II. Background

The ethnic Khmer minority in Vietnam, known as Khmer Krom ("lower Khmer"), live in the southern-most part of Vietnam, bounded by Cambodia, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea.[2] Many Cambodians still refer to the southern-most provinces of present-day Vietnam as Kampuchea Krom, or "Lower Cambodia" because they see it as part of the ancestral homeland of the Khmer people.[3]

This Mekong Delta region was formerly part of the Khmer Empire (9th-13th centuries A.D.), which at various times included parts of Thailand, Laos, and southern and central Vietnam. With the decline of the Khmer Empire, by the 17th century increasing numbers of ethnic Kinh, or Viet people, had begun to settle in what is currently the central and southern parts of Vietnam.[4] During the French colonial period (1867-1949), the Mekong Delta region was incorporated into the southwestern part of the French protectorate Cochinchina. In 1949 the French ceded Cochinchina to Vietnam.

The current population of the Mekong Delta's 13 provinces is 17 million, about one-fifth of the total population of Vietnam.[5] Ethnic Khmer, who number more than one million, are the largest ethnic minority group in the Delta, which is also home to Hoa (Chinese) and Cham minorities, in addition to the Kinh people.[6] Today, large numbers of Khmer live in the provinces of SocTrang (where they make up 30 percent of the population), Tra Vinh (30 percent), Kien Giang (13 percent), An Giang, Bac Lieu, Can Tho, Vinh Long, and Ca Mau.[7]

Nationalist movements

During the resistance against French rule in the 1940s, some Khmer Krom supported north Vietnamese Communist forces, or Viet Minh, who had formed alliances with the nationalist Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer) movement in the lower Mekong Delta and in Cambodia.[8] Other Khmer Krom supported the French, including some Buddhist monks who fought in local militias sponsored by the French.[9]

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Republic of Vietnam launched repressive assimilation campaigns, reinforced by a 1956 "nationalization" decree. The government ordered the closure of Khmer pagoda schools, discouraged the use of the Khmer language, and required Khmer Krom to take on Vietnamese surnames.[10] The Franco-Khmer school in Soc Trang was turned into a Vietnamese institution.[11] Republic of Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Roman Catholic, implemented anti-Buddhist laws during his 1955-63 regime to restrict the growth of Buddhism throughout Vietnam, including in the Mekong Delta. Land reform policies, including government-sponsored migration of Kinh to the Mekong Delta provinces, deprived Khmer Krom of their ancestral lands.[12]

These "Vietnamization" efforts led to ethno-nationalist movements among the Khmer Krom.[13] They included the Kangsaing Sar, or "White Scarves"movement(Can Sen So in Vietnamese), which aimed to preserve Khmer Krom identity, and the Struggle Front of the Khmer of Kampuchea Krom, led by Khmer Krom Buddhist monk Chau Dara, which initially focused on calling for equal rights for Khmer Krom with the Kinh majority. In 1963 Chau Dara was arrested after the Front raised an army of about 1,500 soldiers and demanded that Vietnam "return" Kampuchea Krom to Cambodia.[14]

Various other ethno-nationalist movements followed among the Khmer Krom, as well as among the Cham, the former inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam, and ethnic highlanders (often called Montagnards or Dega) of the Central Highlands. These included the Struggle Front for the Liberation of Kampuchea Krom, the Front for the Liberation of Northern Cambodia, and the Front for the Liberation of Champa. In 1964 the Front for the Liberation of Champa and the Struggle Front of the Khmer of Kampuchea Krom merged with Bajaraka, a Montagnard ethno-nationalist group that was the precursor to FULRO, the United Struggle Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races.[15]

Given the Khmer Krom's history of forming nationalist movements, as well as longstanding xenophobia and animosity between Khmer Kroms and ethnic Vietnamese, the present-day government of Vietnam is sensitive to the possibility of a Khmer ethno-nationalist movement re-emerging within its borders. The government is thus quick to suppress expressions of dissent or Khmer nationalism among Khmer Krom communities in Vietnam.

Engaged Buddhism

Buddhists have peacefully demonstrated for political change in Vietnam and Cambodia since before either country obtained independence from the French. Many prominent nationalists in the anti-colonial struggle were Khmer Krom intellectuals or former Buddhist monks born in southern Vietnam.[16]They recruited members into the movement by going on preaching tours in Khmer Buddhist temples in southern Vietnam and Cambodia in which they called for the preservation of Theravada Buddhism and exhorted people to join the independence movement.[17]

