GENEVA (Reuters) - A Vietnamese human rights group Thursday accused the country's Communist authorities of persecuting ethnic minorities by seizing their ancestral lands and forcibly sterilizing women.
Minority hill tribes, who protested earlier this year over land and religious rights, are a primary target of repression, a report by the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights said.
"The Vietnam Committee is concerned that ethnic communities in Vietnam are suffering from a deliberate and systematic policy of discrimination which includes expropriation from ancestral lands, religious persecution, arbitrary arrest, disappearances and the forced sterilization of women," the report said.
"This policy, which in 2001 led to the most serious outbreak of popular unrest ever known in unified Vietnam, is a grave violation... of the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination," it added. Vietnam is one of 157 states to have ratified the 1969 treaty guaranteeing freedoms.
The report was issued in Geneva, where the U.N. Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination Thursday wound up a two-day examination of Vietnam's rights record.
The Montagnards, an ethnic minority of the Central Highlands who fought alongside U.S. forces during the Vietnam War, were perceived as a threat to internal security, the group said.
The Vietnam Committee accused Hanoi of sending thousands of soldiers and militia to the Central Highland provinces of Gia Lai, Daklak and Kontum since the protests.
"Hundreds of Montagnards were beaten by police and many arrested in the wake of these demonstrations," it said. Martial law reigned in the Central Highlands and Montagnards were now fleeing across the border into Cambodia, it added.
The U.N. committee of 18 independent experts repeatedly questioned Hanoi's delegation about treatment of the country's 50 minority groups, including reported forced sterilizations, according to a U.N. summary of the debate.
Vietnam's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Nguyen Quy Binh, assured the U.N. body that his country rejected all forms of racist violence or discrimination.
Its 77 million people enjoyed freedom of religion, and land allotment to ethnic people was a "priority," he said.
The government did not force people to refrain from having more children, but having more children had a negative effect on families as it cut their benefits, Nguyen said.
15:22 08-09-01
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