Subject:      VI:Farmers, traders protest in Vietnam

Angry market traders demonstrate in Hanoi


Copyright, 1996 Reuters Ltd.

    HANOI, Sept 9 (Reuter) - About 70 traders, most of them women,
staged a rare demonstration in central Hanoi on Monday to protest
against the allocation of booths and kiosks at a newly rebuilt market
in the capital's old quarter.
     Eyewitnesses said traffic was halted on the road in front of the
Hanoi People's Committee building, which is at the heart of the city's
main tourist area, as the women stood and chanted slogans.
     Street demonstrations in Vietnam are rare. Protests are
considered highly sensitive and are seldom reported by the communist
country's state-controlled media.
     A foreign news photographer at the scene of Monday's
demonstration was stopped from taking pictures. He was taken to a
local police station, where rolls of film were destroyed.
     Eyewitnesses said police dispersed the protesters.
     The official Ha Noi Moi newspaper carried a report which said
Vietnamese journalists had been barred from reporting on a meeting
between the Dong Xuan market's management board and the traders on
Saturday.
     The market, selling everything from sneakers to snakes, used to
be Hanoi's biggest before it was gutted by a fire two years ago.
     It has now been nearly rebuilt. But some of the former traders
complain that they have been reallocated unfavourable stalls on the
top floor of the new building.

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09/16/1996

Viet Land Wars

Copyright, 1996. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By KATHY WILHELM
 Associated Press Writer
   HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- The government decided Ngoc Khanh Road had
to be extended on the western fringe of this fast-growing capital, and
the nearby residents weren't at all happy about losing their homes and
shops.
   So unhappy, they boldly challenged the decision.
   They haggled for months over compensation. Then, when the
bulldozers were poised for action, a dozen tradespeople gathered
outside Communist Party headquarters, holding paper signs pleading:
"Ngoc Khanh Calls for Help."
   It was a radical action in communist Vietnam, where any sort of
dissent from government policy is routinely suppressed.
   And, indeed, police hustled them onto a truck and back home. The
road work went ahead.
   But the brief demonstration was a manifestation of a spreading
problem. As Vietnam fires up its economy for rapid development, urban
poor and farmers are increasingly being forced to make way for
highways, factories, airports and tourist hotels. They aren't moving
quietly.
   Pleading ancestral roots and, in the case of farmers, lost
livelihoods, the dispossessed are signing petitions, tramping from one
government office to another and staging protests.
   In May, farmers in Kim No Village on Hanoi's outskirts tried to
stop an army work crew from plowing up their rice fields for a golf
course financed by the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo. The villagers
fought with stones and hoes; police drove them back with tear gas and
electric batons. One woman died in the melee and four villagers were
arrested.
   Hanoi city officials said the Kim No farmers were offered new
fields and financial compensation but demanded more.
   "If this was their land, and we took it away, they would be right.
But this is owned by the government," said Khue, an official at the
city Investment Department who refused to give his full name.
   "The government gave them the land and now takes it away. The
government has taken care of them properly, but their belly is
bottomless."
   There lies the heart of the problem: Under Vietnam's communist
system, the state owns all the land. The rights of the users are murky
-- something potentially troubling not only to farmers but foreign
investors paying millions of dollars for 30- or 50-year "land use
certificates" so they can build factories and office buildings.
   Residents rarely learn about projects that will displace them until
the government announces approval. There is no public debate over the
new land use or the amount of compensation, and no formal channel
exists for appeals.
   "Local officials have never talked in detail to us about
compensation or when work would start," said one Kim No farmer, who
didn't want his name used for fear of retribution. "We don't trust
them anymore."
   Phung Van Nghe, an official in the General Department of Land
Administration, said people ordered to move can appeal to his office.
But he also said that in his experience, such appeals have never
succeeded.
   Foot-dragging has delayed construction projects, however. The World
Bank-financed widening of Vietnam's main highway, Highway 1, was held
up for months last year by residents' demands for more money.
   "The problem is usually farmers don't understand the long-term goal
of the project," Nghe said. "They don't see the relationship between
the government's interests and their own interests."
   The interests on all sides seem to be in profit. The government
usually moves the old residents to new plots of land and pays cash
compensation worth several years' income from their lost shop or rice
field. But the new location is often less desirable, and the cash
settlement falls far short of the price the government charges the new
user.
   It has been eight years since the government split up village
cooperatives and restored family farming, and farmers now think of the
land as theirs. They want to reap the windfall.
   An unusually critical article in The Saigon Times, a weekly
magazine, suggested the government should have the right to force
relocation only for community services or national defense, not for
commercial development.
   "There are a lot of cases in which people think the authorities are
making self-serving compulsory purchases," the magazine said. "Land is
purchased dirt-cheap and sold at high prices. It is not surprising at
all that some people are becoming superbillionaires."
   Savvy residents in areas targeted for development have begun
illegally cutting their own deals with land speculators. Others,
seeing foreign businessmen look over a piece of property, move in as
squatters, hoping for an undeserved share in the compensation package.
   Officials abuse the system, too. Prices for land use are negotiated
case-by-case and in private, resulting in kickbacks and unauthorized
sales. The Hanoi city government recently implicated nearly 200
officials in illegal land deals, mostly with rich and powerful
Vietnamese who wanted to build private houses.
   One solution would be to privatize land and let the market sort out
all the problems. But after a recent Communist Party congress urged
moves to strengthen, not reduce, the state sector, it's a solution no
one has dared propose -- except the dispossessed.
   "Our land is not nationalized," several hundred farmers from
villages around Ho Chi Minh City wrote in a petition last year as
authorities made plans for an investment zone. "Our ancestors spent a
lot of effort, sweat and tears to work the land."
   If it is taken, they wrote, "there will be no social equality."