When Vietnam veered onto the capitalist road a quarter century ago, there was hardly a hint of pushback by the officials and apparatchiks that had, until then, been entrusted with the enormous – and futile – task of building socialism. To the contrary, many enthusiastically set about to exploit the opportunities that doi moi, or reform, brought to hand.
It turned out that one of the surest routes to wealth in contemporary Vietnam lies in expropriating farmers and converting farmland to more immediately profitable uses. In January of this year, the attention of the nation was riveted by two stories with that theme.
The first, beginning on Jan. 5, concerned a sensational shootout on the outskirts of Haiphong City. The incident, which is discussed in part 2 of this three-part series, followed local authorities’ demand that a fish farmer surrender land that he and his family had reclaimed and made profitable after 14 years’ hard work. Some reports say the tract was under consideration as the site of a new airport.
The second story, reported on Jan. 20, concerned the end of a three year effort to put Tran Ngoc Suong in jail, allegedly for embezzlement but, it seems well-established, actually for resisting the takeover of her flourishing agribusiness venture, the Song Hau Farm.
Land conversion was what the Party brass in Can Tho City and nearby Co Do District had in mind when in 2005 they proposed to take over the Song Hau Farm. With the cooperation of Korean and American investors, they planned to build a ‘new town’ bordering the city’s planned modern airport on the former collective farm’s 4000 hectares.
First, however, they had to deal with Tran Ngoc Suong. Suong, then 56, had been director of the farm for seven years. Before that, she was chief assistant to her father, a demobilized Viet Cong officer who had been assigned in 1978 to create a collective farm from a vast expanse of swamp deep in the Mekong Delta. The success of the father-daughter team in the endeavor is legendary in Vietnam, one of the few brilliant achievements of the grim years following the end of the ‘American War’ and the nation’s reunification.
By 2005, the Song Hau Farm was selling rice and fish profitably to home and overseas markets. Though reconfigured as a joint stock company in 1991, the farm had remained remarkably true in important respects to its founding ideals, providing reliable income and social services for some 3000 farm families. Suong wasn’t going to let them down.
“[Song Hau] is the last true example of agricultural production following socialist principles,” Suong says she told the local Party chiefs at a meeting in October 2007. “I personally have never taken a penny that wasn’t due me. You call me ‘behind the times,’ comrades, too backward to lead such an enterprise. Well, I’m ready to hand over leadership to the people I’ve trained over the years.
“You want to turn Song Hau over to somebody else – are they going to regard the farm as their own flesh and blood? Song Hau is a highly productive farm community. If they turn Song Hau Farm into an industrial zone, what’s going to happen to our people?”
Can Tho’s power elite wasn’t a bit concerned by the social costs that Suong foresaw. Perhaps they reasoned that the dispossessed farmers could find work in the new factories or on the golf course they expected to spring up on the former rice paddies and fish ponds. And they had a Plan B.
If it’s deemed necessary to punish someone, Vietnamese law provides any number of possibilities. A staggering number of activities are technically illegal but routinely tolerated because to enforce the law would cause the system to freeze up. However, they can be invoked to force a dissident into line.
In September 2008, Suong was indicted in the local Co Do District Court on charges of embezzling 9 billion dong (US$428,857 at current exchange rates) from Song Hau Farm. When the case came to trial in August 2009, she was convicted of running an illegal slush fund and sentenced to eight years in prison. Four subordinates drew lesser terms.
Suong appealed. The appeals court in Can Tho City upheld the lower court’s verdict.
When it looked as though Suong might actually serve time in prison, her case became front page fare in Vietnam’s national press. A platoon of aging revolutionaries, prominently including Mme Nguyen Thi Binh, once the Viet Cong foreign minister, rallied to Suong’s defense. Supporters argued that setting up an unreported fund for social welfare purposes was an entirely ethical way of dodging red tape and in any event, was not illegal when it was established many years earlier.
Former Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet, a hero to Vietnamese reformers, had already connected the dots in a May 2008 letter to the Can Tho Party Committee. “I understand that it was your idea, not the public prosecutor’s, to bring criminal charges against [Suong], Kiet wrote. “She’s made great contributions to the agricultural progress of the region, and if there was wrongdoing, it should be dealt with in a reasonable way.” Further, wrote Kiet, “I can’t support your plan to take the collective’s land to set up an industrial zone.”
