While most Americans may have forgotten the anniversary, memories of South Vietnam remain poignant in Orange County’s Little Saigon region, the world’s largest Vietnamese refugee community.
On Bolsa Avenue sidewalks this afternoon a youthful, energetic crowd of several dozen protesters gathered, waved South Vietnamese and American flags, and repeatedly chanted their wish:
No, it wasn’t for better pho, cheaper crawfish or more coffee bars with beautiful girls.
They really want: “Freedom for Vietnam!”
(They also thanked the United States.)
Countless drivers passing Asian Garden Mall honked their vehicle horns and yelled in support.
Vietnam’s leaders, who have softened dictatorial policies in recent year as a way to increase U.S. corporate investment, still refuse to grant their citizens basic freedoms of speech, religion and assembly.
Earlier this month, Vietnamese authorities arrested–Nguyen Quoc Quan–a Vietnamese American in Ho Chi Minh City for allegedly plotting to disrupt that country’s re-unification celebrations.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.