RIGHTS-VIETNAM: More Montagnards Repressed in Past Year – Report

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 23 2002 (IPS) - The Vietnamese government has been stepping up its “persecution” and “repression” of the Montagnards, ethnic minorities living in the country’s central highlands, according to a report released Tuesday by the New York-based independent rights lobby Human Rights Watch.

This pattern of abuse has been evident since February last year, says ‘Repression of Montagnards: Conflicts over Land and Religion in Vietnam’s Central Highlands’. the 200-page report released by HRW.

Police brutality, including torture, is among the “repressive tactics employed by the Vietnamese government” with growing frequency over the past 13 months to suppress the rights of the Montagnards,” the HRW study adds.

According to an account narrated by a Montagnard villager to an HRW researcher: “They (the police) beat us over our whole body, including our heads. They beat our fingers, hands, arms and necks — everywhere. There was no blood because they used a rubber truncheon. After beating us they took our photographs.”

On that occasion, according to the report, 19 men belonging to the ethnic Jarai were “tortured and imprisoned”.

“This is the first time that they are being subject to this scale of abuse,” Mike Jendrzejczyk, a director at HRW’s Asia division, told IPS. “We fear the human rights situation may deteriorate even further.”

Minorities make up 15 percent of Vietnam’s 77 million people and most of them live in the central highlands, home to some 54 ethno-linguistic minority groups.

But Hanoi says that the hilltribe communities are being influenced by “enemies of Vietnam from abroad” and that it is in fact trying to help them get away from slash-and-burn agriculture. In late March, a Vietnamese foreign ministry spokeswoman said the “talk about any oppression is just groundless imagination”.

What triggered the repression was a series of public protests and demonstrations in February 2001. Then, members of the indigenous minorities in Vietnam’s central hills took on the government by calling for their rights to ancestral land, religious freedom and independence.

“Police conducted village-to-village sweeps and arrested dozens of highlanders, in a number of cases using torture to elicit confessions and public statements of remorse,” the report notes. “Throughout the Central Highlands, highlanders were subjected to surveillance and interrogation after the February protests.”

“Periodic detention or placement of people under house arrest continued to be reported in the highlands from September 2001 through early 2002,” it adds.

The public protests seemed inevitable, says Jendrzejczyk. “The right to land and religious freedom had grown into an explosive situation during the second half of the 1990s. There is a lot of disaffection and there is no attention from Hanoi.”

Many Montagnards feel they were either being marginalised or deprived of the territory that was theirs historically by Hanoi’s push to settle ethnic Vietnamese from other provinces.

These migrants come to the central highlands to develop economic zones and state farms, including vast tracts of land for coffee, of which Vietnam is a leading world exporter. As a result, the hilltribes have been reduced to minorities in all four highland provinces, Lam Dong, Daklak, Gia Lai and Kon Yum.

The economic gap between the highlands and the rest of Vietnam is wide, with up to 75 percent of all ethnic minorities living below the poverty line compared to 31 percent for the majority Kinh population.

There are few reports about unrest in the highlands in the Vietnamese press, including the hilltribes’ protests last year, reflecting the sensitivity of the issue for a government suspicious of the Montagnards, many of whom fought alongside U.S. special forces troops during the Vietnam War.

Many of those who have been resettled from Vietnam, or after the fleeing the country to go elsewhere, have moved to the United States.

In early 2000, members of the Montagnard Foundation Inc, an indigenous rights group based in South Carolina, began to recruit supporters in the central highlands to spread the word about a movement to gain independence.

Religious freedom is also an issue because many Montagnards have turned away from traditional forms of religion to Christianity. HRW puts the number of Protestants in the Central Highlands at 229,000 to 400,000, and Montagnards make up the bulk of Vietnamese Protestants.

“The discontent in the Central Highlands arises not only out of the encroachment on Montagnard traditional lands but official harassment and discrimination against ethnic minorities who are evangelical Christians,” the HRW report adds.

However, the Christians among the highlanders have also suffered reprisals because a sizeable number took part in the February demonstrations, according to the report.

In March 2001, for instance, the police ordered “some Vietnamese civilians to ransack and destroy the church with axes,” a Montagnard villager told HRW researchers. “They forced the ethnic Jarai to burn it. Everyone was crying – for the dead and wounded and for the church.”

Many Christian highlanders are also among the over 1,000 Montagnards who have fled Vietnam for safe refuge in neighbouring Cambodia.

This incensed the Vietnamese authorities, more so after the U.N. refugee agency got involved in setting up refugee camps in Cambodia. Hanoi described them as “illegal border crosses” and pressured Phnom Penh repatriate the Montagnards, whom it calls economic migrants.

“More than 500 Montagnard refugees who fled to Cambodia in the year following the February 2001 protests were forcibly returned to Vietnam. (HRW) received reports that some of the returnees-particularly those who led others to flee-were beaten and imprisoned upon return to Vietnam,” the report by the rights lobby adds.

Hanoi has been reluctant to permit the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conduct its duties. “After agreement at one point to let UNHCR inspect the areas the Montagnards are being taken back to, the Vietnamese government changed its mind,” says Indrika Ratwatte, a regional officer at UNHCR.

Thai legal and rights expert Vitit Muntarbhorn faults Hanoi for failing by its ethnic minorities: “Vietnam has a moral obligation to uphold human rights. If a people feel they do not fit into a society they have a right not to be punished for it.”

“But the ill treatment of hilltribes is not particular to Vietnam,” he explains. “Burma, Thailand and Laos also have such ethnic minorities who are marginalised and discriminated against.”