Houston Chronicle

Vietnamese hold officials hostage over land dispute

- By Mike Ives

DONG TAM, Vietnam — Residents of Dong Tam, a village on the outskirts of Vietnam’s capital, have been holding hostages for nearly a week to protest a government attempt to evict villagers from disputed land.

The standoff has riveted a nation where farmers’ land is often taken from them for developmen­t.

Some of the more than three dozen officials and police officers taken hostage last weekend were released, but others were being held in Dong Tam on Friday, according to rights activists and state news outlets.

Residents had erected barbed-wire barricades to block access to a part of the village.

The episode has developed into one of the more dramatic confrontat­ions in recent years between ordinary Vietnamese and their authoritar­ian government. The top city official in Hanoi, the capital, was expected to meet with villagers Friday. State-run news outlets reported that officials had promised to review the underlying reasons for the land dispute, and to refrain from violence.

A blogger near Dong Tam who spoke on condition of anonymity said people simply wanted to return to normal life.

The blogger was among a group of villagers protesting the land seizure in coordinati­on with the people holding the hostages. He said 19 officials were being held inside the barricades, a claim that could not be independen­tly verified.

Dong Tam residents were protesting a move by Viettel, a military-owned telecommun­ications company, to seize 145 acres of disputed land, the statecontr­olled news site VnExpress reported Thursday.

The land was once owned by the military and was transferre­d to Viettel for a defense-related project in 2015, according to an online report by the staterun newspaper Dan Tri. It said villagers had been trespassin­g on the land. Neither Viettel nor any villagers directly involved in the hostage crisis could be reached for comment Friday.

Activists in Hanoi said the dispute began last weekend, when police officers and plaincloth­es security forces entered Dong Tam, about 25 miles south of Hanoi, to evict the villagers. The villagers resisted and managed to capture 38 of the police officers and security officials in the process, the activists said.

Experts and activists said the dispute was a vivid reminder of a quandary with which Vietnam has wrestled for decades: how to allocate land in a Communist country that allows quasi-private ownership rights but considers all land to be state property.

“Things will not stop at Dong Tam,” said Le Dung Vova, a prominent Vietnamese activist and writer. “Similar incidents will keep happening everywhere, with different levels of intensity, especially as land resources become more scarce.”

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