Farmer's fight highlights Vietnam land crisis

Vietnam: A Vietnamese fish farmer who used a shotgun and landmines to resist forced eviction has become an instant symbol of soaring public discontent over land rights in the communist nation.

Doan Van Vuon and his family injured six policemen in the shootout last month and he and three relatives have been in detention ever since.

But their rare act of defiance triggered an outpouring of support -- even from one of the most unlikely defenders, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.

Vuon's forced eviction and the destruction of his house on the outskirts of Vietnam's third-largest city Haiphong were "illegal", Dung said recently, vowing to prosecute the corrupt local officials responsible.

The prime minister's intervention shows top officials are aware of how explosive the issues of land confiscation by local authorities and inadequate compensation payments have become in Vietnam, analysts say.

The country embarked on its first steps towards a market economy in the late 1980s. In 1993, Vietnam allowed citizens to acquire "land use rights" and handed out 20 year leases, but land is still officially owned by the state. This has left millions of rural tenants like Vuon vulnerable to the whims of local officials, who can reclaim land for vaguely-defined "public interest" reasons, which experts say leads to widespread local corruption.

With Vuon's case, "you have a paradigm of everything that is wrong with the land tenure system," David Brown, a retired US diplomat who served in several posts throughout Southeast Asia, told AFP.

More than 70 percent of all complaints lodged with authorities nationwide concern land -- and the problem looks set to get worse when the 20-year leases expire in 2013.

"This is basically a make or break issue for the regime," Brown said, warning that the government had limited scope to tackle the root cause of land disputes. A constitutional amendment, which could legalise private land ownership, or an overhaul of the land laws to allow for longer leases, is tricky and neither are likely to be passed the next year, said Vietnam scholar Carl Thayer.

"You are dealing with an explosive issue that could divide the country. You wouldn't expect many people to take up weapons (like Vuon) but you do get riots, burning district offices, large groups of people showing up in Hanoi." In 1997 discontent erupted over land in northern Thai Binh province, and tens of thousands of people joined protests, during which local officials were attacked and scores of police stations and local government offices were set ablaze. "Thai Binh province would weigh on everyone's minds," Thayer said.

More recently, thousands of demonstrators held peaceful protests in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007 opposing the seizure of land for a shopping centre. Smaller peaceful protests over land are regularly reported in the country's major cities. AFP