TRANSCRIPT OF RADIO TALK SHOW AIR ON Sunday 31/08/2003

The Montagnards

Summary:
The Montagnards are the forgotten people of Vietnam’s Central Highlands and are now in danger of extinction after years of relentless repression and religious persecution. Nick Franklin investigates the claims of human rights abuse and the desperate fight for survival by the Mountain people to save their land and their culture.

Details or Transcript:

Me Le Thi: I can hum some melody, something like… (demonstrating singing)

Nick Franklin: Hi I’m Nick Franklin, and now on Radio National an Encounter with the mountain people of Vietnam, the Montagnards – the forgotten people of a war in which Australia played its part. History records the war as ending in 1975, but in many ways it’s never stopped for the Montagnards.

Me Le Thi: (continues singing demonstration) …you feel that suffer is in their melody, music.

Nick Franklin: Me Le Thi is one of the few people from Vietnam’s central mountains living in Australia. Through her art and music, she’s working to keep Montagnard culture alive.

Music

Reading: They came and took our land, and made it theirs. They try to erase our language and force us to speak Vietnamese. They have taken our fertile lands and forced us to the bad land. They say they have come to build progress for my people, but they have come to kill, arrest and oppress my people. Source: Human Rights Watch report

Nick Franklin: The US-based campaign group, Human Rights Watch, has collected hundreds of testimonies – like the one we just heard – from Montagnards describing their persecution over the last three decades. Amnesty International tells a similar story. Its London based South-East Asia researcher, Daniel Alberman, has no doubt that in Vietnam today, the Montagnards live with all the trappings of a police state.

Daniel Alberman: Certainly there appears to be an atmosphere of paranoia in the upper levels of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the government towards the Montagnard people and attacks against the state they perceive, and also against other dissidents in the country. And I think if you are paranoid, you see your enemies everywhere, then you do indeed see your enemies everywhere

Nick Franklin: Why should the government of a nation of 80 million people be paranoid about the activities of a tiny collection of indigenous people numbering in total less than 750,000? The quick and easy answer is to point to the Montagnards’ role in the Vietnam war – the fact that many were recruited to fight alongside Americans. But the tensions between the Montagnard and the Vietnamese began long before the Communists came to power.

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Reading: Since God gave birth to the world, we ethnic minorities have always been in the same place. Since antiquity our ancestors have always told us that this is our land. The Vietnamese never lived here. What we learned from our grandparents is that Vietnam started invading our land in 1930. In that year the French started working in Dak Lak, and five Vietnamese went to work for them as cooks and helpers.

From the time the French left in 1954, bit by bit the Vietnamese increased their presence until they were all over the place. In 1958, because the Vietnamese were getting stronger and stronger in the central highlands, all the ethnic minorities – Ede, Koho, Jarai, Stieng and Bahnar – stood up to make the first demonstration. All the ethnic minorities had one idea: we want our land back. At that time the Vietnamese promised to give us our land back so there would be no conflicts. They were not speaking the truth. Instead they put our leader, Y Bham Enuol, in jail in Hue for seven years.Source: Human Rights Watch report

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Kok Ksor: All my life is no peace but war.

Nick Franklin: Kok Ksor, President of the Montagnard Foundation, now lives in exile in the USA. As a child he grew up in Vietnam’s central mountains in the French colonial period.

Kok Ksor: The French got our land in 1895 and they start to gather our people because we are different with Vietnamese people and they gather all of us and name us as Montagnards because we are the people who live in the mountain and they name us that because they want to organise a nation for our people.

Village life when I was a kid was peaceful, nobody bother us, even though there’s a war between Vietnamese and the French, but there’s nobody bother us in our village. We were free to go anywhere we want to travel, to hunt and fish and making farm. We can stay late in the jungle or spend night in the jungle without any fear that someone would arrest us and imprison us like what it is right now.

