Vietnam opens Central Highlands to journalists

weeks after violent mass protests

By MARGIE MASON, Associated Press Writer

Last Updated: April 26, 2004, 12:55:13 AM PDT

PLEIKU, Vietnam (AP) - Following intense international pressure, Vietnam allowed foreign journalists into the Central Highlands on Monday in an attempt to show life had returned to normal two weeks after thousands of ethnic minority Christians clashed violently with authorities during mass protests.

The three-day government-orchestrated trip began in Pleiku, the provincial capital of Gai Lai province and will end Wednesday in the neighboring Daklak capital of Buon Ma Thuot.

There is little in the sleepy town near the Cambodian border to hint at the mass demonstrations that erupted April 10, when ethnic minority villagers, collectively called Montagnards, took to the streets on foot, tractors and motorbikes to protest religious repression and government confiscation of tribal lands in at least 20 villages in the province.

Nguyen Vi Ha, chairman of the Gia Lai province People's Committee, blamed the protests on a U.S.-based group that sympathizes with the Montagnards.

Ha said one protester died after being pelted with stones thrown by other protesters, a security official was beaten to death and another official was critically injured. He said most protesters returned home peacefully and that a maximum of three would likely be prosecuted.

He said no protesters fled the country, contradicting reports last week in a Cambodian newspaper that at least 160 Montagnards were deported back to Vietnam.

Ha said a few instigators "fooled or forced" the others into joining the protests by telling them they would be paid or that they would be resettled in the United States where they would be supported by the government.

"If that's the case ... I would volunteer to go the U.S. so that I would not have to work," Ha said.

He denied reports that police used force against the protesters, and showed a heavily edited black-and-white video of demonstrators hurling rocks at police and crowding into a local government building. A water cannon being used against protesters was shown briefly in the background of one frame.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has said it received eyewitness accounts of police and security officials fatally shooting one protester and beating at least nine others to death while injuring hundreds of others in three provinces.

Vietnam has denied those allegations, but until Monday had not permitted any foreign reporters to travel to the sensitive area. The European Union, along with human rights groups, have called for international observers and media to be allowed into the area.

Monday's trip was closely monitored and controlled as a handful of journalists were led from one interview to another and told they could not venture out on their own and report independently. Requests to meet with protesters detained by police or their families were denied.

Human Rights Watch reported that many Montagnards, who are largely Protestant, have gone into hiding.

Ha denied that security forces had been increased since the unrest, but said more local officials have been dispatched to villages to educate the ethnic minorities about not being misled by "reactionary forces."

Similar protests erupted here in 2001 over the same issues and about 1,000 Montagnards were eventually resettled in the United States after fleeing to Cambodia.