PLEIKU, Vietnam, March 17 (AFP) - An almost farcical whitewash by Vietnam's communist authorities as they finally admitted foreign journalists to the strife-torn central highlands has failed to hide the intensity of a six week-old wave of ethnic unrest.
Despite massive security, protests by the region's mainly Christian indigenous minorities still grips the countryside, residents said.
Violent clashes rocked Cuu Prong district to the west of this coffee belt town only a week ago.
Protests have swept virtually all of Gia Lai province's 13 districts amid fury among the highlanders over a massive influx of ethnic Vietnamese settlers which saw them reduced to a minority for the first time in the 1999 census.
The authorities took no chances as they prepared to go ahead with celebrations for the 26th anniversary of their capture of the provincial capital at the tail-end of the Vietnam War amid defiant fanfare here Saturday.
Plainclothes security agents launched a massive operation across the town to prevent any repetition of a protest in early February in which thousands poured in from the countryside, sparking violent clashes with police.
But after finally admitting foreign journalists to the region in the face of mounting accusations of human rights abuses, the authorities then reneged on repeated promises to provide access to protestors. A tight programme took journalists only to official meetings and controlled tourist villages.
However, what journalists were able to gather from snatched interviews and unprogrammed stops confirmed some of the concerns about minority rights and religious freedoms.
Such concerns have begun to jeopardise one of the key planks of Vietnam's economic reforms, a trade deal signed with the United States last July which still awaits ratification by Congress.
Residents said outlawed Protestant churches had been instrumental in the wave of ethnic assertiveness among the minorities and were being further targetted because of the unrest.
The churches have won a huge following in recent years because of their preaching in minority languages.
Even the official programme inadvertently let slip that the underground chapels, set up in homes in minority villages, were the target of a clampdown.
"The government banned the house churches," the headman of a model minority village, to which journalists were taken, said bluntly, to the discomfiture of accompanying officials.
"There are only house churches because we have so far not got permission from the government to build proper churches," said Wanh (eds: one name), the chief of De Ktu commune in Mang Hlang district north of here.
Wanh proudly told how his villagers from the Bahnar minority had heeded the government ban, resisting missionary efforts from neighbouring districts.
He insisted the government's opposition to Protestantism was motivated by a desire to preserve the minorities' traditions.
But he went on to add that many elements of the Bahnars' traditional animist religion, such as feasts, sacrifices and traditional medicine, were themselves outlawed as "extravagant or superstitious."
After prompting from provincial officials, Wanh declined to elaborate on a statement that the protests in the region had followed a "church programme."
He eventually admitted he could not name any demonstrator from his defiantly animist village, despite his provincial minders' insistence there were protestors there.
In the impoverished suburb of Khong, an overwhelmingly Protestant village of the Jarai ethnic minority which has been swept up by Pleiku's growth, residents said they had been closely watched by plainclothes security men since the February 2 protest in which some churchgoers had taken part.
"A good 90 percent of villagers worship at a makeshift church they have organized in a house down the road and they are quite fanatical," one resident told AFP.
"The village chief was called in by the security services after the protests to give an account and be reeducated."
The authorities had so far turned a blind eye to the services at the impromptu church.
Residents stressed that Protestantism had provided a conduit for a broader sense of minority grievance about the loss of their lands which had deepened a gulf with Vietnamese settlers.
"They come into our cafe sometimes to drink coffee but they never talk to us at all," said one of the few Vietnamese residents.
"They come here because they don't know how to make coffee themselves, even though they grow it," quipped his wife, with a condescension typical of Vietnamese attitudes towards the minorities.
The cafe owner said he had overheard customers demanding "self-determination and the right to run their own lives."
"Some of them were insisting that they should have all of their land back, right across the four provinces of the central highlands," his wife said indignantly.
Even the authorities acknowledge they are still far from resolving a host of grievances among the minorities, who have been marginalized by the clearance of the province's forests for settlers to grow cash crops.
"Some of these problems can be settled right away, but others will take some time," said the deputy chairwoman of the provinces's ruling people's committee, Nay Lan, herself an ethnic Jarai.
But flying in the face of the evidence of the security clampdown all around her, she insisted the only protest had been that in the provincial capital on February 2, which had only been "a small-scale affair."
Her colleague Nguyen Vi Ha showed journalists what he said was evidence that the protest was incited by saboteurs based in the United States.
The official media charged last week that documents seized on two Jarai men arrested near the Cambodian border in late January proved they were agents of the South Carolina-based Montagnard Foundation Inc, a minority rights group led by US citizen Ksor Kok.
But privately, an official acknowledged to AFP that the two men were just ordinary farmers and that the accusation they were foreign agents was a diversion from the underlying problem.
"It will take decades to overcome the animosity of the ethnic minorities towards the Vietnamese," he said.