The Ethnography of Vietnam's Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850-1990 by Oscar Salemink

Author:Oscar Salemink [Salemink, Oscar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780824825799
Google: MZkBEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1657428
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2002-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

The report was not optimistic about the solution to this problem. While it noted some willingness to accept change among Rhadé, it mildly criticized Vietnamese assimilationist policies, especially the Land Development Centers. In other words, ‘in any inter-cultural situation like this, one must understand that it takes two to tango’ (ibid.: 104).

The American-backed nation-building policy by South Vietnam’s Diêm regime was expressed in land grabbing, exploitation, discriminination, and repression of ethnic cultures and languages, as was noted in the MSUG reports. And as predicted, this provoked resentment among the Montagnards. In 1958, Montagnard civil servants who since 1955 had been active in a Front de la Libération des Montagnards, founded the Bajaraka Movement (Bahnar, Jarai, Rhadé, Koho) to protest against the Diêm regime’s ethnic policy and to demand autonomy for the former PMS. President Diêm was outraged about the ‘highland gang’, and most of the leaders were arrested and put in jail. What is more, all the crossbows – personal items used for hunting – were confiscated from the Rhadé men, the most active group in the movement. One of the leaders, Y Bih Aleo, escaped arrest and went underground to join the Communist resistance. He would become Vice-Chairman of the National Liberation Front (NLF) after its establishment in 1960, and President of the Central Highlands Autonomy Movement. As noted in the same MSUG reports and by Bernard Fall, the Viêt Minh continued to propagate against the Diêm regime in radio transmissions in the vernacular languages, condemning land grabbing and promising autonomy (as in the ill-fated autonomous zones in the North, which would be abolished after 1975).

Simultaneously, ethnic minority cadres who had gone North in 1954, filtered back into the Highlands with a thorough political training, and often accompanied by ethnic Vietnamese who adopted the lifestyles of the population where they lived (Hickey 1982b: 47–73).22 In 1959–60, guerrilla warfare in the Highlands was renewed with the Trà Bông rising of the Kor and Hrê minorities in the mountains of Quang Nam and Quang Ngãi.23 Significantly, in War by Other Means (1989), Carlyle Thayer argues that the Highlanders acted as the catalyst for the resumption of guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam. In other words, although there already was a North-Vietnamese presence in the Central Highlands, it was the rise of violence in the Highlands that preceded and prepared the Communist Party’s decision to resume armed struggle and establish the NLF. In the course of one year, the guerrilla had spread to most of the Highlands, and by 1961 many villages had come under the influence of the NLF. It became increasingly clear that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), which was trained for conventional warfare, was no match for the guerrillas – neither in the Highlands nor in the Mekong Delta (cf. Halberstam 1964; Schell 1988; Sheehan 1989). By then, many American observers and policymakers felt that ‘Something Extra and Special’ had to be done; this was to be provided by the US Army Special Forces.

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