Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [363]
During the American War, those minorities living around the Seventeenth Parallel soon found themselves on the front line. The worst fighting occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when North Vietnamese troops were based in these remote uplands and American forces sought to rout them. Massive bombing raids were augmented by the use of defoliants and herbicides which, as well as denuding protective forest cover, destroyed crops and animals; this chemical warfare also killed an unknown number of people and caused severe long-term illnesses. In addition, villages were often subject to night raids by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers keen to “encourage” local support and replenish their food supplies.
It’s estimated that over two hundred thousand minority people in the central highlands, both civilian and military, were killed as a result of the American War, out of a population of around one million. By 1975, 85 percent of villages in the highlands had been either destroyed or abandoned, while nothing was left standing in the region closest to the Demilitarized Zone. At the end of the war thousands of minority people were living in temporary camps, along with Viet refugees, unable to practise their traditional way of life.
Vietnam’s ethnic minorities | Recent history |
Post–reunification
After reunification things didn’t really get much better. Promises of greater autonomy came to nothing; even the little self-government the minorities had been granted was removed. Those groups who had opposed the North Vietnamese were kept under close observation and their leaders sent for re-education. The new government pursued a policy of forced assimilation of the minorities into the Vietnamese culture and glossed over their previous anti-Viet activities: all education was conducted in the Vietnamese language, traditional customs were discouraged or outlawed, and minority people were moved from their dispersed villages into permanent settlements. At the same time the government created New Economic Zones in the central highlands and along the Chinese border, often commandeering the best land to resettle thousands of people from the overcrowded lowlands. According to official records, 250,000 settlers were moved into the New Economic Zones each year during the 1980s. The policy resulted in food shortages among minorities unable to support themselves on the marginal lands, and the widespread degradation of over-farmed upland soils.
Doi moi brought a shift in policy in the early 1990s, marked by the establishment of a central office responsible for the ethnic minorities. Minority languages are now officially recognized and can be taught in schools, scholarships enable minority people to attend institutes of higher education, television programmes are broadcast in a number of minority languages, and there is now greater representation of minorities at all levels of government – indeed, the current secretary general of the Communist Party, Nong Duc Manh, a member of the Tay ethnic group, is the first non-Viet to hold such an elevated position. Cash crops such as timber and fruit are being introduced as an alternative to illegal hunting, logging and opium cultivation. Other income-generating schemes are also being promoted and healthcare programmes upgraded.
All this has been accompanied by moves to preserve Vietnam’s cultural diversity, driven in part by the realization that ethnic differences have greater appeal to tourists. However, in many areas the minorities’ traditional lifestyles are fast being eroded and extreme poverty is widespread; while minorities constitute around fourteen percent of Vietnam’s population, they account for one-third of those living under the poverty line. This, along with grievances over ancestral land rights and religious