US embassy cable - 04HOCHIMINHCITY401

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 HO CHI MINH CITY 000401 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
 
DEPARTMENT FOR EAP/BCLTV, DRL, PRM, CA/OCS, S/ES-O 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PHUM, PGOV, SOCI, PREL, KIRF, VM, HUMANR, ETMIN, RELFREE 
SUBJECT: MONTAGNARDS PROTEST IN CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OVER EASTER 
WEEKEND 
 
REF:  A) HCMC 0391  B) HANOI 1007 C) HCMC 0147 
 
1. (SBU) Summary:  ConGen HCMC has spoken with numerous sources in 
Ho Chi Minh City and the Central Highlands regarding reports of 
violence during demonstrations by ethnic minority residents 
("Montagnards") of Dak Lak and Gia Lai provinces.  The 
demonstrations began early on the morning of Saturday, April 10 
(refs A and B), one day after the U.S.-based Montagnard Foundation 
(MFI) issued a press release declaring that 150,000 Montagnards 
would undertake nonviolent protests throughout the Central 
Highlands over the Easter weekend against the GVN's "denial of 
their freedom to worship Christ" and "ongoing repression against 
the Montagnards."  Absent intervention by the international 
community, the release warned, the GVN's "repression against the 
Montagnards will be cruel and bloody."  While no individual ConGen 
source has been able to offer an overall estimate of the number of 
Montagnards involved in the protests, the numbers they report seem 
much lower than figures cited by MFI.  Accounts relayed by 
reliable ConGen sources also suggest the protests may have been 
confined to limited areas.  According to religious leaders in 
HCMC, Dak Lak, and Gia Lai, the unrest over the weekend had "no" 
effect on Easter celebrations, which went forward as planned in 
both government recognized and unregistered Protestant churches. 
Most of Post's Protestant contacts claimed the protests had very 
little to do with religion, and much more to do with land disputes 
and economic disparities.  End summary. 
 
2. (SBU) A house church pastor, who had just arrived in HCMC from 
Gia Lai on Monday morning, told Poloff that most of the 
demonstrations in his area had been confined to Dak Doa District, 
which stretches approximately 15-60 kilometers from the provincial 
capital of Pleiku.  He said that Saturday morning had been quiet 
near his home, until reports began to trickle in from neighboring 
Dak Lak early in the day.  Traveling to one of his churches 
approximately seven kilometers from Dak Doa around noon, he noted 
sizeable numbers of police and military units setting up razor 
wire to guard the roads into Pleiku.  For most of that afternoon, 
he observed two military helicopters circling overhead, as 
ambulances raced back and forth between Dak Doa and the city. 
Police contacts told him that reinforcements were being sent in 
from Binh Dinh Province to control the spread of the protests. 
(One of ConGen's Protestant sources in HCMC noted that 1000 riot 
police had been flown to Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot from HCMC as 
well.)  He had heard reports of 50-60 injured in Dak Doa, but had 
no idea how many of those were police and how many were villagers, 
or how many Montagnards were involved overall.  The pastor had 
departed Pleiku at about 6:30 p.m. on Sunday.  He claimed to have 
had no problem leaving the city, since the roadblocks ran only in 
the opposite direction.  As of the time he departed Gia Lai, he 
was aware of no problems faced by recognized or unrecognized 
Protestant churches in his province. 
 
3. (SBU) The pastor's brother-in-law, who lives in Dak Lak, told 
the pastor on Saturday that police there were apparently aware of 
the planned protests by Montagnards over the weekend and had 
prepared themselves to contain the protesters in their own 
villages.  They had also established roadblocks to divert cars to 
Nha Trang and Quy Nhon, on the Central coast.  He said his friends 
on the police force told him that they had expected most of the 
villagers to enter the city via National Highway 14 (connecting 
HCMC to the south with Gia Lai and Kon Tum to the north), and had 
been caught off guard when groups of ethnic minorities appeared 
within a kilometer of the city limits via other routes.  The 
brother-in-law attempted to travel to Pleiku Saturday morning.  He 
was unable to reach Pleiku, normally a four- to five-hour trip, 
until late in the evening.  After arriving in Pleiku, he told the 
pastor that there were signs of conflict at various points along 
the way, including abandoned tractors, piles of stones, and some 
bloodied garments.  As far as all of ConGen's contacts were aware, 
ethnic minority protesters employed only stones in Dak Lak 
Province, although primitive slingshots were used to increase 
their effectiveness.  The pastor heard rumors of possible small 
arms in Dak Doa, but had no definitive information. 
 
4. (SBU) The sister of one prominent HCMC pastor with nationwide 
contacts reported from Buon Ma Thuot that perhaps a thousand 
ethnic minority males had been detained in makeshift camps outside 
the city.  Females were apparently not detained.  She said that 
police had stopped most of the protesters before they ever reached 
Buon Ma Thuot, shooting the wheels of the converted tractors often 
used as transportation in this part of Vietnam.  Most of the 
protesters appeared to be from rural villages well outside of the 
provincial capital.  She had apparently also heard that police 
were under orders to refrain from using guns to quell the 
disturbances.  She told her brother that she knew for sure that at 
least two police had died near Buon Ma Thuot, largely because they 
were forced to engage the protesters with only clubs at such close 
range.  She and other sources said that the police were fighting 
the protesters in street clothes, so that it would look as if the 
clashes were between ethnic minority villagers and their ethnic 
majority Kinh Vietnamese neighbors, rather than with the 
government.  While the sister decided not to return home to Cu 
Mgar (just north of the provincial capital) on Saturday, she was 
able to attend her normal Protestant house church service there on 
Sunday.  At least one pastor in Buon Ma Thuot reported via a HCMC 
contact that several of his relatives had been detained in Cu Mgar 
in the aftermath of the protests, but it was unclear exactly why, 
or whether they were still in detention. 
 