Moved by photos of the frail but unbowed Miss Suong in the dock, public opinion was overwhelmingly on her side. In Hanoi, impatience with the Can Tho authorities was manifest, the center’s typical reaction when the actions of ham-handed local officials stir up public unrest.
In May 2010, after central prosecutors found procedural violations, Vietnam’s Supreme Court threw out the verdict.
Seemingly unfazed, in February 2011 the Can Tho Police reported that further investigation had found fresh evidence pointing to Suong’s guilt. In August, prosecutors filed updated embezzlement charges against Suong and her subordinates.
Suong’s friends did not give up. Their chosen instrument was Vietnam’s ‘Fatherland Front,’ a Communist Party-dominated amalgam of groups that purports to ‘represent the entire people.’ On the heels of the new indictment, the Front urged administrative remedies for Suong’s wrongdoings, if truly there were any.
Its own investigation, the Front advised the Supreme Procurator in a public letter, showed that Suong was blameless. The welfare fund was established in 1994, it reasoned, was established well before Suong became the farm’s director and was not at that time illegal. Further, harrumphed the Front, “the investigation is sullying the name of a farm that has a fine reputation among senior government officials and has gained outstanding achievements.”
And finally, it appears, the Can Tho authorities have agreed to drop the charges. It’s not because they agree she’s innocent, they said on Jan. 19. It’s “because of the contributions made by Suong and her family to the state.”
Shootout in Tien Lang
This is the second of a three-part series on corruption Vietnam's land ownership by David Brown, a retired US Foreign Service official who served in several posts throughout Southeast Asia.
Early last month, the Vietnamese public, weary after a year of high inflation and slow growth, was turning its attention to the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday only a few weeks off. In the far south of Vietnam, the long ordeal of labor hero Tran Ngoc Suong was about to end – local authorities had decided to drop charges that she had embezzled funds from the nation’s last thriving collective farm.
Then an extraordinary report from Tien Lang district, on the outskirts of Haiphong, a port city east of Hanoi, sent a shock through the body public. A fish farmer and his family had resisted a large force moving in to enforce an eviction order. With an improvised mine and muskets bought on the black market, they’d wounded two soldiers and four policemen, including the local police chief.
As in the Song Hau Farm affair, it was local authorities’ determination to wrest control of rich agricultural land that provoked the incident.
In 1997, Doan Van Vuon moved to Vinh Quang Village and leased nine hectares of coastal wetlands from the village People’s Committee. Trained as an engineer, Vuon began to build the dikes, sluices and ponds needed to raise fish and shrimp. No one expected Vuon and his family to succeed, but after several years of effort and experimentation, the fish farm turned a small profit. Other pioneers followed Vuon’s example. By 2004, some 20 families in Tien Lang district were developing fish farms covering approximately 250 hectares of previously worthless land. Vuon himself had reclaimed a further 11 ha from the sea, increasing his family enterprise to 20 ha of ponds altogether.
In 2005, however, the fish farmers of Tien Lang received a shocking notice from the district administration. The swampland that they had rented would be repossessed when their leases expired, it said. There would be no compensation for improvements.
All land in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is owned by the state. Since 1993, however, individuals and enterprises have been granted ‘land use rights.’ For most farmers, that meant that they were allotted a piece of their former collective farm for a 20 year period.
Vuon, for reasons still unclear, had been given only a 14-year lease backdated to 1993. He was ordered to vacate by 2007.
Vuon and the other fish farmers say they had believed – in accordance with rural custom – that their leases on the land they’d improved would be routinely extended. Further, like all farmers, they expected that if the local government took a piece of land back for some public purpose, they’d be compensated for the improvements they’d made.
The fish farmers protested. The district authorities wouldn’t budge. The district court upheld the authorities’ order to vacate. The farmers appealed to a higher court in Haiphong City.
As is common in Vietnam, the Haiphong court referred the appeal to an arbitrator, a local magistrate, in hope that the dispute could be resolved informally. The procedure resulted in April 2010 in a “memorandum to create conditions for mutual agreement on resolution of the matter.”
Reportedly, the Tien Lang district agreed to extend the fish farmers’ leases when they expired and the farmers agreed to withdraw their complaint. The document was signed by Vuon and other representatives of the fish farmers and, representing the district government, by the chief of the Tien Lang district office of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. The magistrate then affixed the appeals court’s vermillion stamp.