The anti-colonial movements of the 1940s included prominent Khmer Krom monks. In 1942 French colonial police violently cracked down on the "Umbrella War," a peaceful demonstration in Phnom Penh by more than a thousand Buddhist monks and lay people protesting the arrest and defrocking of Achar[18]Hem Chieu, a nationalist monk who had vehemently opposed the French proposal to romanize the Khmer alphabet.[19] The French colonial administration responded to the demonstration, which has been called "the first coordinated act of anti-colonial forces within Cambodia,"[20] by warning the Buddhist Institute and the Pali[21] School in Phnom Penh not to get involved in politics, and prohibiting monks affiliated with either institution to deliver sermons.[22] Many of the protesters fled to Thailand, and the Pali School was closed for more than six months.[23]Achar Hem Chieu was subsequently imprisoned at Poulo Condor (Con Son) prison in Vietnam, where he died in 1943.[24]

In the 1960s a number of Khmer Krom monks were assassinated or executed in Vietnam, including the abbot of Khleang Pagoda in Soc Trang Province in 1960, and the abbot of Chek Chroun Pagoda in Tra Vinh Province in 1963. Despite the repression of Khmer Buddhists, which caused many Khmer Krom to flee to Cambodia, in 1974 the Vietnamese government estimated that there were about 500,000 ethnic Khmer and more than 400 active Khmer pagodas in south Vietnam.[25]

In November 1969 several thousand police violently dispersed a peaceful demonstration in Saigon by 200 Khmer Krom monks from the Mekong Delta who were protesting the government's assimilationist policies. A number of smaller demonstrations by Khmer Krom monks took place in the Mekong Delta the following year.[26]

Some ethnic Khmer in Vietnam not only opposed the government in the south, but actively supported the communist movement.[27] After the reunification of Vietnam in 1975, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam recognized the wartime contributions that some Khmer Krom Buddhist monks and intellectuals had made towards the revolutionary effort and the independence movement that preceded it.[28]

After reunification

New policies on religion and land reform instituted after Vietnam's reunification in 1975, as well intense cross-border fighting between Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge troops in 1978-79, resulted in severe hardship for Khmer Krom communities in the Mekong Delta, including forced displacement from their land and restrictions on Buddhist ordinations and other Buddhist practices.

During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79) in Cambodia, however, Vietnamese authorities allowed Cambodian monks who had fled from Cambodia to take up residency in Buddhist pagodas in the Mekong Delta. After Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979, many of these monks returned to Cambodia under the auspices of the Vietnamese government to facilitate the re-ordination of monks in Cambodia's Buddhist sangha,[29] which had been decimated by the Khmer Rouge.

In the mid-1980s the Vietnamese government adopted a more repressive stance towards Khmer Buddhists, based in part on suspicions they were linked to underground movements to topple the new regime, according to Buddhist scholar Ian Harris:

By this time Khmer Krom monks needed an identity card to travel anywhere. In 1984 many monastic libraries were confiscated and monks involved in teaching about Buddhism and Khmer culture were imprisoned. It seems that the Vietnamese believed the Khmer Krom were involved in a subversive organisation, which they called KC-50. The movement was supposed to be backed by the US and sought to reinstate the previous non-communist government. Some 72 Khmer Krom intellectuals, including many monks, were arrested in the campaign against KC-50. The worst suppression occurred in Tra Vinh Province (Preah Trapeang) and this explains the case of Khim Tok Choeng, the chief monk of Preah Trapeang, who was arrested in 1985. His body was finally returned in a sealed Vietnamese-style coffin, his fellow Khmer Krom believing that he had been murdered by having his stomach cut open. Other monks killed around the same time in a similar manner include Vens. Thach Kong, Thach Ret, and the … President of the Central Committee of Theravada monks in Vietnam, Kim Sang, of Wat Chantaraingsei, Ho Chi Minh City.[30]

While overt persecution of Khmer Krom Buddhists by the Vietnamese government abated during the 1990s, observers say that the government simply began to replace "hot" (i.e., forceful, direct, and blatant) approaches with "cold" methods--more subtle strategies to control Khmer Buddhists' freedom of movement, assembly, association, and religion.[31]

Landlessness

During cross border fighting in 1978-79, both Vietnamese troops and Khmer Rouge soldiers forcibly expelled Khmer Krom from their land along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. When the evacuees returned after 1979, many found their houses demolished and ethnic Vietnamese living on their land, making the original owners landless.[32] The Vietnamese government provided most families small plots of land on which they could rebuild their houses, but not land suitable for agricultural purposes, as one Khmer Krom farmer from An Giang Province, Vietnam explained:

There was no land for me to plant rice for my own family. Instead, there were state-owned collectives on land that had been private land before. It was very difficult to survive. The rice fields did not produce enough rice.[33]

A Khmer Krom Buddhist monk told Human Rights Watch:

They said the land is the government's--the people are allowed to just temporarily use it. But then the main people who took land were party cadre, police, and authorities. They collaborated with each other, and did not focus on the people.[34]

In 1988, as part of Vietnam's de-collectivization and the reforms associated with the doi moi (renovation) policy,[35] a household contract system was initiated for farmers, who were allocated specific plots of land under Politburo Resolution 10.