5. (SBU) Anecdotal evidence from business contacts in the region 
confirmed that the disturbances, while very real and in some cases 
very violent, did not seem to have spread very widely.  Asked 
about the prospects of bringing a group of foreign tourists to the 
Central Highlands in the next few days, a government-owned tour 
operator in Gia Lai said Monday that the most serious incidents 
had occurred in Dak Lak, although even those were over by Saturday 
night.  Much more limited protests had taken place in Gia Lai, 
while Kon Tum had been completely quiet.  The tour company 
representative said these protests were much more muted than those 
in 2001, and that the government was much better prepared this 
time around.  She blamed the protests on the growing gap between 
rich and poor, noting that most of the protesters had been caught 
trying to break into stores to loot food.  An employee at one of 
the ConGen's favorite restaurants in Buon Ma Thuot noted that the 
protests lasted less than a day, and were mostly confined to a 
single ward of the city.  While other groups had tried to come to 
the city from rural villagers, they were all stopped by the police 
in their villages, or en route.  He thought there had been very 
little real violence, and was ready to book a table.  A 
businessman with factory interests in Gia Lai was aware of the 
protests, but thought the government was being much smarter than 
in 2001, and was looking for ways to avoid direct confrontation. 
He said that local officials had told business owners that they 
were responsible for defending their own premises from protesting 
Montagnards.  The businessman had heard stories about one unarmed 
official being killed by a group of ethnic minority villagers in a 
remote part of the province, but was unable to estimate the extent 
of the protests, the level of violence, or the number of 
casualties. 
 
6. (SBU) Pastors from both government recognized and unregistered 
churches blamed the unrest in the Central Highlands on Kok Ksor 
and his Dega followers in Vietnam, with one going so far as to 
say, "Kok Ksor controls everything."  While they were not sure 
whether or not Dega organizers had recently crossed the border 
from Cambodia to incite the mostly-poor ethnic minority villagers, 
many contacts had heard rumors that protesters were offered US$50 
(up to four months earnings or more in the poorer parts of the 
Central Highlands) to participate, although the money had yet to 
be paid.  One reliable Protestant house church source with good 
contacts in the Central Highlands told Poloff that many of the Ede 
leaders who had returned from Cambodia after the 2001 uprisings 
had told the villagers they could earn money just by fleeing to 
Cambodia.  They also promised resettlement in the U.S.  Those 
stories carried great currency in the economically underdeveloped 
ethnic minority villages, the contact said.  According to his 
sources in the Central Highlands, Dega organizers had recently 
contacted many of the villages to tell the residents that if they 
"made a lot of noise" they would be allowed to resettle in the 
U.S.  While Post's sources uniformly agreed that the Montagnards 
had valid reasons to protest -- particularly related to 
confiscation of tribal lands and what the Montagnards viewed as 
ethnic discrimination in health care, education, and economic 
opportunity -- they felt the protests had very little to do with 
religious persecution. 
 
7. (SBU) Comment:  It is interesting to note that many ConGen 
sources came to the same conclusion independently of one another: 
namely, that the government was much better prepared to deal with 
ethnic protests this time around than in 2001.  There also 
appeared to be a consensus of opinion that the police had 
generally attempted to exercise restraint in quelling the 
protests, at least by their standards.  A striking point that 
emerged from Poloff's conversations with religious contacts, 
however, was that the protests seemed to have no impact on the 
ability of both government recognized and unrecognized Protestant 
house churches -- or Catholic churches, for that matter -- to 
conduct services on Saturday and Easter Sunday.  According to most 
of these sources, the protests, confined to relatively limited 
areas to begin with, were over by Saturday in Dak Lak and by 
Sunday in Pleiku.  Pushed for estimates, their numbers of ethnic 
minority villagers involved ranged in the thousands, not the tens 
or hundreds of thousands reported by MFI. 
 
8. (SBU) Comment (cont.):  Almost none of Post's well-connected 
sources knew that anything out of the ordinary was going on in 
those first few hours when fights were purportedly raging 
throughout Dak Lak and Gia Lai.  In fact, the first many of them 
heard that there were potential problems in the Central Highlands 
was when Poloff called them for information.  When they followed 
up with their local church leaders at Poloff's request, they often 
found that even pastors in Buon Ma Thuot and Pleiku were 
completely unaware of the protests.  One HCMC-based contact, who 
used to live in Buon Ma Thuot, chalked this up to the very limited 
contact between urban and rural residents in the Central 
Highlands, and noted that peoples' awareness often extends only as 
far as their own immediate living area.  This is consistent with 
ConGenoffs' own experiences during provincial trips, when we are 
often confounded by local villagers who don't even recognize the 
name of the very next village only a few kilometers away.  Poloff 
was also surprised to learn how much his HCMC contacts seemed to 
be relying on the Internet for information on these events, since 
their own large networks of religious workers in the provinces 
were not aware of any disturbances.  Those contacts attributed 
this to the lack of affiliation between the Dega communities and 
their own Protestant congregations. 
 
9. (SBU) Comment (cont.):  All of this makes it extremely 
difficult to determine the accuracy of the many conflicting 
accounts of these protests.  ConGen will continue to follow up 
with contacts and seek direct access to the affected areas.  Even 
so, it will likely take time to clarify what really happened in 
the Central Highlands over Easter, and what effect, if any, it 
will have on the process of "normalization" (ref C) of 
unregistered Protestant churches there. 
WHITE