Ethnic unrest sweeps Vietnam

Ethnic unrest sweeps Vietnam

HANOI (AFP): A wave of apparently well-coordinated protest was sweeping Vietnam's central highlands as the region's ethnic minorities vented their anger at the loss of lands to Vietnamese settlers, residents said on Wednesday.

Thousands of minority protesters had taken to the streets of the region's main towns over the past few days prompting authorities to launch a major crackdown, residents told AFP.

Some minority people were now being barred from leaving their districts but protests were continuing in rural areas on Wednesday, they said.

The communist authorities sought to play down the protests, confirming just a single demonstration in a single town more than a week ago.

But officials at the region's biggest tourist draw, the Yok Don National Park, confirmed it had been ordered to close for the past three days and was not expected to reopen soon.

Fury at government land confiscations, which have turned the minorities' ancestral forests into the country's largest coffee- growing region, was the principal factor behind the protests, residents said.

But they were also fueled by government repression of fringe Protestant churches which have won large numbers of followers among the minority peoples in recent years.

Several thousand protesters staged a four-day protest in the town of Pleiku, capital of Gia Lai province, over the weekend, while another 2,000 demonstrated in the Dac Lac provincial capital of Buon Me Thuot on Tuesday, residents said.

"On Friday and again throughout the weekend, lines of protesters stretching as far as the eye could see marched along the roads leading into Pleiku," a businessman in the town told AFP.

"Several policemen were injured and a number of the demonstration's organizers arrested," a textile seller said.

In Buon Me Thuot, around 2,000 minority people traveled into the town to demonstrate Tuesday, a resident said.

The demonstration only lasted a single day but protests were continuing Wednesday in nearby Yok Don National Park, he said. Weekend protests were also held in rural districts of Gia Lai province, coinciding with the demonstration in Pleiku.

"There were demonstrations in several districts but the largest was here in Chu Prong among members of the Jarai and Bahnar minorities," said the owner of a jewelry shop in the district.

"Uniform and plainclothes police were out in force to monitor the demonstrations and several protesters were arrested before being released a few hours later."

Police were now preventing minority groups from leaving the district, he added.

Residents said the demonstrations had brought together people from the whole range of ethnic minorities which inhabit the region, including the three biggest -- the Jarai, Ede and Bahnar -- who between them number more than 600,000 people.

There was a shared anger at a massive influx of Vietnamese settlers to grow coffee and other cash crops, which made ethnic Vietnamese a small majority in Gia Lai province for the first time ever at the last census in 1999.

Vietnam has jumped from nowhere to become the world's second- largest coffee exporter in recent years, largely through the opening up of new plantations in the central highlands.

The region has long been resistant to government control of any hue, spawning resistance movements which fought first the French, then the U.S.-backed Saigon regime and then the communists.

A United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Peoples fought out of bases just across the border in Cambodia as recently as the late 1970s, prompting the communist authorities to launch a first wave of Vietnamese settlement into so-called New Economic Zones in the region through the 1980s.

In recent years, fringe Evangelical and Pentecostal Churches have attracted large numbers of followers among the minorities, again attracting the suspicion of the government.

Anger over the authorities' seizure of church buildings helped fuel the wave of protests, one resident told AFP.

On Tuesday the authorities in Gia Lai called in religious leaders to deliver a stern warning to keep out of the unrest.

Provincial officials "stressed the need for vigilance in the face of ... attempts by wicked elements to exploit religion to ... sow disunity among local inhabitants," official media said.