Ethnic Vietnamese minorities test new leader
DAKLAK - Reports of Vietnamese from ethnic minority
groups fleeing to neighboring Cambodia, after Hanoi cracked down on
protests over land and religious rights, shed some light into the
little-discussed restiveness of minorities in this Indochinese country.
Last April, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen agreed to let 38
Vietnamese hilltribe people, who arrived in the country after fleeing
neighboring Vietnam, leave for the United States as refugees. They had
been given refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR). On May 24, the UNHCR discovered a group of
Vietnamese hiding in a jungle in Cambodia. The 52 Vietnamese ethnic
people immediately asked for asylum, saying they feared persecution at
home in a country where most people come from the Kinh majority.
These are but two cases, and there has been scant mention in the local
press of the unrest in the Central Highlands, home to some 54
ethno-linguistic minority groups (also called Montagnards). But the signs
are that more Vietnamese from ethnic minorities from the Central
Highlands have been fleeing to Cambodia after the Vietnamese
government cracked down on their protests in late October last year,
and in March. Since that time, an estimated 250 Vietnamese asylum
seekers have fled Vietnam. Of this, 38 have settled in the United States,
according to media reports.
Such eports of its citizens fleeing have frustrated and embarrassed the
Vietnamese government. There has been little public acknowledgment of
the unrest, until government spokesperson Phan Thuy Thanh said the
asylum seekers were "illegal immigrants" and demanded that Cambodia
stop interfering in Hanoi's internal affairs and return them to Vietnam.
The roots of restiveness in the Central Highlands - which include poverty
and marginalization in the resource-rich region - are a challenge to the
new general-secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), Nong
Duc Manh, who was chosen as the country's top leader two months ago.
When they elected Manh to that post, top CPV cadres hoped that the
Soviet-educated forestry engineer from the Tay ethnic minority could
help ease unrest in the Central Highlands, home to hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese from ethnic minority groups. After all, Manh was famous
for his talents of mediator. He is also the first Vietnamese leader to come
from an ethnic minority group - minorities make up 15 percent of the
country's 77 million people.
But so far, the highlands issue has remained a burden for Manh and his
new elected Politburo. The economic gap between the highlands and the
rest of the country remains wide. In 1998, 75 percent of all ethnic
minority people lived below the poverty line, compared to 31 percent for
the majority Kinh population. Among these minority groups, those living
in the Central Highlands remain the poorest.
Economic resentment in the Central Highlands is linked to the growng
number of migrant farmers - drawn by the prospect of growing coffee
beans for export - who have gradually become the majority on lands
where ethnic groups have lived for generations. Many of these farmers, a
good number from the central and northern provinces, played a key role
in increasing the area planted to coffee plantations and making Vietnam
the world's second-largest producer of robusta coffee beans.
But the number of migrants increased further when the government, this
time keen on arabica coffee beans because they fetch higher prices than
robusta, encouraged more of them to settle in the highlands and reclaim
more land for plantations. This prompted widespread protests and
demonstrations by ethnic minorities in February in Gia Lai and Daklak
provinces. The protests brought together the Jarai, Ede, and Bahnar,
who number more than 600,000 people in the region. They were
protesting the continuing inflow of lowland ethnic Vietnamese, who they
claim are encroaching on ethnic minority lands to build coffee plantations.
Hanoi then sent hundreds of soldiers to live with ethnic minorities and try
to win them over. It has also boosted minority-language broadcasts to
the highlands. But in March, ethnic villagers again clashed with authorities
in Gia Lai province after the latter tore down a Protestant church in Plei
Lao hamlet in Chu Se district, 35 miles south of the provincial capital of
Pleiku. Police arrested three men, identified as protest leaders, and some
of their "stubborn followers", although some religious sources said up to
60 people were caught, including some church leaders.
The arrests prompted thousands of Christian hilltribe people to protest
what they called the government's repression of their Protestant faith. The
majority of Vietnam's 200,000 Protestants are Montagnards living in the
Central Highlands. The local state media only mentioned this incident a
month after it occurred, accusing a US-based minority exile group,
FULRO, of whipping up the violence.
FULRO (United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races),
founded by the French government during colonial times, promotes the
separation of the Central Highlands from Vietnam.
There would have been few more details about the March confrontation,
except that a naive commune chief by the name of "Wanh", speaking to
reporters, blamed Protestants for the problem. He said the government
did not approve the local Protestant church, as it does not belong to the
mainstream. "All Protestants in this area go to illegal underground house
churches," Wang said, adding: "The government does not want them to
adhere to Protestantism because they have to abandon all their cultural
values."
The central highlands cover the southern part of the Truong Son
mountain range and include the provinces of Lam Dong, Daklak, Gia Lai
and Kon Tum. Unlike the ethnic minorities in North Vietnam, the hill
tribes of the Central Highlands are mostly semi-nomadic, live by
slash-and-burn agriculture and are at the bottom of the educational and
economic ladder. Many are illiterate, marry early, have large families and
shorter lifespans than other Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese government says it has been trying to help the Central
Highlands people by weaning them away from slash-and-burn practices
that destroy forests, and getting them into settled agriculture. Official
figures say that about 77 percent of minority households here in Daklak
province have adopted the new farming methods - and that 51 percent of
them emerged from poverty last year.
Likewise, they say, Daklak's GDP growth last year was 1.9 percent
above 1995 and three times more than 1990. Local newspapers have
published stories of Daklak ethnic minority people who become
billionaires thanks to their coffee plantations.
Meanwhile, the international advocacy group Refugees International
recently accused Vietnamese authorities of hunting down its fleeing
citizens on Cambodian soil. Hanoi has several times asked for
Cambodia's help in finding these refugees, but with little result. Relations
between Phnom Penh and Hanoi were soured in April by Cambodia's
decision, under pressure from Washington and the United Nations, to
allow fleeing hilltribe people to be given asylum in the United States.
By Nguyen Nam Phuong - The Asia Times - June 5, 2001.
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