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Reading: In 1965, when they let Y Bham out of jail, the ethnic minorities started the FULRO movement – the Front For The Liberation of Oppressed Races. It was based here in Mondolkiri (in Cambodia) right near the spot where we are sitting today. I was twelve years old and carried a gun that was as long as me. Everyone, young and old, joined the struggle. Later, in 1969, Nguyen Van Thieu, the President of South Vietnam, promised in the “033” agreement to give us our lands back. Y Bham would be in charge of the central highlands and the Vietnamese would go back to Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam received foreign aid and used the Dega to fight against North Vietnam. Thousands of us were killed. Source: HRW report

Fx: Troops in film, Green Beret.

Nick Franklin: Kok Ksor was one of those Montagnard who joined the Americans. Of course, John Wayne’s version of the Vietnam War in his film Green Beret, seen through patriotic American eyes, bears little resemblance to Kok Ksor’s experience. In Kok’s war the truth is messy. The good and the bad not nearly so clearly defined.

Kok Ksor: Like Viet Cong came to our village and accuse our people of supporting (?) and the South Vietnamese; they threaten our people to kill them if they do support the South Vietnamese. In order to threaten people, they did really took one or two of our people just kill in front of people. If you support the South Vietnamese, this is what we’re going to do to you.

Also, South Vietnamese came to our village, they did the same thing - they don’t want us to support the Viet Cong. But they both are Vietnamese and they said if we support the Viet Cong, they going to kill us the same way.

Nick Franklin: An Australian soldier was seconded to the CIA to recruit Montagnards and turn them into an anti-communist fighting force . In his autobiography, Tiger Men, Barry Petersen describes some of the complexities of the Vietnam War not reflected in films like Green Beret.

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Reading: In 1964, with the 100-man Montagnard force now firmly under my control, I realised I was in a politically precarious position. I was a foreigner, totally in command of a minority group – the Montagnard – in South Vietnam and I was vulnerable on many sides. There was always the possibility that the Vietnamese would move in and insert their own command structure. I wanted to operate the force so that it could be used to maximum effect and I did not want to risk the possibility of ineffective command. There was the other problem of the running sore of Montagnard resentment towards the Vietnamese. From Tiger Men

Nick Franklin: As Barry Petersen records in his book, the Montagnard did stage an unsuccessful revolt against the south Vietnam regime. There’s no doubt that winning the hearts and minds of the Montagnards was seen as a priority by Petersen’s CIA masters. Clearly, if you could win over the people, you could better control the strategically important central highlands. And so Petersen was under pressure to recruit more and more Montagnards.

Reading: I knew the reason for the swift expansion. Viet Cong activity was increasing throughout the country. The highlands were the key to the security of South Vietnam because the North Vietnamese were using the Ho Chi Minh trails which ran from the north, through the highlands of Indo-China to the south, to infiltrate the country. Men and equipment were being poured into South Vietnam in increasing numbers. The Montagnard, scattered throughout the highlands, were in the best position to block the growing North Vietnamese invasion. Teams of trained Montagnard, working amongst the scattered population, were best suited to gain the people’s support, and to collect most useful information about the VC and North Vietnamese. From Tiger Men

Nick Franklin: Despite Barry Petersen’s highly successful recruitment drive, some Montagnard were to join up with the Viet Cong. According to Kok Ksor, if you were a Montagnard, you could end up losing, whichever side you fought for.

Kok Ksor: Both sides are really destroying our people. We are just like a sandwich. Both sides are pressing us and killing us, but nobody knows in this world. The other people in the world supported the North for the war and other people in the world supported the South, both are killing are people – we are in the middle.

I worked for US Special Force and also Fourth Infantry Division for a while, so I changed around wherever I can find a job. During the War our relationship is very close. More than like a friend, like brothers because we really support them and they really depend on us to help (them) during the war. That’s why many of our people were executed by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army because they said: “We are the ears and eyes of the US Army”. After 1975 when they took over the central highlands they kill a lot of our people and during the war too, if they capture any of the Montagnard people, they will not let them live, and we know that – if we are captured by them, we know they will kill us.

Music

Nick Franklin: Barry Petersen was so successful in winning over Montagnards they presented him with a ceremonial chieftain’s dress – this, incidentally, can now be seen on display at Australia’s War Memorial Museum in Canberra. Petersen may have got too close to the Montagnards for his own good. He was eventually withdrawn from Vietnam, allegedly at the request of the CIA. Although he was to do another tour of duty in Vietnam, the Americans made very clear his old job of recruiting Montagnard was over.

