WASHINGTON (AFP) -- They rub shoulders with U.S. President George W. Bush and lawmakers in Washington but are shunned as ""terrorists"" by Vietnam's communist leadership -- members of U.S.-based Viet Tan are stepping up their campaign for democratic reforms in their motherland.

Short for Vietnam Reform party, Viet Tan has built up a vast membership of Western educated Vietnamese spanning the globe and is fuelling an underground dissident network inside Vietnam.
Now, the group is boldly testing the limits of the authorities in Hanoi by secretly sending members to the tightly governed Southeast Asian state, taking the pro-democracy campaign right to the home ground.
Three of its members -- two Americans and a French -- were caught last month by the Vietnames authorities together with three other Viet Tan associates -- a Thai and two locals -- in Ho Chi Minh City as they were preparing to distribute pro-democracy pamphlets.
One of the arrested Americans, a mathematician developing a machine to translate English to Vietnamese, was accused of entering Vietnam on a fake Cambodian passport.
All were branded ""terrorists"" in the state media and the arrests triggered protests from France and the United States, where lawmakers criticized Vietnam for what they call political and religious repression.
Hanoi has released one of the two Americans and the French citizen Nguyen Thi Thanh Van, a journalist with Radio New Horizon, whose nightly broadcast spreads Viet Tan's message to counter
To highlight its growing influence in Vietnam, Viet Tan's chairman, Do Hoang Diem, said farmers who participated in land protests that journalist Van featured in her broadcasts came to the jail were she was detained to offer flowers.
""Viet Tan holds that the Vietnamese people must solve the problems of Vietnam,"" he told AFP.
""Change, therefore, must come through the power of the people in the way of grassroots, peaceful means,"" said Diem, 44, who met Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney at the White House earlier this year to seek action against Hanoi for cracking down on dissent.
Most of the leadership of Viet Tan were just teenagers or younger when the Vietnam war ended. Viet Tan's members in Vietnam include intellectuals, university students, and workers.
Diem as a 12 year old was among hundreds of thousands of ""boat people"" who fled to the United States in the late 1970s after the war fearing communist rule.