Undeterred, the district authorities reneged on the bargain. No sooner had the farmers withdrawn their complaint than the district declared the local court’s ruling still valid. Again it pressed Vuon to hand over his fish farm. Driven to desperation, Vuon resolved to fight back. When police, reinforced by soldiers – 80 armed men altogether – moved in on his farm on the morning of January 5, Vuon and his family fired the shots that roused the nation.
It’s not so clear what will happen next. Vuon’s fish farm was devastated, three houses bulldozed and a quarter million dollars’ worth of mature fish looted by strangers. Vuon and his brother are in jail, charged with attempted murder of police officers who were carrying out their duties.
To Vietnamese public opinion, however, the brothers are heroic figures.
Dang Hung Vo, a retired high official, comments that “it’s possible to see the recent incident at Tien Lang as a climactic demonstration of the faults in our Land Law and how it is implemented at the local level. A good farmer, pure, simple and hard-working, who’s driven to defend his right to his land with home-made weapons – what misery! Everybody believes that there’s such a thing as justice and that the law ensures it. Certainly that’s what the farmers who built the fish ponds at Tien Lang believed. They went to the court expecting fair play, but the simple truths they understood proved elusive. The hopelessness of their situation drove them to take desperate measures.”
Vo and other experts on land policy have blasted the Tien Lang officials and the Haiphong deputy province chief who defended them for fundamental errors in the interpretation and execution of the law, but that’s not what’s really at issue here. It’s really a question of common sense and decency, of respect for a farmer’s bond with the land he’s worked – or so many commentators say.
Prime Minister Dung has ordered the Haiphong City authorities to explain how the shootout at Tien Lang came to pass, and how they intend to repair the situation there. Probably a few heads will roll; Vietnam’s public clearly hopes that Farmer Vuon’s won’t be among them.
It’s Dung and his colleagues in the government and Communist Party politburo who must deal with the larger problem, however. Vietnam’s current land law is a time bomb set to go off in 2013 -- without fundamental reform, the sort of tragedy that overtook Dang Van Vuon threatens half the nation’s population.
The Wisdom of Farmers
This is the final part of a three-part series on corruption Vietnam's land ownership by David Brown, a retired US Foreign Service official who served in several posts throughout Southeast Asia.
Vietnam’s vaunted doi moi, the economic reforms that ended Vietnam’s disastrous attempt to build a Soviet-style economy in the years after their ‘American war,’ meant for nearly all the nation’s farmers the end of collective farms. With few exceptions, the village-sized collectives were broken up, and each farm family was given a 20-year lease. Freed to work individual plots and profit from their own labor, they powered extraordinary growth in agricultural productivity.
In the 15 years after 1993, agricultural production more than doubled. By 2008, Vietnam had become a leading exporter of rice, coffee, cashews, pepper and farm-raised fish and shrimp, even while surplus manpower drifted away from rural villages to work in the booming new industrial zones.
Next year, however, the initial 20-year leases of farmland will expire. In Vietnam there seems to be consensus that the land law must be revised again. The question is how. Literally interpreted, provisions in force since 1993 permit the state to take back farms without any compensation at the end of the lease period. It seems, say expert commentators, that farmers’ belief that they were secure in their right to continue to work their land was just that – a belief. It has no juridical foundation in Vietnamese law.
Recent scholarship has confirmed the general perception that the vagueness of the current land law, the non-transparency of administrative procedures and the quick profits that can be made by insiders when farmland is expropriated and converted to other uses are a principle driver of official corruption. Years of effort to codify procedures seem simply to have multiplied opportunities to extort under the table payments. Ninety percent of the civil complaints brought to the courts concern land disputes.
Even were the process not shot through by corruption, the reckless and seemingly relentless conversion of prime agricultural land into industrial parks, housing estates, roads and golf courses would be a matter of growing concern. Vietnam’s Agriculture Ministry calculates that in 2001-2006, some 376,000 hectares of rice land were expropriated, displacing over a million farmers. Amendments to the land law in 2003 that spurred ‘development’ by making it easier to ‘liberate’ large tracts appear to have accelerated the pace of displacement. Of the 31,000 land-related complaints filed in 2007, some 70 percent alleged inadequate compensation for expropriated land.