Now living in Bangkok, Barry Petersen retains a high regard for the Montagnard. He sees them as a brave and independent minded people … although he does think some of the exiles’ claims of human rights abuse are exaggerated.

Barry Petersen: Some of the other abuses I have heard of – for example, beatings by police, yes that could happen. But one must remember that generally the authorities – the public servants at the lower provincial and district level – are not well educated people and in this instance you’re looking at Vietnamese who don’t have a good education, and who are not very aware of the problems, and who tend to be very racist. But this you can apply to almost any country in the world. The lesser educated, less aware people are probably more racist than those who are aware, and unfortunately this applies to school teachers as well.

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Nick Franklin: Today, over a quarter of a century after the end of the Vietnam war, there is another reason the authorities are persecuting Montagnard.

Reading: In 1988 the ethnic minorities started to become Christians. We’d been Christians for a long time before that, but it was in 1988 when all ethnic minorities believed everywhere. Jesus changed our idea (from armed to peaceful struggle). If we didn’t have Christianity and the Holy Spirit within us, we would use violence to oppose the Vietnamese and we would all be dead. Source: Human Rights Watch report

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Nick Franklin: Before being converted to Christianity, most Montagnard grew up practising animism.

Kok Ksor: Well, the time before then our people don’t have any religions. All we do, if one of our families got sick, they have to do something about that person to get healed – they take rice wine and kill a chicken or pigs and just pray to good spirit to heal that person. So, we don’t have any religion like Buddhist, they just go there and worship Buddhist, Buddha, every day – we don’t have anything like that. But one thing to make sacrifice is just to pray for something good for the families and something good for the weather and our crops and the good years for our farms – something like that. The first religions came to us is the Catholic and the second is the evangelists – that’s Protestants from the US.

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Kok Ksor: Well, I became a Christian when I was 14, because the first time I went to a church and I went to school there and my uncle took me to church. And I believe that there is God, always there is God. And they told me about the Christ who died for our sins so that we can have life. And also all the things that have been created like trees, mountains, waters and something that people – human beings – cannot make or created, I think all those things belong to God, God who created them. That’s why I believe there is God.

Wilfred Wong: Anti Christian persecution takes place throughout Vietnam. There are majority Vietnamese who are also being persecuted for their faith, but it appears to us that the ethnic minority groups, such as the Montagnards of the central highlands are bearing the brunt of this religious persecution.

Nick Franklin: Wilfred Wong is a researcher and Parliamentary Officer for the London-based campaign group, Jubilee.

Wilfred Wong: The fact that the Montagnards in the central highlands, many of them assisted the US Military during the Vietnam war, has made them even more suspicious in the eyes of the government. But at the same time the increasing number of Christian conversions among these Montagnards has increased the antagonism of the Vietnamese authorities towards them because the Vietnamese are very suspicious of any ideology, belief system that attracts a large following, other than their own Communist ideology.

Nick Franklin: According to a Human Rights Watch report, many Montagnard have developed their own form of Christianity. Dega Christianity combines aspirations for independence with a brand of evangelical Christianity.

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Reading: We call our church “Dega”. The reason we want our own religion is because in the past there were Vietnamese leaders who controlled the church. They would come into our villages and take photographs of poor people in the central highlands to raise charity money from abroad. None of that money ever reached us. We started Dega religion in 2000. We wanted to make our own church to contact directly with international supporters, not through Vietnam. The authorities charge that we believe in politics and that it’s not religion we are doing. Source: Human Rights Watch report

Daniel Alberman: Missionary activities are very active in the region, Protestant missionary activities, and I think to some extent one should see the grievances of the Montagnard people as providing fertile ground for missionary activities as well, and perhaps if those grievances were met by the authorities, maybe there would be less conversion to Christianity also.

Nick Franklin: Daniel Alberman of Amnesty International.

Wilfred Wong: I think the Vietnamese authorities believe there is a connection between these Montagnards wanting autonomy or independence and their Christian beliefs, and the Vietnamese authorities are generally suspicious of Christianity, partly because it’s linked, or perceived as linked, to the outside world, especially to the West.

