On June 11, a group of Montagnards in the Central Highlands of Vietnam attacked the offices of two communes with small arms and Molotov cocktails, killing four policemen, two commune officials and three civilians. the attackers injured two other policemen and burned the offices of the commune. This provoked an immediate and massive response from the government.
At the time of writing this article, 74 people have been arrested, among them, allegedly, one of the members of the group master minds. Two people turned themselves in and the government promised leniency for the others who surrender.
Until now, almost all the information about the facts comes from the government side, so there is clearly a bias in the information. The government selectively leaked a lot of information and made sure the story got coverage in the state-controlled media.
The Communist Party of Vietnam dispatched immediately Vice Premier Tran Luu Quang and Vice Minister of Public Security Luong Tam Quang to signal control of the government, a sign of the government’s insecurity.
legitimate complaints
Dak Lak and the Central Highlands are not new to unrest, although gun violence is very rare in Vietnam. But the region hasn’t been beset by violence for a while, which raises some questions: Why now? What sparked this latest wave of riots?
There are a number of underlying issues for any disturbance involving the Montagnards, a broad group of some 30 different tribes, in the Central Highlands.
Beginning in the 1990s, the Vietnamese government began encouraging the migration of ethnic Vietnamese Kinh to the region to establish coffee plantations and other agricultural enterprises.
Today, Vietnam is the second largest coffee producer in the world, exporting more than 1 million metric tons in 2022, and almost all of it comes from the Central Highlands.
But that put the Kinh people at odds with the Montagnards, who practiced shifting agriculture: burning forests, cultivating for a few years, then moving to new land. Suddenly, with the land titles for the Vietnamese settlers, the highlanders were unable to practice their traditional agriculture, environmental degradation and inefficiency.
Beyond economic interests in encouraging the settlement of Kinh, the government had a political interest in colonizing the region.
The Montagnards had close ties to both the French and American colonial governments. Persecuted minorities often seek the protection of the majority population. During the Vietnam War, the United States relied on the Montagnards and the Hmong in neighboring Laos to intercept North Vietnamese troops and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Hanoi has never forgiven them for this.
But while the Montagnards often portray their fight as anti-communist, it’s important to note that the pre-1975 Republic of Vietnam government also treated them terribly, believing they were abetting the North Vietnamese on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. South Vietnamese government officials shared the same mistrust and condescension as their rivals in Hanoi.
Politics aside, Kinh simply shows a lot of condescension towards the poor tribes that make up the Montagnards. For the Montagnards, this is simply a form of internal colonialism; in fact, some highlanders do not even respect Vietnamese sovereignty.
That animosity and mistrust is further compounded in Hanoi by the fact that many of the Montagnards are evangelical Christians. The Vietnam Fatherland Front, an arm of the Communist Party responsible for mass organizations and religions, only recognizes six religions, controlling their clergy and organization.
Evangelical Christianity remains unrecognized, and as such, house churches are technically illegal. That many of the Montagnard congregations are supported by religious groups in the United States and elsewhere adds to Hanoi’s paranoia.
Land and religious freedom remain at the center of Montagnard’s complaints, but there are others.
The Central Highlands continues to be a poor region of the country, lagging behind in indicators of human development, educational opportunities, and public health. While Vietnam enjoyed economic growth of over 8 percent in 2022 and was a darling of foreign investors, receiving more than $22.4 billion in investment, such prosperity is nowhere to be seen in the Central Highlands.
And while we shouldn’t be conspiratorial about it, we should consider that the unrest comes at a time when US-Vietnam relations are poised to become a “strategic partnership.” CPV General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong has agreed in principle to visit Washington this summer, and President Biden is expected to visit Vietnam in the fall.
Not everyone in Vietnam’s conservative and xenophobic national security establishment and party echelons is happy about the deeper ties. An all-out crackdown is likely to lead the US Congress to examine Vietnam’s already dismal human rights record, attacks on independent journalists and environmental activists, and control of social media.
The government’s quick and effective response has gone well for the Vietnam Ministry of Public Security and its minister, To Lam, who immediately promoted all four officers posthumously and moved quickly to compensate their families and injured officers.
What do we know about the attacks?
So far we know very little about the motivation for the attacks or the organization of the group or the links to the outside, if any. Montagnard organizations in the United States have denied any implication.
A spokesperson for the ministry of public security said the group had acted “in an organized, reckless, ruthless and inhumane manner”. The suspects had allegedly been “ordered to kill local officers and police on sight, taking their property and weapons.”
According to state media, three of the detainees claim to have been promised “large sums of money” to kill the officials.
The government has offered little evidence other than statements from arrested persons, but given the history of coerced confessions in Vietnam, this is not reliable evidence.
The government will have a heavy-handed and disproportionate response. As spokesperson for the communist party noted:
The local authorities quickly took drastic measures to suppress the attack, stabilize the situation, support the bereaved families and the injured, and call on local residents to remain calm and follow the instructions of the authorities to ensure safety.
Troops from the Ministry of Public Security were shown on state television, deployed with sniper rifles. They are clearly not taking it lightly.
In addition to the large-scale response, the Vietnam People’s Army was mobilized in Cu Kuin district to provide security, a role the army has largely avoided, although less so in the central highlands than in the regions dominated by the kinh ethnicity
The government immediately received the cooperation of the Cambodian government in sealing the border.
The government has also moved quickly to control the information space, imposing large fines on five people so far for spreading “false information” on Facebook about the attacks. The government, which has intensified its use of civil rather than criminal fines to control social media, hopes the VND35.5 million ($1,510) fine will be enough to deter online discussion.
More information about the attacks and their motivations will emerge, but anything in the Vietnamese state media is there for a reason. While the government has every right to promote law and order, it has long ignored the legitimate grievances of the country’s ethnic minorities. and will shift the blame from himself to foreign forces.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the US Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.
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