There’s no solid evidence yet that the politburo has decided to amend Vietnam’s constitution, which declares that “the land belongs to all of the people, and the state manages it on their behalf.” However, the shootout early in January between a farm family and police sent to repossess their 20 hectare fish farm has framed their problem in the starkest way.
Analyzing the Tien Lang incident, Saigon Tiep Thi, a Ho Chi Minh City newspaper , commented that “for nearly 20 years, since the 1993 revision of our Land Law, farmers have believed in the doi moi policy because they firmly believed that when their [initial 20 year] land rights grant ended, they would continue to have the right to work that land if they wished, and that the law would protect their ownership of improvements to the plot. That is the political basis of their continued belief in the [ruling Communist] Party, their readiness to follow its lead.”
Now it seems that only a radical move by party and government that renders farmers secure in their possession of the land they work will satisfy Vietnamese public opinion. Only an unequivocal right to own the land they work, to transfer it, add to it or improve it as they choose is likely to quiet the farmers’ fears. In short, the Party and government are pressed to codify rural tradition.
There’s much to be said for such an approach, says John Gillespie, an Australian who recently studied how Vietnam’s local courts manage disputes over property rights. Judges routinely steer litigants toward arbitration, and arbitrators have a strong tendency to propose a settlement based on ‘common sense and community sentiment’ than to rely on the letter of the law. They do so, Gillespie found, because conciliation is is far more likely than confrontation to bring a durable conclusion to land disputes.
That was the solution attempted when Dang Van Vuon and other Tien Lang farmers appealed a local court’s order to vacate the fish farms they’d worked long and hard to establish. The farmers and a Tien Lang district representative agreed on the face-saving solution the arbitrator proposed. However, the district chairman and the chairman of Vuon’s home village, a pair of brothers, refused the deal.
Literally thousands of articles on the shootout at Tien Lang have appeared in the Vietnamese press, and thousands more have been posted on Vietnam’s lively blogosphere. So far, however, the motives of the local officials who demanded the return of Doan Van Vuon’s leased swampland and who ultimately decided to repossess Vuon’s farm by force remain uncertain.
The local officials told an investigator from the Fatherland Front that they intended to save the government the trouble of paying a large sum for the property if rumors were confirmed that a new airport would be constructed there along the shoreline. Villagers told the same investigator that they believe the officials intended to profit by the resale of the fish farm, and indeed already had buyers already lined up.
It’s a measure of the public’s inclination to suspect ulterior motives when the state expropriates property in Vietnam that no commentator has suggested that the officials were simply trying to do what they believed the land law required them to do.
Destroyed family farm could force changes in Vietnam’s law
Every now and then, a shocking event changes the way a nation thinks about its politics. The January 5 shoot-out at Tien Lang. in which officials tried to evict a farm family on a spurious charge that their lease had lapsed, may be a game-changer for Vietnam.
Commentators writing for Vietnam’s national newspapers and political blogs say the confrontation between the desperate family and police who came to repossess their farm has caused people – including Communist party leaders -- to think differently about ‘the land problem.’
Journalistic hyperbole could be at work here. Still, government decisions announced on February 10 lend credence to the notion that a paradigm shift has occurred.
It has been five weeks since Doan Van Vuon’s family fought back with muskets and a homemade mine against the police and soldiers that came to evict them from their 20 hectare fish farm (see part 2 of this series for details). Quoting villagers who did not hesitate to speak up, reporters who swarmed to the scene in the days after the event quickly demolished the local officials’ account of the incident. Land law experts declared that the officials had no legal basis to revoke Vuon’s lease or deny him compensation. Retired generals decried the use of soldiers to enforce the eviction order; retired judges faulted a district court’s rejection of Vuon’s appeal.
Higher government levels – the Hai Phong City administration and the central authorities in Hanoi – were slow to react. The city officials seemed distinctly out of touch with the events in Tien Lang and mainly intent on deflecting blame. Meanwhile, investigative teams sent by central government ministries and institutions brought back alarming reports.
On January 16, just a few days before the week-long lunar New Year holiday, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung ordered the People’s Committee of Hai Phong City to investigate fully and report.
Commentators in the national press and on political blogs, meanwhile, were finding a larger significance in the incident. “Though it seemed just a local matter,” said a former deputy prime minister, “the incident typifies and reflects things that are going on all over the country.” Another analyst stressed that “very few indeed imagined that the Tien Lanh drama could rouse such a tidal wave of public opinion.”