Nick Franklin: And given, Wilfred, what happened in the Vietnam war, in one sense as an outsider it’s not surprising that they would be highly suspicious, is it?

Wilfred Wong: Er, no, in fact the Vietnamese authorities, of course, will never forget that many of the Montagnards did work with the US military during the Vietnam war. The interesting thing is that during that war the, North Vietnamese promised autonomy to the Montagnards in the central highlands as a way to try and get their support, and some of the Montagnards actually supported the North Vietnamese because of that. The South Vietnamese also promised them autonomy. None of them ever delivered on the goods, which is not surprising why the Montagnards are so wary of whatever promises and assurances of respecting their rights are given to them by the Vietnamese authorities.

Nick Franklin: Wilfred Wong of Jubilee. Rather than winning autonomy, the Montagnard have increasingly suffered the same fate as Australia’s indigenous people – they’ve lost much of their land…and much more too.

My Le Thi: Many people who left Vietnam, like from a different part of Vietnam, I guess they wouldn’t have the same feeling as what I have, because probably those places are quite ... (pause)they have a special place, but it’s not as special to me, it’s not as special on a spiritual level as the land in the central highlands.

Nick Franklin: My Le Thi is a Sydney based artist, who grew up in Montagnard country in Vietnam’s central highlands. She still feels a great affinity for her native land.

My Le Thi: The wind can sing…the water can, can sing and you could feel the air – it’s a different air, it’s like everything that’s connected with life – the trees, the culture, the people – we live with nature and we love nature. And every single grass and everything just – bamboo’s very much an important part in our life. They give us music. They give us a place to live, making houses and also and we cook the bamboo. Just one of the very humble, natural materials, come from nature.

So the music, the people, the wind, the water…the rhythm of life – everything is connected, and makes everything kind of bound together. So when you’re not there any more, you’re looking and searching for something similar, but nothing is really the same.

Nick Franklin: Today the Montagnard have lost much of their best land. Barry Petersen, the Vietnam vet who once recruited Montagnard, says it was quite clear what was happening – even back in the 60s.

Barry Petersen: I believe those claims are correct, and I saw some of it myself during the time I was there when Vietnamese peasants from the over-populated coastal areas were resettled into the highlands on the more fertile areas of land on what they called “land development centres”, Now, post-war, I saw it again in 1990 when I visited the highlands. Hundreds of thousands of people from North Vietnam were resettled in the highlands. And, of course, this has taken a lot of land away from the Montagnard.

Nick Franklin: And I gather you also saw that the Montagnards often in effect lost their villages, had Vietnamese villages superimposed on them. How did that work?

Barry Petersen: Well, when the land was taken for the Vietnamese peasants, the villagers there lost the village, and they were resettled. And in 1990 I visited one such village in the south of the area I worked in during the war. They were resettled and they didn’t have time to build long houses on stilts when they actually visited them.

But with regard to the Montagnard villages, what the Vietnamese tried to do in assimilating the Montagnards, they superimposed in some cases a Montagnard village over a … sorry, a Vietnamese village over a Montagnard village by criss-crossing the village with lanes. Now if those lanes ran thorough a long house in two or three places, it split the long house up, and parts of the long house ended up on opposite sides of the lane, and either side of the long house were Vietnamese peasants resettled. So, in other words, this was a very primitive way of assimilation and it only created more animosity.

Reading: The authorities confiscate our swidden fields or rice paddies and say it’s the property of the government. Just when our fields are ready for harvest, they take the land, ploughing it over during the night to make coffee or rubber plantations. Sometimes they even want to demand money from us after they’ve taken our land and ploughed it over. All we can do is cry.

My grandfather had more than five hectares of land and gave only part of it to me – less than a hectare. In the past we did shifting agriculture, moving our farm plots around. The fallow land was part of our land. Now we just farm in one place. I have just enough land to feed my family, but nothing left over. Source: Human Rights Watch report

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Nick Franklin: ABC Radio National put the Montagnards’ claims about loss of land to the Vietnamese Government. We were told through the Vietnamese Embassy in Canberra that their ambassador was too busy to talk to us. But the embassy did reply with a long fax, which not only rejected the allegations, but also went on to say:

Reading: The Vietnamese State and Government have been carrying out numerous policies and measures aimed at boosting socio-economic development in Tay Nguyen. As a result, important progress has been made in socio-economic and cultural development in Tay Nguyen over recent years. Its economic growth has reached 10% annually, higher than the national average.

