Vietnam protesters contrite, media visit highlands
DONG VILLAGE - Two Vietnamese men who said they took part in anti-government protests this month expressed regret at their action on Monday as authorities took foreign media on a rare trip to the restive highland region.
Up to three ringleaders out of about 3,000 protesters face charges of causing social disturbances, Nguyen Vy Ha, chairman of the People's Committee of Gia Lai province, told the first foreign journalists to visit the region since the demonstrations.
"I'll never do it again. I have realised my mistake," said Chyam, a member of the Gia Rai ethnic minority, as he stood outside a simple concrete house on the outskirts of his village surrounded by rubber, pepper and rice fields.
Another man, who wore a slingshot around his neck, told reporters he did not fear the authorities.
"Officials are very nice people, they educate us," he said.
Thousands of minority hill people, known as Montagnards, marched to government buildings in Gia Lai and neighbouring Daklak province on April 10 and 11.
Human rights groups say the disturbance was a repeat of widespread, violent protests in February 2001 over land and religious rights.
Many of the minority people in the Central Highlands coffee-growing region practise an unsanctioned form of Protestantism. Some accuse authorities of taking ancestral lands.
Of the province's 1.1 million residents, 44 percent are members of ethnic minority groups.
As it did three years ago, the government blamed overseas "reactionary" groups such as the Montagnard Foundation, run by Kok Ksor, who founded the defunct armed opposition group FULRO, for stirring up the protests with promises of asylum and money.
Apart from the three ringleaders, protesters judged to have had minor roles in the latest unrest were let off after conducting "self-criticism", local officials said.
"Extremist attacks"
Since the 2001 protests, official visits to the highlands by diplomats and foreign media have been restricted.
But bowing to foreign criticism of a government cover-up, authorities this week allowed a small group of foreign correspondents and U.S. diplomats into the area.
The Montagnard Foundation, which has published dramatic allegations about hundreds of deaths in the latest unrest, says it champions the rights of a repressed and abused group.
The government rejects such accusations.
Officials on the carefully arranged media tour cited statistics about the region's economic growth and told of help given to the minority people.
For the first time, the government also showed video footage of one of the protests outside the provincial capital of Pleiku on April 10 where a crowd of people was seen swarming around the office of the local authority, shouting and pushing.
There were also scenes of militia being pelted with stones.
"The purpose of the video footage is to be replayed to the villagers so they can see for themselves how the extremists attacked authorities and violated the law," said Ha.
The director of the provincial hospital, which treated the injured from the protest, said he did not know how many people had been hurt and most of those admitted after the unrest had been discharged.
By Christina Toh Pantin - Reuters - April 26, 2004.
Vietnam opens Central Highlands to journalists
PLEIKU - Following intense international pressure, Vietnam allowed foreign journalists into the Central Highlands on Monday, two weeks after thousands of ethnic minority Christians clashed violently with authorities during mass protests.
The government-organized trip began in Pleiku, the provincial capital of Gai Lai province and is to end Wednesday in the neighboring Daklak provincial capital of Buon Ma Thuot.
In this sleepy town near the Cambodian border, there was little hint of the mass demonstrations that erupted April 10, when ethnic minority villagers, collectively called Montagnards, took to the streets on foot, tractors and motorbikes to protest religious repression and government confiscation of tribal lands in at least 20 villages in the province.
Nguyen Vi Ha, chairman of the Gia Lai province People's Committee, blamed the entire incident on a U.S.-based group that sympathizes with the Montagnards.
He said no protesters had fled to Cambodia, despite Cambodian media reports last week quoting human rights workers saying at least 160 Montagnards had been deported back to Vietnam.
Ha said a few instigators "fooled or forced'' the others into joining the protests by telling them they would be paid or that they would be resettled in the United States where they would receive government support.
"If that's the case ... I would volunteer to go the U.S. so that I would not have to work,'' Ha said.
He denied reports that police used force against the protesters, showing a heavily edited black-and-white video of demonstrators hurling rocks at police and crowding into a local government building. A water cannon being used against protesters was shown briefly in the background of one frame.
Ha said one protester died after being pelted with stones from other protesters and a security official was beaten to death while another was critically injured. He said most protesters returned home peacefully and that three would likely be prosecuted.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has said it received eyewitness accounts of security forces fatally shooting one protester and beating at least nine others to death while injuring hundreds of others in three provinces.
Vietnam has denied those allegations, but until Monday had not permitted any foreign reporters to travel to the area. The European Union, along with human rights groups, have called for international observers and media to be allowed into the region.
Monday's trip was closely monitored and controlled as a handful of journalists was led from one interview to another and told they could not venture out on their own and report independently. Requests to meet with protesters detained by police or their families were denied.
Human Rights Watch reported that many Montagnards, who are largely Protestant, have gone into hiding following the Easter weekend protests.
Ha denied that security forces had been increased since the unrest, but said more local officials have been dispatched to villages to educate the ethnic minorities about not being misled by "reactionary forces.''
Similar protests erupted here in 2001 over the same issues and about 1,000 Montagnards were eventually resettled in the United States after fleeing to Cambodia.
Vietnam has blamed the latest unrest on the South Carolina-based Montagnard Foundation. The group was founded by former members of an anti-communist guerrilla group allied with the United States during the Vietnam War.
The Associated Press - April 26, 2004.
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