Oppression & Development

"Development" in the Central Highlands of Vietnam

This information is provided as a forecast of the future northeast Cambodia if development continues there which is void of cultural and ecological concerns.

As mentioned in History the SVN Government sought to colonize the Central Highlands in the 1950's and early sixties but the effort ceased as the war escalated. After North Vietnam's victory over SVN the two countries were reunited as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) and colonization of the Central Highlands went into high gear. By 1991 through forced and spontaneous migrations, an additional three million poor Vietnamese were resettled in the Central Highlands. These settlers were given plots of forest to clear for farm land while state enterprises received the largest and most fertile tracts to clear for coffee plantations. The luxury woods were logged for export revenues and lessor species cut for the domestic market and pulp/paper mills. The hordes of new settlers cut wood for housing needs and of course on a regular basis for firewood. They cut more wood to convert to charcoal for sale in urban markets.

One of the SRV objectives in colonizing the Highlands was to force the Montagnards away from shifting or swidden agriculture to sedentary farming, the Vietnamese lowland practice. The SRV position is that shifting cultivation is backwards, wasteful, etc. and blames it for the deforestation. However, provided there's enough land to go around, swidden agriculture allows "the best labor/output ratio of any agricultural system in highlands, as these are generally not suitable for permanent cultivation..." ¹. Some western experts state the SRV position against swidden farming is merely rhetoric whereas objective data points to the massive influx of Vietnamese who practice sedentary cultivation, logging concessions, and state coffee plantations as the primary causes of deforestation in the Highlands ².

Beyond expropriating hill tribe land for Vietnamese settlers and state plantation enterprises, the SRV moved the hill tribes out of other large areas and designated these for future development, parks, and conservation areas. Thus the hill tribes were forced into sedentary farming on the least desirable land.
Further, they're only allowed enough for a "kitchen garden" the yield from which will not feed a family and the fertility of the poor upland soils is quickly exhausted. Meanwhile the Vietnamese farmers are permitted to be "transitional shifting cultivators who practice swidden as an itinerant lifestyle for temporary periods and also practice other forms of agriculture, such as [lowland] wet rice cultivation" ³.

The anarchic colonization of the Central Highlands provided short-term benefits to a relatively small percentage needy Vietnamese, huge profits to logging concessions and the SRV, and made Vietnam one of the world's largest coffee producers. But the longer term devastation of the forest ecology and the livelihoods of the hill tribes is far greater. The impoverishment of Montagnards caused by these policies is probably a factor in their population regression while the balance is owing to harsh birth control measures imposed on them. Also, the destruction of the Highland watersheds is the cause of the massive lowland floods of recent years which the international community responds to as though it were a natural disaster.

Beginning in late 2000 through Easter 2004, Montagnards conducted peaceful demonstrations to express their grievances over having lost their ancestral lands and being persecuted as Christians. Reportedly, the SRV police and military brutally crushed these demonstrations, committed other atrocities, and incarcerated many. These crackdowns sparked a steady flow of refugees across the border into Cambodia.

Roads to the northeast Cambodian frontier have been improved considerably and Ratanakiri has commercial air service. Speculators and foreign agricultural businesses are buying large tracts of hill tribe communal lands. Many of the real estate transactions are done in the country's capital with no regard to hill tribe occupancy, claims, and communal land management practices. Others are done locally by tricking illiterate hill tribes people into thumb printing (approving) documents which favor the buyer and bear no resemblance to the spoken deal; still other deals are done through intimidation or misinformation. For more info see this URL.

Since 1998 the population of Mondolkiri and Ratanakiri has increased by 38% due primarily to Khmer migration from the lowlands. Most are peasants who clear forest land and practice sedentary farming which causes deforestation.

60% of males and 75% of females age six and above never entered primary school whereas the national average for both genders is 19%. ⁴

Only 2.9% completed primary school, a mere 0.5% finished high school, and none have any post secondary education. ⁵

Adult illiteracy rates are 62% male and 84% female; the national averages are 21% and 43%. ⁶

Relative to Cambodia nationally, the rate of female stunting is fourfold; infant and under age five mortality rates are double; and the number of severely anemic children is four times higher. ⁷

The number of orphans is 33% higher than elsewhere in the country. ⁸Seventy-seven percent of the Mondolkiri population does not have access to any mass media. ⁹

Security is occasionally very tight with Cambodian police and military searching for Montagnards escaping from Vietnam. The SRV pays bounties for those captured and Vietnamese military patrols seem to move at will throughout these provinces.