Clashes over eviction flare in southern Vietnam
04:33 a.m. Jan 09, 1998 Eastern
By Adrian Edwards
HANOI, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Police in southern Vietnam have detained dozens of women and children following new protests in an area close to the site of recent rural unrest.
Residents and state sources told Reuters the trouble flared on Thursday morning when women in Long Binh district, in Dong Nai province, blocked a main highway to protest moves by the military to evict them from homes on land adjacent to a base.
When traffic police failed to move them, reinforcements equipped with riot gear were brought in.
Crowds which had gathered to witness the showdown, watched as the women and children struggled against arrest. Witnesses said fighting became fierce as police began loading the protesters on to trucks.
Word on the fate of those rounded up was not immediately available. But the trouble was said to have been brewing for weeks.
Residents said people who had bought land from officials at the base had been told recently they would have to leave.
A number of fist-fights between soldiers and civilians facing eviction were reported over the past month, resulting in a standoff between the two communities in which officers and residents are reported to have been taken captive or beaten.
Thursday's clashes, and the problems which preceded it, follow similar but more serious unrest in the same province just weeks earlier.
Long Binh lies close to Tra Co, where an estimated three thousand Catholic villagers clashed with police in November over moves by the local authorities to acquire land belonging to their local church.
The methods employed in both protests were similar. The November troubles began as a protest involving old women and children. It escalated when the authorities tried to intervene with hundreds of people blocking the north-south road artery, National Highway One.
Rural unrest is considered a major concern for Vietnam's communist leadership. The peasantry, which makes up 80 percent of the country's 78 million people, is the mainstay of its support.
The troubles in Dong Nai in November drew a protest from the Vatican and demonstrations among overseas Vietnamese communities. But they also followed more serious unrest in the northern Red River Delta province of Thai Binh.
Hanoi has responded by despatching top party officials to both areas in an effort to restore calm, and by dismissing a number of local cadres.
Hanoi-based economists said earlier this week that the issue was one of several which had crowded out planned discussion of further reform policies at a meeting of the country's top communist party officials in late December.
Analysts say that while none of the recent incidents have been directed against central government, land ownership disputes and associated allegations of official corruption have emerged as common themes.