Writers remarked on the government’s restraint. Some saw special significance in the absence of ‘official guidance’ to the media, an indicator that the central authorities wanted the Tien Lang incident thoroughly ventilated. Several wondered if the central government was taking a lesson from China’s peaceful resolution of a lengthy confrontation between villagers and police at Wukan just weeks earlier.
The most interesting speculation posits a fundamental shift in the regime’s awareness of rice-roots frustration with corrupt and high-handed local officials. Retrospective significance has been attached to calls by Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong and Prime Minister Dung toward the end of 2011 for a general revamping of the Party’s lower ranks. Said one writer: “It’s clear that there’s been a change in perception, in re-examining the trust of the people in the Party and government.” These analysts seem to conclude that Vietnam’s leaders can and may indeed leverage revulsion over the Tien Lang incident to weed out despots at the village and district level.
Thus it was that Chief Cabinet Secretary Vu Duc Dam had a thoroughly attentive audience when he briefed reporters on the conclusions ratified when, on February 10, the prime minister convened a top level meeting on the Tien Lang incident.
Dam said that participants in the three hour meeting had agreed that the core problem was the weakness of district and village leaders in dealing with land matters. These officials had made incorrect decisions both when they granted Vuon his lease and when they decided to repossess the tract. They erred further in using force and in choosing to move on Vuon just before the new year holiday.
The local officials were criminally culpable of bulldozing three homes on Vuon’s property and allowing the theft of the fish and shrimp grown in Vuon’s ponds.
Further, said Dam, the Hai Phong City administration failed to investigate promptly, assess responsibility for mistakes or provide timely and accurate information to the press and public. Not until their most recent report had the Hai Phong authorities shown proper appreciation of the seriousness and complexity of the incident.
Dam said the prime minister had instructed the Hai Phong authorities to get busy making Farmer Vuon whole again. They were to see to it that legal and judicial irregularities in Vuon’s case were repaired, so that Vuon could continue to use the land leased to him. The Hai Phong authorities were in addition to initiate criminal proceedings against the local officials who arranged for the destruction of the three houses on Vuon’s property. They were to consider mitigating circumstances when revisiting the charges lodged against Vuon – that he attempted to kill people who were carrying out public duties.
Finally, the Hai Phong authorities were instructed to clarify who of their number had authorized Tien Lang officials to pursue their vendetta against Vuon, and to explain why they had been so slow after the incident to identify the culpable parties or to inform the central government authorities of their findings.
Dam added that in addition to the failures at the local and municipal level, the prime minister and his colleagues recognized fundamental problems in Vietnam’s much-amended Land Law. The statute, he said, is convoluted, internally contradictory and out of step with recent developments, a daunting challenge for ill-trained local cadre to administer.
For these reasons, Dam said, the politburo and the government resolved to make a thorough revision of the Land Law. Related to this, he added, was the matter of amendments to Vietnam’s constitution.
(Current provisions of the Vietnamese constitution vest ownership of farmland in “the People” and its management in “the State.” Instead of private ownership, farmers are permitted to lease plots for 20 year terms. Local officials assign and administer these leases.)
By and large, that’s what the Vietnamese public wanted to hear. It’s rare that the regime acknowledges a systemic problem, but, de facto, that’s what it’s done. Whether it now can fix the land tenure regime so that it’s transparent and straightforward, proof against local officials’ fiddling it for their own advantage – that’s another matter entirely.
By past form, Hanoi might have been expected to respond differently to the Tien Lang incident. This is, after all, an authoritarian regime that is said to be dominated by conservatives. Its internal decision-making processes are shrouded in secrecy. Over the years – for example, when in 1997 tens of thousands of impoverished farmers seized village offices and marched on district towns in Thai Binh province – it has not hesitated put down rural protest by force.
As some commentators have suggested, it may be that Trong, Dung and their colleagues at the top have been rethinking what it will take to retain popular acquiescence to Communist Party leadership. The regime’s management of the issues raised by farmer Vuon’s desperate defiance of local bullies seems to reflect serious effort to read public opinion and respond to it.
Trong, installed as party chief a year ago, has called curbing the excesses of the party’s local representatives a life or death issue for the regime. The politburo is well aware of what ordinary Vietnamese want: social stability and an orderly evolution toward a freer, fairer, more transparent and inclusive system of government. What’s not at all clear is if it can deliver such a result.
David Brown
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