Rural Unrest a New Dilemma for Vietnam’s Rulers

Last summer, a remarkable event happened in this isolated commune: Peasant farmers protesting corruption, high taxes and government unresponsiveness rebelled against local leaders, taking hostages and disrupting the rice harvest.

The uprising, which spread to other locales and lasted several months, unleashed nightmarish visions in Hanoi. If the Communist regime lost the support of peasants--who make up 80% of Vietnam’s population and represent the regime’s main bulwark--what was to stop it from losing control of the whole country?

Hanoi also fretted because the peasants weren’t just a bunch of unemployed dissidents. Many were former soldiers. Their province, Thai Binh, had been a birthplace of resistance against Japanese invaders and French colonialists.

Thai Binh--population 1.8 million--sent off half a million of its men to fight the Japanese, French, Americans and South Vietnamese between 1940 and 1975; 47,000 were killed. More than 1,800 mothers lost two or more sons. One mother lost all seven.

Hanoi initially responded to the rebellion in the province, about 60 miles southeast of Hanoi, with predictable silence. It banned foreign correspondents from visiting, then released in the Vietnamese press a skimpy and sanitized version of the disturbances.

Last month, in a turnabout nearly as remarkable as the rebellion itself, Hanoi escorted 18 foreign correspondents to the scene of the worst violence, Quynh Hoa, where local officials talked with surprising candor about what had gone wrong.

“We led the fight against foreign invaders, but to tell you the truth, we made some mistakes in economic management,” said Phan Nguyen Duyet, the commune’s Communist Party secretary. “Our cadre were not well qualified, and that caused waste.”

The decision to invite the journalists--made at the highest level of the government--came at a time when Hanoi is buzzing with new decrees apparently designed to loosen the constraints of government and win back the confidence of investors who have become disenchanted with the prospect of doing business in Vietnam.

Foreign investment contracts dropped nearly 50% last year, tourism has dried up, and the pace of economic reform has slowed to a turtle-like speed. Against that backdrop, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai met recently with 800 foreign businesspeople in Ho Chi Minh City (previously Saigon) to promise that Vietnam will rein in the country’s numbing bureaucracy and corruption and start opening up society in order to create a more favorable business climate.

The prime minister’s remarks were followed by a much-applauded devaluation of the local currency and decrees to speed up the approval of investment licenses, ease customs regulations, broaden the number of industries eligible for temporary tax relief--and, coincidentally or not, bring journalists to Thai Binh.

Quynh Hoa’s 7,000 residents earn only $150 each on average a year. Before Vietnam embraced a quasi-free-market economy in 1989, no road reached Quynh Hoa. No one owned a motor scooter. No home had a tin roof or electricity. But Hanoi’s new economic policies brought many welcome changes: a narrow road, pumping stations for irrigation, electricity, radios in 89% of the homes and TVs in 35%, a school with 18 classrooms.

But the policies also brought access to more money--mostly government funds designed to build infrastructure. The Communist cadre running the commune got greedy.

Since 1990, officials said, 20 cadre members had embezzled from $100 to $2,000 each from various public works projects.

Farmers who complained about the corruption and the size of “contributions” people had to make to each public works project were dismissed as ingrates.

Last summer, they took matters into their own hands. An unknown number of peasants, armed with knives and clubs, took control of the road to Quynh Hoa. They closed down the marketplace, interrupted weddings and funerals, prevented some farmers from working in the surrounding rice paddies and stormed the party headquarters.

When officials dispatched 20 police to quiet things down in November, the officers were disarmed, tied up and held hostage for four days. Some were beaten; three were hospitalized, officials said. Two women sent by higher authorities to pacify female farmers were also taken hostage. The standoff ended peacefully, without any deaths, after Hanoi promised to take action.

So far, 20 of the commune’s 37 cadre members have been dismissed. Of the 300 or so peasants involved in disturbances throughout the province, most have been “severely punished” and have undergone “self-criticism sessions” or are awaiting trial.

Western political analysts said the unrest in Thai Binh is indicative of tensions in many rural areas, where farmers--although generally supportive of the regime--believe they have too little say in their destiny.

In the long run, this may be Hanoi’s greatest challenge. To maintain its rural power base, it must prove wrong the words of one Western diplomat: “At the senior level, the party is all about keeping the perks of privilege and very little about the lives of peasants. Senior party leaders don’t care as much about how things go for farmers as they do just making sure the farmers don’t get mad at them.”