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The Vietnam News

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Vietnam official newspaper admits Hmong exodus from northern mountains

HANOI - An official Vietnamese newspaper acknowledged Thursday that ethnic Hmong families from Vietnam's northern mountains were moving to the central highlands in an uncontrolled migration. The Nong Nghiep Viet Nam (Vietnam Agriculture) said one of its correspondents met a group of around 100 Hmong en route for the central highland province of Dak Lak from their home in Lai Chau province in the far northwest. Overseas church groups have long charged that tens of thousands of Hmong Christians have fled to the central highlands since 1997 to escape severe persecution by the provincial authorities in the northern mountains.

But the daily insisted that the mainly young group from La Ho commune in Muong Lau district was moving because of land hunger rather than for reasons of religious persecution. "'Come with us, there's lots of good land down there,' the people said, even though none of them had ever been to Dak Lak," the paper reported. Land hunger has certainly been a major factor in migration to the central highlands as the region has been developed for large-scale coffee-planting in recent years. An influx of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese over the past decade was a major factor in a wave of unrest which swept the highlands' mainly Christian minorities earlier this year and which the authorities are still struggling to contain.

But church groups say that tens of thousands of Hmong who were converted to Protestantism by Hmong-language broadcasting from the Philippines during the 1990s have fled to the region to escape persecution in their native provinces of Ha Giang, Lai Chau and Tuyen Quang. Two Hmong pastors who had returned to Ha Giang province from Dak Lak were detained on November 20, a Western diplomat said this week, citing church sources. Protestant churches have won a huge following among the Hmong and other minorities in both the northern mountains and the central highlands in recent years because they preach in minority languages.

Last month, the communist authorities finally granted nationwide recognition to a single state-authorised Protestant church, the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (ECV). But the mainly urban and ethnic Vietnamese congregations of the ECV probably only account for around 25,000 of the country's estimated 750,000 Protestants, the Western diplomat said. The underground churches of the ethnic minorities remain illegal and the target of official suspicion for fanning what the authorities now describe as a separatist rebellion in the central highlands. On Tuesday, at their first meeting since their legalisation on March 16, ECV elders "criticised some people in the central highlands for abusing the name of the Protestant church for political purposes," the official media reported approvingly.

Agence France Presse - April 5, 2001.