HOA BINH PROVINCE, Vietnam (dpa) – Forty kilometres southwest of Hanoi, at the foot of steep forested hillsides, 80-year-old Muong grandmother Ngo Thi Chich squats in the courtyard of her home and cuts young bamboo for dinner.
“You here to buy land?” she asks suspiciously, barely looking up from her chopping as a quartet of visitors peeks through her gate.She has reason to be wary. A growing number of ethnic Vietnamese, or Kinh, are moving to the predominantly Muong region. They are the recently rich, an expanding subset of wealthy urbanites intent on grabbing slices of rapidly disappearing land around the capital.Chich and her family live a few hundred metres from Suoi Ngoc Vua Ba, a leafy tourist refuge complete with water slides, hiking trails, a nine-tier “waterfall of dreams” and, according to a glossy brochure, Muong and Tay minorities ready to charm visitors.But charm they do not, as most of the minority peasants have been driven out by local cadres who leased the land to park developers.When a half dozen local Muong protested the lease in the late 1990s they were detained for two years, a young Muong man notes.“We used to farm on terraced fields and do slash-and-burn up there,” Chich says, tilting her chin towards the park. “But the tourist area took the land from us, so we have no land to cultivate our crops. It’s had an impact on people’s lives.”Conditions are similar elsewhere in this land of 80 million, as the communist government’s fixation on homogeneity threatens one of the most diverse ethnic configurations in all of Southeast Asia.“Vietnam has probably experienced one of the most dramatic internal population migrations of any country in the world,” wrote researcher Stanley Zankel in a report on minority health strategies.Aggressively adventurous Kinh strike out from the lowlands toward what the government often calls “the high and far regions,” long the preserve of the country’s 53 ethnic minorities.A staggering 600,000 Kinh have resettled on the fertile soils of the Central Highlands in the past decade – more than the combined total of the three largest Montagnard groups living there.Encroachment on ancestral lands, notably by avid coffee-growers and greedy bureaucrats with the right connections, helped spark the country’s worst social unrest in years last February.Police closed off the region to outsiders, and an ensuing crackdown drove hundreds of Montagnards across the border into Cambodia, where they languish in U.N. camps.Why did it turn so sour? The “assimilationist policy of the government and the more general ethnic chauvinism embedded in Kinh attitudes to mountain people” are much to blame, says an Australian-based academic who asked not to be named.Another explanation: A minority community totalling roughly 11 million people has virtually no grassroots community activism.The Australian academic says such movements have been severely curtailed by Hanoi for obvious political reasons. The government’s one-party system brooks no rivals – dissent is quashed at the outset.“Hence the kind of explosion that erupted earlier this year as pressures had built up over a long period without avenues for release,” he explains.Vietnam’s overseer of ethnic issues, the Committee on Ethnic Minorities and Mountainous Areas (CEMMA), is supposedly in the minorities’ court. Controlled by Kinh, the agency has been under fire for a corruption scandal tainting its chairman.CEMMA told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that the Central Highlands are “basically stable since the government issued many urgent policies and measures to improve the situation.”While tensions have cooled from a boil to a simmer there – as confirmed by a Western aid worker living in the provincial capital Buon Ma Thuot – similar trouble is brewing in the northwest.Hanoi is set to approve Vietnam’s largest ever power project, a 3,600-megawatt hydroelectric dam in remote Son La province which would displace as many as 100,000 people, mainly ethnic minorities.Black Thai communities there see themselves in a bind.They want the development the plant would surely bring. “But we don’t want to leave our ancestral lands,” says a community leader in Chuong Hoa commune, which would likely wind up under water.Current plans are for many of Son La’s disposessed to be trucked down to the Central Highlands, further exacerbating a volatile situation there and perhaps pitting minorities against each other.But rays of hope peek through the clouds.The Communist Party’s recently appointed general secretary, Nong Duc Manh, comes from an ethnic Tay family in Vietnam’s far north. It’s too early to tell, but it is thought that Manh may have a soothing effect on existing tensions.Officials in charge of minority issues are also expected to travel soon to Canada and Mexico to study policy, diplomats confirmed.Hanoi is hinting at greater transparency, too. A senior representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is hoping to get access to the Central Highlands to monitor the potential return of the minority refugees in Cambodia, paid a visit to Vietnam in June.
