HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Vietnamese authorities have arrested 15 people with reported links to a Vietnam War-era guerrilla movement and accused them of inciting anti-government protests in the central highlands this month, an official said Saturday.
An official in Gia Lai province, where the arrests were made, said the suspects were former members of FULRO, a group of highland ethnic minorities that fought alongside U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official said police were searching for five others and said they were spreading Protestantism — the religion of many ethnic minority members in the area — and advocating autonomy.
Three days of protests by members of ethnic minority groups in the coffee-growing provinces of Daklak and Gia Lai began Feb. 2. The government closed the area to outsiders, and the U.S. Embassy issued an advisory against travel there.
Confiscation of minority land for coffee plantations has been one sore point, and religion is apparently another. Many ethnic minority members are converts to evangelical Protestantism, and Communist authorities have a record of suppressing religious groups.
Authorities brought in soldiers and riot police to quell the protests, believed to include as many as 20,000 people. Thousands demonstrated in front of the government and communist party buildings in the two provincial capitals, Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot.
The official Vietnam News Agency said Friday that the disputes erupted over long-standing land grievances after two "local provocateurs" were arrested Jan. 29. The agency said they were immediately released after confessing their crimes and asking for leniency.
The Montagnard Foundation — a Spartanburg, S.C-based advocacy group for Vietnam's highland ethnic minorities — said the protests began when two of its workers were arrested, severely beaten and imprisoned in a military camp Jan. 30.
The foundation's director, Kok Ksor, said protesters were also angry over government confiscation of their land to make way for coffee plantations. Vietnam has become the world's second-largest producer of Robusta coffee beans.
The Gia Lai official said the suspects were former FULRO fighters who went through Vietnam's forced-labor "re-education" camps — prisons for loyalists of the former pro-Western regime. FULRO is a French acronym for the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races.
Travel into the area remained restricted Saturday, with checkpoints set up along the major highways leading to Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot, the provincial capitals. Foreigners are barred until Feb. 15.