they are removed from the map.
Sections lost to Cambodia include parts of Siem Reap and Battambang provinces as well as the land on which Preah Vihear temple sits.
Towards the end of the five-and-a-half minute clip, a narrator addresses "the talented people of the young Thai generation" and emphasises the importance of understanding their country's history.
But Council of Ministers spokesman Phay Siphan said Thursday that the video was actually "twisting the facts of history".
And government officials are not the only ones to have criticised the video.
Michel Tranet, a Cambodia historian and lecturer, said Sunday that the video was "absolutely wrong".
He argued that Thailand had violated Cambodia's sovereignty far more often than the reverse, saying: "The Thai historians themselves and the internationals know that Thailand has regularly ventured into Cambodian ancestral territory."
Rong Chhun, president of the Cambodian Independent Teachers Association, said the Thai government was being dishonest in its presentation of Thailand's past actions towards Cambodia.
"If we actually look at history, today's Thailand was the Khmer Kingdom's territory before," he said.
Thai Embassy officials could not be reached for comment Sunday.
From:
Timber export ban to save forests, promote carbon-credit trading
Cambodia's "avoided deforestation project", part of an agreement signed last month with nine community forestry groups in Oddar Meanchey, is expected to generate 8.5 million tonnes of carbon-offset credits over 30 years, according to the NGO Terra Global.
MINISTER of Agriculture Chan Sarun on Thursday announced a Kingdom-wide ban on timber exports in a move aimed at protecting forests and promoting a future carbon-credit trading programme.
"We must stop illegal timber exports and make a greater effort to protect our forests," Chan Sarun said. "With carbon credits, we can develop the country and improve the lives of our people without damaging our environment."
In years past, illegal logging for domestic use and cross-border trade has stripped Cambodia of much of its natural forest cover, he said, adding that the government has confiscated nearly 300,000 hectares of land cleared of its forests by developers and land speculators.
"We have [also] confiscated more than 52,000 cubic metres of illegal timber, some 319 trucks used by illegal loggers and prosecuted more than 600 individuals involved in the illegal timber trade," Chan Sarun said.
Ma Soktha, head of the reforestation office at the Ministry of Agriculture's Forestry Department, said the government spends between
US$850,000 and $1 million each year on conservation efforts, tree plantings and security efforts to prevent logging in protected areas.
"We will not have to worry about illegal logging if we enforce existing laws and halt all timber exports as well," he said.
Ma Soktha said the government has also planted nearly 50,000 hectares of trees and laid the groundwork for a carbon-credit programme.
"We have created two carbon-credit sample areas on 24 hectares of forest land in Oddar Meanchey and Koh Kong provinces," he said.
Amanda Bradley, country director for Community Forest International, said last week that the export ban and increased conservation efforts were important steps towards combating global warming and developing a new sustainable market for carbon credits for Cambodia.
"The government stands to profit substantially from developed countries with a carbon-credit programme, which in turn would help people improve their economic situation," she said.
Nop Polin, national coordinator of climate change awareness at Geres, said trading in fresh air, as he described the carbon-credit programme, instead of illegal timber could reduce greenhouse gasses and help prevent global climate change.
"We need forests to protect against global warming and other natural disasters," he said. "And we can sell the world our carbon credits, which is to say we can sell them fresh air."
From:
Under the gaze of the Divine Eye
AGONG rings out over the city, swallowed by the noise of the morning traffic, as the devotees arrive in their Sunday best - flowing white robes and small black caps for the men - and gather in the main prayer hall.
Incense chokes the air as three priests, clad in gold and red, lead the congregation in chants under the unblinking gaze of the Divine Eye, suspended in a sky-blue frame above the altar.
For adherents of Caodaism, a religious sect native to southern Vietnam, the ceremony is a fortnightly ritual that emphasises universal peace and the oneness of man, God and the universe.
"Since I started participating in Caodaism, my family is happier because I stopped using violence against my wife, stopped drinking wine and stopped having a mistress," says Phan Van Quang, 64, who started going to the temple when he was 25 to "understand the dharma" and gain good fortune.
Phnom Penh's Caodai temple, a shaded citadel down an alley off Mao Tse-Tung Boulevard, has been the Cambodian home of Caodaism since 1934; and temple elders say that before the Khmer Rouge, it boasted a congregation of over 10,000.
Though that number has dwindled to around 2,000 today, the temple continues to find eager converts among the city's Vietnamese community.
"Day after day, more and more people are respecting Caodai," said Tran Van Ngoan, the head of temple security.
"We do not force people to participate in this religion. People respect it by themselves voluntarily."
Today, he said, there are over 1,300 Caodai temples in southern Vietnam, and over 5 million adherents, spread as widely as Japan, North America, Europe and Australia.
East meets West
Caodaism - more properly known as Cao Dai Dam Ky Pho Do, or the "Third Great Universal Religious Amnesty" - was born in southern Vietnam in the early 1920s, when Vietnamese civil servant Ngo Van Chieu claimed to have made contact with spirits who communicated to him a symbol - the "all-seeing eye" - and a new creed reconciling the great religious philosophies of East and West.