Nick Franklin: Later in the same fax, the statement said:

Reading: The living conditions of the majority of people in the region has been constantly improved while the poverty rate has markedly decreased.

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Reading: The first time they beat me, they hit me on my back legs with a long stick during interrogation. The reason was because I told them I wanted to protest about the land and wanted to take our land back. There was no blood, only bruises, which disappeared after two or three days. The second beating was the same. They asked me if I was going to stop (demanding land). I said I will continue. When I said I wanted to struggle against them, they began beating me. I said one word about that and they beat me. I told them I would do whatever I could to oppose them; even if it meant I die, I wasn’t afraid. That caused them to hit me even more. Source: Human Rights Watch report

Nick Franklin: Now, I’ve read reports from human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who talk of many forms of repression, including torture. Have you been able to confirm there was torture, and if there was torture, what’s happened?

Wilfred Wong: Yes, there has been a lot of torture, many cases. In many cases the people who are detained by the authorities are tortured. Sometimes tortured to make false confessions, or to give information about other activists. And one common form of torture is electric shocks. And we are also aware of people who have just simply disappeared and who remain unaccounted for, and they have probably been killed. And we are aware of some extra judicial executions as well.

Nick Franklin: Now these are obviously very serious things to say. What evidence do you actually have of executions?

Wilfred Wong: Well, we have investigated these reports of executions, in a number of cases carried out by lethal injection. The sources we have found for this information, we believe to be reliable, but obviously we cannot identify them publicly for their own security.

Nick Franklin: But in the incidents of the lethal injection, when three people were killed – where was that, and what actually happened?

Wilfred Wong: The three people were Montagnards who had been arrested for taking part in the peaceful demonstrations in January 2001. They were being kept in a prison and they were executed by lethal injection by members of the Vietnamese Security Forces, and the information we have on this we believe to be, in fact, very reliable, which is why we had no qualms about raising this with the British Government and Vietnamese authorities.

Nick Franklin: Wilfred Wong speaking for the Jubilee Campaign from London. ABC Radio National also raised these specific claims with the Vietnam Government. We were told:

Reading: Vietnam is a multi religious country and 20 million Vietnamese – almost one third of the population – are religious believers. There is absolutely no repression of religions in general and Protestants in Tay Nguyen. All religious activities among the minority people of the Tay Nguyen Central Highlands are taking place normally.

Nick Franklin: But recent Montagnard refugees, interviewed in the United States, say the pattern of persecution and violence continues.

Refugee 1: I have my uncle, he was the pastor, and he very good, most people like him and he’s very nice and let people to understanding to believe God is the truth. And also that he’s arrested by 1975 when Vietnam took over South Vietnam and put him in jail for about 12 years. After he returned back home two or three months, then they put some chemical inside his body, then he died after three months.

Refugee 2: My relatives they tortured, because of their activity for the Montagnard Foundation and because they are demonstrators. They invited them to the police station and beat them and shocked them with the electric baton, and they put them in the prison, and they allowed the Vietnamese prisoners to beat them too.

Refugee 3: They arrested my cousin and they put him in the prison and they shock him with electric and kick him, and they using the gun to …(unclear)..his head.

Nick Franklin: Human Rights Watch has published what it says is a confidential Communist Party analysis of the Montagnard.

Reading: Their strategy consists of taking advantage of the concepts of freedom and democracy and exaggerating a number of our difficulties and shortcomings during the cultural and economic development process, which aims at the unity of the people and the party. They have made the people lose confidence in the party and the authorities.

Nick Franklin: Organised Montagnard demonstrations in February 2001 provoked the biggest backlash by the authorities.

