In Vietnam, the Cradle of the War Lays Down a Semi-Welcome Mat

With tourism on the upswing in Vietnam, one of the country’s most beautiful regions--the Central Highlands--is trying to attract more foreign visitors and cash in on the bonanza.

The strategy officials in Pleiku came up with was twofold: Keep prices high and make it difficult for tourists to explore the area. Then they sat back and waited. And waited. And when tourists flocked to the beach resorts and Halong Bay and Sapa and skipped the highlands, they scratched their heads in puzzlement.

A pity. The mountainous highlands are Vietnam’s last redoubt of elephants and tigers and are home to the Javan rhinoceros, one of the world’s rarest mammals. The region is awash with lakes and waterfalls, graced with sweeping vistas of jungle-covered valleys and towering peaks, and populated by some of Vietnam’s most interesting minority ethnic groups.

But like U.S. states, the provinces of Vietnam have considerable autonomy in determining local policy. Here in Pleiku, population 70,000, the Communist Party has clearly opted to give government control top priority, even as the country as a whole is becoming more liberal, more open and more accessible to visitors.

Tourists must spend the night within the city limits and cannot visit Vietnam War-era battlefields without a permit, which often takes a week to obtain. Visiting a minority ethnic village also requires a permit, which costs $20, and an escort by a government guide, $12. Foreign journalists cannot meet with local officials without approval from Hanoi and must travel with a government interpreter. Until 1995, Americans were not allowed in Pleiku, period.

At the scruffy state-run Pleiku Hotel (where a sign advises visitors: “Do not play games and bring prostitutes into room”), a single goes for $38 a night, about what a four-star hotel in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City charges, and the roast chicken dinner, at $1.20, bears distinct similarities to barbecued rubber. So few visitors pass through town that Westerners are viewed with friendly curiosity in the outdoor markets.

It is, though, not entirely surprising that a touch of xenophobia lingers here. For more than a decade after the 1975 fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam, a low-level war continued in the mountains here against minority guerrillas belonging to FULRO, or the United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races.

FULRO had about 10,000 troops in 1975. They were Montagnards--a generic term for Vietnam’s scores of minority groups--and many had fought as mercenaries for the French and the Americans. Most were Protestants, with little affection for the ethnic Vietnamese majority.

As recently as 1992, a surviving band of several hundred guerrillas remained in a remote corner of Cambodia and continued cross-border raids. They later surrendered to the Vietnamese government and were integrated into society or flown under U.N. auspices to the United States. Today, the highlands, like the rest of Vietnam, are politically stable and at peace.

In many ways, Pleiku is where the American War, as it is called in Vietnam, kicked into high gear. On Feb. 7, 1965, when the 23,000 U.S. military personnel then in Vietnam were classified as advisors, a Viet Cong mortar attack on an Army compound killed eight Americans. President Lyndon B. Johnson used the attack as justification for the sustained bombing of North Vietnam known as Operation Rolling Thunder. In March 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines landed in Da Nang to take up a combat role. By 1969, U.S. troop strength in Vietnam had grown to 540,000.

South Vietnamese troops burned Pleiku when they fled in March 1975, clearing the way for North Vietnam’s advance into Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City. Pleiku was rebuilt in the 1980s with Soviet assistance and all the charm of a Stalinist housing project. Now, that era too has passed, and Pleiku is emerging as something of a mini-boomtown, with graceful new buildings reflecting the sweeping, open style of Montagnard architecture.

The boom is being abetted by high yields of coffee, black pepper and rubber. Pleiku’s once quiet streets are abuzz with Chinese-made motor scooters. The first traffic lights have arrived. A new movie theater is packing in crowds to see “Cyberbyte Monster.” And the nearby Ia Ly hydroelectric power plant, opened last month on the Dak Bla River after 10 years’ construction, promises to end thrice-weekly electrical blackouts.

As a sign of the changing times, the sprawling base that housed troops from the U.S. 4th Infantry Division has been turned into a coffee plantation, and the runway of the U.S. airfield in Kontum, an hour’s drive north, is used for drying rice and giving driving lessons to young Vietnamese.