This article was originally published on Loa, a news website and podcast on Vietnamese news by Viet Tan. An edited version is published below as part of a content-sharing agreement. Reporting by Chris Lê and Kiên Trịnh.
On January 9, 2020, Vietnamese authorities deployed thousands of police to Đồng Tâm village on the outskirts of the capital Hanoi to solve a land dispute. A clash between residents and authorities followed, and three police officers and two civilians were killed.
The government has barred all independent media from entering the area, leaving state media and social media as the main sources of information. Many netizens are trying to piece together what happened. The Loa team also got together to make sense of what went down. Here’s what we have:
The raid
As 5,000 police and armed forces stormed the village of Hoành in Đồng Tâm commune in the middle of the night of January 9, loudspeakers blared messages to residents — which it referred to as “retaliating forces” — warning them not to “go over the limit with their actions.”
The police’s first stop was the home of Lê Đình Kình, referred to as cụ Kình in his community, a respected 84-year-old village member who long led a local protest movement against corruption. According to the South China Morning Post, a live stream recorded by land rights activist Trinh Ba Tu reported that “[Kinh] was shot twice in the head, once in the heart, and once in the foot. He was shot in front of his wife.”
The military airport
Things weren’t always strained between the government and the people of Đồng Tâm, but tensions began to with the construction of a military airport near their village in 2017 by Viettel, Vietnam’s military-owned telecom company.
All land in communist Vietnam belongs to the state, so technically the government can use it for whatever purposes it wants. But locals say they have farmed the land for generations and were not being properly compensated, the BBC reports.
Even during this contentious time, locals of Đồng Tâm still continued to show support for the government. A photo featured on BBC Vietnamese shows signage created by the community that read “The people of Dong Tam completely trust and believe in the Party vision.”
In fact, cụ Kình, the elder who was killed by the police, has been a Communist Party member for more than 50 years, and also served as the head of the village’s police force.
However, in April 2017, the relationship took a turn for the worse after local authorities started to section off 59 hectares of land for the Viettel project. In a confrontation, the police attacked and broke cụ Kình’s leg which resulted in local residents converging and holding 38 officials and police officers hostage for a week.
The chairman of the People’s Committee of Hà Nội, Nguyễn Đức Chung met with local residents to promise no reprisals and to resolve the land dispute peacefully.
However, in December 2019, Chung issued an order further pressuring the people of Đồng Tâm to relinquish the land.
Village leaders released a call to action weeks before the raid
Residents of Đồng Tâm organized a town hall meeting in late December 2019 and accused Nguyễn Đức Chung of dishonesty and corruption. During the meeting, cụ Kình declared that the people would stand their ground and protect their land.
Three officers and two civilians dead
Authorities shut off the internet and phone connections in Đồng Tâm and blocked roads leading to the village. As a result, there has been a media blackout surrounding the events of January 9, and most information remains unverified, including how three officers were killed during the raids.
Radio Free Asia reported that YouTube issued a strike against its channel regarding a webcast that included news about Đồng Tâm for unspecified violations of the video-sharing platform’s community guidelines.
State media outlet Hanoi Mới quoted a Ministry of Information official stating that Google and Facebook were responsive in government requests to take down content deemed as “fake or inciteful” over the past two weeks. The three Vietnamese policemen who died have been buried with honors in Hanoi. The government blamed the officers’ deaths on “rioters.”
In the end, outlets across the board have extremely restricted access to what happened in Đồng Tâm, leaving more questions than answers.
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Originally Posted: Global Voices