Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'land'
Viewing articles tagged 'land'
6 articles
Pushed off, 1954–57
In 1954 the French lost and left. In 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem merged our country into the Republic of Vietnam. From 1956 his land development centres moved Vietnamese settlers onto highland soil in numbers our records put at around 850,000. No government objected, and the word the policy used for itself was assimilation.
The land, and what was planted on it
Vietnam went from a marginal coffee producer to the world's second largest in about fifteen years, on red basalt soil in the Central Highlands. The story of how that happened and the story of what happened to the Dega are the same story told from two ends. Forest cover in the highlands fell from 42.8 per cent in 1990 to 19 per cent in 2020.
Frequently asked
The questions we are actually asked — including the hostile ones, which we would rather answer than leave to be answered for us.
February 2001: the highlands stand up
In February 2001 several thousand Dega walked out of their villages into the provincial capitals of the Central Highlands. They asked for three things: their ancestral land, the freedom to worship, and a homeland. It was the largest open protest by an indigenous people in Vietnam since 1975, and it was answered with thousands of troops, twelve-y...
Dega women, and a record written about men
Among the Rhade and the Jarai, land, livestock and the heirloom jars pass through women. Yet almost every source this library is built from is about men — because soldiers, prisoners and petitioners are who got written down. This page sets out what we can establish, and is explicit about the shape of what is missing.
Bauxite: the plateau as a mine
Under the coffee is the ore. Vietnam holds the world's third-largest bauxite reserves, and almost all of them are under the Central Highlands — 5.4 billion tonnes by the 2007 masterplan, across twenty-five planned mines in Dak Nong and Lam Dong. The projects that followed produced the largest open political argument in modern Vietnam, and almost...
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