In VIETNAM, Rage Growing Over Loss of Land Rights

(KIM SON, Vietnam) — Faced with a group of farmers refusing to give up their land for a housing project, the Communist Party officials negotiating the deal devised a solution: They went to a bank, opened accounts in the names of the holdouts and deposited what they decided was fair compensation. Then they took the land. The farmers, angry at the sum and now forced to compete for jobs in a stuttering economy, blocked the main road connecting the capital to the north of the country for one day in December. In a macabre gesture, some clambered into coffins. Police who came to break up the demonstration were pelted with rocks. Several people were arrested. (MORE: Vietnam Deports American Detained for 9 Months) “This is an injustice,” said Nguyen Duc Hung, a rice farmer forced to give up 2,000 square meters (215,000 square feet) of land he had worked for more than 15 years. “The compensation money will help us to survive for several years, but after that, how can we make our living?” Forced confiscations of land are a major and growing source of public anger against Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party government. They often go hand-in-hand with corruption; local Communist Party elites have a monopoly on land deals, and many are alleged to have used it to make themselves rich. These issues unite rural and urban Vietnamese in a way that discontent over political oppression tends not to. Land disputes break out elsewhere in Asia, notably next door in China, but they have particular resonance in Vietnam, where wars and revolutions were fought in the name of the peasant class to secure collective ownership of the land. The farmers who blocked the road quoted the country’s revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, in the banners they posted at their camp. “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom,” said one. “We would rather die than lose our land,” said another. The government recognizes that the anger coursing through the countryside threatens its legitimacy, and has pledged to revise land laws this year