Kok Ksor: After the peaceful demonstration in 2001 many people were arrested and tortured and in prison and many of them – the police were chasing them to arrest them, so they run away and hide in the jungle. But in order to arrest them, so they (the police) went to their families and to their wife to wait there for them to come back home. But during the waiting for them, they just rape their wife and point them with the gun, y’know, who would dare to fight back because there is the gun in their hands and pointed at their heads, so that’s how they force and raped the women.

Wilfred Wong: Now they are outnumbered by the ethnic Vietnamese by about three to one, so they have become a minority within their own land. A systematic attempt to destroy churches and get Christians.

Nick Franklin: Other forms of repression, there have widespread reports of churches being burned down, have you come across that?

Wilfred Wong: Yes, there has been quite a systematic attempt to destroy churches and also to pressure and force the Montagnards, who are Christians, to renounce their Christian faith. In fact it even took on the form of a kind of ceremony where they had to publicly denounce their faith and then drink rice wine mixed with goat’s blood as a kind of crude imitation of what the Vietnamese believe was their pre-Christian animist rituals to prove they have renounced their Christian faith. And this has happened in several parts of the central highlands.

Daniel Alberman: We’ve heard of the destruction of many churches, and it should also be said that there’s destruction of churches deemed illegal that were constructed without official permission throughout Vietnam, it’s not just in the central highlands region. And I think it’s important to make this distinction that the Vietnamese authorities make very clearly between religion that is sanctioned by the state, under organised groups which are sanctioned by the state, and religion which is not sanctioned by the state, and which the authorities are deeply suspicious of. So I think one has to qualify statements on crackdown on religion but certainly the Dega Protestant Church in the central highlands has been the target of some really repressive acts by the authorities, there’s no doubt about that.

Nick Franklin: A Communist Party document of 2001 condemns Dega Protestantism as a vehicle for overthrowing the government.

Reading: The main purpose of the enemy is to take advantage of ethnicity and religion to launch activities aimed at the minorities in the central highlands and combine politics and psychological warfare in order to overthrow the legal government. The purpose is to establish the independent state of Dega, which is also supported from outside, in order to invade our country.

Nick Franklin: Kok Ksor, who runs the Montagnard Foundation from his base in America, is described by the Vietnamese Government as a terrorist. He denies he wants independence for his people.

Kok Ksor: We just asking for our rights as human beings, because Vietnam has signed all the covenants of the United Nations, just like the covenant of civil and political rights and they agree with that but they just don’t expect it. We want to ask the world to push to convince Vietnam to respect the international law, that is all we do, that is not political. We just ask them to give us as human beings the right to live, the right to co-exist. With Vietnam, something like that, but they didn’t want us to live them. They didn’t recognise, they say that we are their citizens, but I didn’t see they recognise us as citizens. We have been living with them for a long time, but they recognise us as their worst enemy on this earth.

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Kok Ksor: Well the greatest hope for the Montagnard is not independence – you say to the Montagnard people the word “independence”, and they don’t understand what it is, but only the people who are educated, but the real villagers, they don’t know about independence because they don’t even know how to read and write their own name. What they really know, what they really want, is freedom. The freedom is …they are free to farm on their land, they are free to go hunting on their land and fishing and they can go anywhere in their area where they live without fearing of anyone to come and arrest them and torture them. That’s the freedom they want. Our people don’t have any word for independence, but we do have the word for freedom.

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Nick Franklin: These days the Montagnard barely register among the more powerful countries of the West. According to Daniel Alberman of Amnesty, most governments have, to say the least, been careful to keep any criticism of the Vietnam Government muted.

Daniel Alberman: Well, rather than talk about whether to introduce sanctions or not, I think in the last few years the Europeans, the Australians, the Americans, many powerful foreign countries have engaged in so-called constructive dialogue with the Vietnamese authorities regarding human rights issues and they have toned down their criticism and rather had a softly, softly approach to discuss areas of mutual concern. And I think we’re concerned after several years of so-called constructive engagement, there have been precious few concrete outcomes.

And we would like to see all the groupings and foreign governments really review their policies of constructive engagement to see whether they are actually getting anywhere. We would question whether there’s been any improvement or any positive outcomes of this constructive engagement.

Nick Franklin: The Vietnam Government, in their blanket rejection of all the allegations raised in this program said:

Reading: There is no such thing as repression of Protestants, torture by police or loss of land by the ethnic minority.