Under Vietnam's 1993 Land Law, the state still retains ownership of all land but provides rights to farmers using and occupying land, including the right to sell, exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land use rights.[36] Farmers can obtain land use certificates, called "Red Books," which in theory protect them from illegal confiscation of their land.

Researchers have found that in practice, the 1993 Land Law has resulted in many low-income farmers like Khmer Krom selling their land to pay off debts or to simply make ends meet, especially with escalating costs of fertilizer, pesticides, and health care, combined with the declining price of rice.[37] The result has been increased speculation, fraudulent land transactions, and an escalation in land conflicts.

The Land Law stipulates that land disputes are to be resolved through conciliation by the provincial, district, or municipal people's committees. If any party disagrees with the decision of the people's committees they can appeal to higher government administrative bodies, or to the courts.[38] Despite the provisions of the law, many Khmer Krom farmers complain that corrupt local authorities are unresponsive to their land rights complaints or make biased decisions favoring ethnic Kinh or government officials' illegal or below-market value acquisition of their land.[39] As social scientist Phillip Taylor notes, the main disadvantage for many Khmer Krom "has been their limited recourse to the institutions of the state to press their claims, which has tended to back the claims of the settlers against the original inhabitants."[40]

Poverty

While the Mekong Delta is Vietnam's most productive rice-growing region, Khmer Krom reap little of the financial benefits. A study prepared for the government-donor-NGO Poverty Task Force linked poverty rates to ethnicity, finding that the Khmer Krom suffer the highest rates of poverty in the Mekong Delta, in part because they are left with only marginal soils to cultivate.[41]

Land reform policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which provided some "ownership rights" to people living and working on land for a certain amount of time, often left out Khmer Krom who had already been displaced from their land. Other Khmer Krom have sold or mortgaged their land because of their poverty or indebtedness.

Compared to Vietnam's seven other geographical regions, the Mekong Delta region has the largest number of low-income people in Vietnam (4 million) and the second-highest level of landlessness in the country.[42] According to the bilateral donor AusAID, the Khmer Krom are the most "economically and socially disadvantaged" of the three main ethnic minority groups living the Delta.[43]

Many Khmer Krom now work as hired farm laborers on others' land or have stopped working in the farming sector altogether, instead working as hired manual labor at low-income jobs such as portering or recycling that require low skill and educational levels.[44] There is a steady flow of young people leaving the Mekong Delta region to seek factory work in Ho Chi Minh City.[45]

Finding themselves increasingly deprived of land and a source of livelihood, and lacking effective legal avenues for redress, increasing numbers of Khmer Krom have taken to the streets in protest (see section IV, below).

Discrimination

The Vietnamese often sarcastically say that the Khmers are poor because we have too many festivals and traditions. In fact, it's not because of our traditions, but from the Vietnamese stealing the Khmer land.

--Buddhist monk from Soc Trang, December 2007

The Vietnamese government statesthat racial and ethnic discrimination "does not exist" in Vietnam, where "all ethnic groups have, from time immemorial, coexisted peacefully without racial conflicts and discrimination. All ethnic groups in Vietnam, regardless of their size, language, culture, history and level of development, have enjoyed the same rights in all aspects of life."[46]

An article in the state-controlled Voice of Vietnam radio touts government programs for ethnic Khmer:

It is as clear as daylight that more than 1.2 million Khmer people in the southwestern region are happily joining efforts to develop the economy and stabilize their lives… Over the past five years, the State has invested more than VND1 trillion (roughly US$59,000) in building infrastructure facilities for more than 200 communes inhabited by the Khmer. As a result, 108 Khmer pagodas have been built and refurbished, more than 60,000 poor Khmer households have been provided with land to build houses, more than 100,000 households have been granted loans worth VND150 billion (US$8,800) to develop production, and more than 80 percent of the households have had audio-visual equipment, and learned the Khmer language. Provinces densely inhabited by the Khmer such as Tra Vinh and Soc Trang have newspapers available in the Khmer language. Every year, traditional Khmer festivals are held with pomp and circumstance.[47]

Vietnam's 1992 Constitution affirms the rights of ethnic minorities. Article 5 states that the government forbids all acts of ethnic discrimination and guarantees the rights of ethnic groups to use their own language and writing systems, preserve their ethnic identity, and promote their own traditions and culture. Articles 36 and 39 authorize preferential treatment for national minorities in education and health care.[48] The National Assembly's Nationality Council formulates and coordinates minority policy, and a government ministry, the Committee for Ethnic Minorities and Mountainous Areas (CEMMA), oversees minority affairs, including poverty alleviation programs and tax incentives targeting minorities.[49]