In an attempt to create the ultimate religious synthesis, Chieu poured everything but the kitchen sink into Caodaism, which counts Sun Yat-sen and French author Victor Hugo among its saints.
Although the doctrine itself is a melange of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, it also incorporates arcane aspects of 19th-century French spiritism, including seances, Ouija-boards, and the bizarre practice of pneumotographie, in which pieces of paper are placed in envelopes and suspended above the altar, where they are supposedly inscribed with messages from God.
Caodai architecture is the same synthetic brew as its doctrine, combining Buddhist sculpture and European baroque into what British author Graham Greene once described as a "Walt Disney fantasia of the East".
Though a more modest affair than its elder brother, the Caodai Holy See in Vietnam's Tay Ninh province, Phnom Penh's temple is the same technicolour feast, with menageries of dragons, lotus flowers and coloured flags covering every available surface.
Tran Van Ngoan said that in order to participate in the religion, adherents have to adopt a vegetarian diet, starting with six days a month during the first six months, and then 10 days a month thereafter.
But attendance at the temple is only required for the main fortnightly services, and the religion - unlike Christianity or Islam - does not demand strict loyalty from its adherents.
"I follow both the Caodai and Buddhist religions - they are not so different from each other," says Yin Chhay, a 56-year-old Khmer from the city's Meanchey district who attends four Caodai services a month but goes to the pagoda for Buddhist festivals.
A holy exile
Phnom Penh's Caodai temple also has a peculiar claim to fame as the resting place, from 1959 to 2006, of Pham Cong Tac, one of the religion's founders and first known "mediums".
Known to adherents as the Ho Phap, or "Defender of the Faith", Tac also brought Caodaism to Cambodia in 1927, when he was posted to Phnom Penh as a junior official in the French colonial administration.
Hum Dac Bui, a spokesman for Caodai.org, a California-based nonprofit organisation, said Tac was sent to Cambodia to prevent him spreading the religion further in Vietnam, but that he quickly went about establishing it in Phnom Penh.
Upon his return to Vietnam, the religion continued to grow at a remarkable pace under Tac's leadership. By the 1950s, an estimated one in eight South Vietnamese was a Caodai, and the religion ran most of Tay Ninh province as a feudal theocracy, collecting its own taxes and maintaining a standing militia of tens of thousands of men.
Tac had achieved such stature within Vietnam that in May 1954 he attended the Geneva Conference, where he tried in vain to prevent the partition of the country.
But when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch Catholic, came to power in 1955, the domestic political calculus began to turn against the Caodai.
In 1956, Diem forcibly disbanded the Caodai militias and other nationalist rivals. Tac and a close circle of followers sought political asylum in Cambodia, where he died in 1959.
"Pham Cong Tac moved to Cambodia because he did not want to see our Vietnamese people fighting with each other. He asked for his body to be taken back only when Vietnam was again at peace," said temple manager Vo Quang Minh, referring to Tac's deathbed request to Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
In November 2006, his remains were finally sent to be interred at Tay Ninh, bringing to an end nearly a half century of exile in Phnom Penh.
Vietnamese restrictions
But whether Vietnam remains a truly "peaceful" place for Caodaists remains unclear. Although the Caodai militias initially fought alongside the communist Viet Minh against the French authorities during the 1940s and 1950s, they turned against them once the colonists were expelled in 1954.
Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, the communists took their revenge, confiscating Caodai property and arresting or exiling many of its leaders.
Vo Quang Minh said that relations between the Cambodian Caodai and the Vietnamese government were difficult during the occupation of the 1980s, but have since improved.
But despite some positive changes, rights groups and exiles say the Vietnamese government continues to ban participation in independent Caodai factions and oversees all internal Caodai affairs.
"Undercover government agents have infiltrated the administration of Caodai, and the religion has to function according to the government's [rules] without respecting the current religious constitution," said Hum Dac Bui.
"The Tay Ninh Holy See has become more or less a place of tourist interest for the profit of the government and is totally paralysed from a religious point of view."
Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said that only the government-approved Caodai sect is legally recognised, and that those who belong to splinter groups are subject to "harassment, arbitrary detention, and imprisonment".
In September 2004, he said, 12 Caodaists from Vietnam were arrested in Phnom Penh when they attempted to deliver a petition to delegates attending an ASEAN meeting.
After being deported to Vietnam, nine members of the group were sentenced to prison terms of up to 13 years on charges of undermining Vietnam's national security.
Adams added: "Cambodia is generally much more free with regard to freedom of religion than Vietnam, whose government sees unregistered church groups ... as a threat to the authority of the Communist Party."
But Tong Dinh Duong, 30, a member of the Saigon Caodai temple on Tran Hung Dao Boulevard in Ho Chi Minh City, told the Post last year that whatever the political situation, Caodaism's unique blend of Western mysticism and Eastern philosophy would prevail.
"When religion combines these together, people living together in the future won't fight together," he said. "In the future, we will have peace."