Wilfred Wong: It is a very difficult situation. I think one major piece of assistance that can be given to them is international pressure. That’s why they need the media, governments elsewhere to raise their issue, because a lot of people do not know about the problems of the Montagnards in the central highlands. And, it’s a very hard struggle for them and it will I think help to at least alleviate some of their suffering if the Vietnamese Government know that the international community is very concerned about this issue and is pressurising the Vietnamese authorities to stop their heavy handed crackdown against the Montagnard people.

Nick Franklin: Wilfred Wong of Jubilee. Meanwhile, the allegations of persecution continue, not only in Vietnam, but also across the border in Cambodia, where hundreds of Montagnard refugees are hiding out in the jungle. A Cambodian Opposition MP claims the Vietnam Government is offering a bounty of $66 for every Montagnard handed back. Son Chhay spoke to Encounter from his office in Pnom Penh.

Son Chay: The Cambodian Government authorities are now searching to arrest them so they will get $66 payment from the Vietnamese authorities.

Nick Franklin: Where are they hiding?

Son Chay: In the north-eastern province and we learn that there are about 500 of them and they are hiding in the jungle and they are exposed to malaria and hungry. Y’know this time of the year is the rainy season and many of the children are now starving in the jungle.

Nick Franklin: For Barry Petersen, who recruited Montagnards into a CIA-funded fighting force all those years ago, there’s a strong belief that Australia has a debt to pay to the mountain people.

Barry Petersen: Yes, I think we do. Several Australians worked with the Montagnard during the war and I’m not saying that we all, that they were all like me. I used to refrain from promising anything, but some people, Americans and possibly Australians who worked with them, were apt to make promises and were apt to support them and, you know, their aspirations were built up and then suddenly to be let down when we left the country, it makes me feel bad and it’s left me with quite a hang up.

Quite frankly I think we do owe a debt to the Montagnard but I don’t think that debt should be shown to be greater than what we owe to the Vietnamese. In other words, I don’t think we should treat the Montagnard any differently to the way we treat the Vietnamese in any aid or assistance we give them. I think we should insist that the aid is across the board and covers both the minority groups and the Vietnamese.

Wilfred Wong: These people have their backs to the wall. They’re quite small, there are only about 600,000 to one million. They used to be larger, but they lost 200,000 in the Vietnam war alone, many others have migrated abroad and I think we’re looking at the possible extinction of a community as a whole if the international community does not pay more attention to their situation.

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My Le Thi: Sometimes a couple, like a man and a woman, they communicate to each other through a music piece. Biting strings, then they communicate with the sound, like …(demonstrates) talking through musical strings. I guess they got the tradition from the very beginning, before people had a language.

I just give myself that right, that road, I do whatever I can to bring this culture, to bring the volume, like the voice of this culture, turn the volume up so other people can hear the voice. And hear about them, knowing that they are there, in this world, in the corner, maybe just the edge of the edge of a society, that they are there. They’re struggling for hundreds and hundreds of years, and they still there. They live with nature, as long as the Highlands still there, they will be around So they want people to know, the more people know about them, they get stronger and the more chance for them to develop, the more chance for them to survive in the way that they deserved.

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Nick Franklin: My Le Thi, one of the few Montagnard living in Australia, is working through her art to keep her people’s culture alive.

My Le Thi: I still have hope, yes, of course. The culture is very strong. The music is fantastic, I realise this is such an important heritage, not only in Vietnam, but it belongs to the world as well.

Nick Franklin: On Radio National, this is Encounter. Readings from the Human Rights Watch report on the Montagnards were by Thien Nguyen and Bao Khanh. Readings from Barry Petersen’s book Tiger Men by Ron Minogue. Technical production by Jenny Parsonage. The program was narrated and produced by myself, Nick Franklin.

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Kok Ksor: What they really want is freedom. Our people don’t have any word for independence…but we do have the word for freedom.

Further information:


Music is from the CD "Red Wind", featuring recording of traditional songs from the Vietnamese central highlands.



Presenter & Executive Producer:
Nick Franklin

Producer:
Nick Franklin