Despite the existence of these official policies and programs, the perception of discrimination is widespread among Khmer Krom. Many Khmer Krom complained to Human Rights Watch that the government discriminates against them by not providing enough Khmer-language secondary education, banning Khmer-language publications about their history and culture, placing restrictions on Buddhist practices, punishing them for peaceful protests or contacts with Khmer Krom advocacy groups abroad, siphoning off development aid intended for Khmer Krom, and offering virtually no legal recourse or compensation for confiscation of their land. Phillip Taylor comments:

[N]or, despite mouthing a commitment to an ethnically diverse society, does the state provide concrete practical measures to allow the Khmer to preserve their culture. Indeed, some Khmer Krom [have] argued that camouflaged by a rhetoric of multiculturalism and symbolic gestures that make it appear that the state is trying to help the Khmer, the consistent effect of the state's policies has been to impoverish, isolate, render stupid their people and thereby extinguish their culture.[50]

The actual situation of the Khmer Krom is difficult to ascertain, given the restrictions Vietnam places on human rights research. However, the widespread perception among Khmer Krom of discrimination is itself a cause for concern, and has only been deepened by the government's efforts to deny there is a problem and forcefully punish those who complain.

A government propaganda billboard in Soc Trang provincial town exhorts Vietnam's different ethnic minority groups, including a Khmer woman at the far left, to work together to build a beautiful, clean and "civilized" city. ©2008 Human Rights Watch

High illiteracy and school drop-out rates

People all around the world have the right to know their own history. But the Vietnamese government does not give this right to Khmer Krom. They try to dissolve Khmer Buddhism without spilling blood, by not allowing Khmer Krom children to learn their own language. If those children do not know Khmer culture, history and language, they will automatically become Vietnamese.

--Khmer Krom Buddhist student activist, December 2007

At the root of many of the complaints of discrimination is the fact that Khmer Krom are disproportionately poor in the Mekong Delta, and disproportionately lacking in education, two conditions that are mutually reinforcing. Grievances about education, described in the following section, reinforce the sense of marginalization among Khmer Krom in Vietnam.

Many Khmer Krom believe that the government's educational policies are designed to assimilate them into the mainstream society of the majority Kinh population, thwart them from accessing higher education, and weaken the foundation of their culture: the Khmer language.

While the Mekong Delta has a higher percentage of primary and secondary schools than Vietnam's seven other regions, it has the second lowest adult literacy rate and the lowest level of public school enrollments in Vietnam--with one-third of the nation's school drop-outs coming from the delta.[51] Eighty-three percent of the general work force--and 96 percent of the low-income population--lack a high school education.[52]

Poor school attendance rates, created in part by low-income Khmer Krom families needing their children to contribute towards the household economy, contribute to the ongoing cycle of poverty.

"Most of the students with bad learning capacity are of Khmer minority; they cannot speak Vietnamese well and cannot follow the study curriculum," said one teacher in Tra Vinh.[53] Another teacher said that Khmer students were "afraid of school." Unable to speak Vietnamese, they cannot understand the teachers, the teacher said.[54] Khmer Krom students put it this way: "We lack the fees to attend school, we struggle with the language, and schools are frequently located far from our homes."[55]

A 2003 poverty AusAID assessment of the Mekong Delta, which found that many low-income Khmer Krom children do not finish school, recommended that the school system be modified to make it "more accessible, both socially and linguistically, to Khmer students."[56]

The Vietnamese government's stated policy is to encourage all ethnic groups to learn Vietnamese, the national language, while recognizing the right for ethnic minorities to study and use their own written and spoken languages.[57] Government education policies and Vietnam's Law on Education entitle ethnic minority students to full or partial exemption from school fees, as well as scholarships to study at ethnic minority boarding schools.[58]

However, the reality is that Khmer Krom students, in addition to struggling with Vietnamese language, typically do not become well-educated in Khmer language either. Public schools in the Mekong Delta conduct the vast majority of classes in Vietnamese, with at most only two hours a week for Khmer literacy classes.[59]

For most Khmer Krom the only way to learn to read and write Khmer is to study at Pali schools run on a volunteer basis by Khmer Krom monks at Buddhist pagodas or to become a Buddhist monk. This rules out Khmer literacy and education for most girls, who are not allowed to become monks and traditionally are not educated at pagodas. At one Khmer pagoda in Tra Vinh visited by Human Rights Watch, for example, of 50 primary school students studying at the Pali School there, only two were girls. At another pagoda school in Soc Trang, Human Rights Watch found that Khmer Krom students, whose ages ranged from 6-12, could speak Khmer fluently but not one could write their names in Khmer and only one or two could recognize letters of the Khmer alphabet. [60]