Hanoi grapples with peasant unrest

Hanoi grapples with peasant unrest

By Ian Stewart

DONG HUNG, Vietnam (AP): Like the colonial French in Vietnam
earlier this century and the feudal mandarins before them, the
Communist Party is struggling to hold back a tide of peasant
discontent.

In the impoverished central provinces -- the birthplace of
Vietnam's communist patriarchs -- the peasants are bristling at
inequity.

About 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of the capital, Hanoi, a
wave of protest in recent months has resulted in the arrest of
hundreds of villagers.

Security forces have been deployed for months in Thai Binh
province, which is now veiled behind a curtain of secrecy.
Foreign journalists are barred from the region.

Accounts from human rights groups, former residents of Thai
Binh and official newspaper reports say dozens of communist
officials have been stripped of their party membership while
several local governments have been disbanded.

Corruption within village governments and the lack of official
response to the growing unrest led to the purges in Thai Binh,
the central government has said.

With the province in disarray, Hanoi is looking for answers.
The underlying causes are as old as Vietnam: poverty,
institutional corruption and an abundance of natural calamities.

"Poverty, abusive officials, contending claims to land, heavy
taxes and other levies have a long history in Vietnam, as the
Communist Party knows better than most," said Benedict Kerkvliet,
a professor at Australian National University.

In central Vietnam's Dong Hung district, centuries-old stone-
carved soldiers stand a grim and rigid vigil over the tomb of
their fallen lord. Quan Man, the district mandarin who fell
victim in the late 1700s to one of Vietnam's myriad peasant
rebellions.

Two riotous centuries later, the peasants and farmers -- the
poorest of Vietnam's poor -- are again angry about economic
disparities.

"Rural society, which comprises four-fifths of the entire
nation, is becoming significantly more like the one against which
the communists first mobilized the masses," writes socialist
historian Gabriel Kolko.

With close to 80 percent of Vietnam's population living off
the land, it is a potentially explosive problem.

When Ho Chi Minh's communist forces drove the French from
northern Vietnam in 1954, all land was placed under state
control. Under collectivized farming, peasants remained poor, but
equal.

A shift in economic policy in 1988 and later accelerated in
1993 allowed for private control of farming land.

The result has been dramatic improvement in output. But the
influential, the wealthy and the connected reap a large share of
the benefits. In mandarin Quan Man's former fiefdom of Dong Hung,
farmhands clad in baggy pants and straw conical hats work the
fields much as they have for centuries.

"If corruption and tax levies become major burdens on
villagers and poverty deepens, the Communist Party will be in
serious trouble," said Kerkvliet, a Vietnam scholar and expert on
agrarian reform. "I think the party knows this and is trying to
address the problems."

Dong Hung's province, Thanh Hoa, was wracked with rural unrest
until 1992. Local officials were accused of embezzling village
tax receipts, financing private construction projects and
ignoring community grievances.

"The leaders still somehow feel repentant about the losses
which could never be recovered, namely the people's trust in the
party committee and the administration," the state-controlled
People's Army newspaper said in a recent editorial.

Cracking down on both village protesters and local officials,
the central government in Hanoi quelled the unrest with a
delicate balance of force and reform.

Money was allocated to help the province expand its industry
from agrarian to include food processing and limestone polishing.
But while protests are in check, party officials concede the
roots of discontent still simmer in Thanh Hoa.

"It's natural to have economic growth hand-in-hand with the
development of social vices," said Dong Hung's district chief, Le
Dinh Bang.

Villagers now working in limestone cutting and processing
shops make 516,000 dong (US$43) a month -- five times what the
vast majority of farmhands make.

With rice yields soaring and Vietnam now the world's second
largest rice exporter, the people who plant, pick and thresh the
crops by hand make little more than 1.8 million dong ($150) to 3
million dong ($250) a year. Their urban counterparts in Hanoi and
Ho Chi Minh City earn on average between 8.4 million dong ($700)
and 18 million dong ($1,500).

According to a recent study, 57 percent of rural Vietnamese
live below the World Bank's poverty line.

In southern Vietnam's Mekong Delta region, more than 83,000
farming households are landless, the Vietnam Farmers Association
says.

The Communist Party's leader, Secretary-General Do Muoi, has
taken to touring the country's rural and poorest provinces,
trying to rally support and above all patience.

"It is the people who push the boat -- and it is also the
people who can overturn the boat," Muoi recently told farmers in
northern Vietnam.

The poor who benefited from early land reforms are now
suffering under the Communist Party's change of policy and its
contemporary program of economic reform called "doi moi."

"When they talk about doi moi, the countryside hasn't seen
much change," said a farmer who left his tiny land holding in
Thai Binh province to find work in Hanoi. Fearing reprisals from
the government, he gave only his given name, Duc.

There has been modest change: One-room, thatched-roof houses
in the countryside now are made of brick. Diet has improved,
though not for all. At least 45 percent of Vietnamese children
younger than five are malnourished, the World Bank says.

The life of a peasant or farmer in Vietnam is still one of
subsistence.

"The farmers and people who work in the fields have been
forgotten in the drive to modernize the country," Duc said.

In Thanh Hoa province during the early 1990s and now in Thai
Binh, protests fueled by disparity and corruption spread like the
early communist rumblings against French colonial rule.

What began as peaceful protests, strikes and petitions against
the local government, quickly escalated into violence.

Arson, brick-throwing and near riots in Thai Binh have been
cautiously disclosed recently by state-controlled news media. In
one incident this summer, farmers in Quynh My village attacked a
police station, wounding eight police officers.

But while official histories praise uprisings against the
French, today's protesters in Thai Binh have been portrayed in
state media as "bad elements who abuse the situation and excite
the people."