1. The country is peaceful, but on a quiet night in the early morning of June 11, 2023, dozens of ordinary people with backs burned because of their hard life, suddenly gathered into two groups carrying guns and rushing at the same time to the police headquarters of two communes in Cu Kuin district, Dak Lak province to kill nine people including four police officers, two commune officials and three people, and injured two other police officers. The incident is a serious.
In the middle of the night, three people reportedly died at the shooting scene, certainly not the ordinary people but probably employees working at the public office. If so, the nine dead are all government officials.
Attacking the state public office, directly shooting and killing state officials is of course a wild crime, ignorant of the law, ignorant of morality, unacceptable, and must be handled by the law. But it must be recognized that the gunfire in Cu Kuin on the night of June 11, 2023 is core in cultural depth and social breadth, not just a matter of law. The sound of gunfire was the explosion, the destructive force of social contradictions, the false bell ringing warning the instability in society and the insecurity in the hearts of the people that had spread far and wide to the innocent village and genuine nation.
Although the people who opened fire on government agencies and killed state officials were all ethnic people in the Central Highlands, the incident was not merely an ethnic conflict but also a manifestation in the society that contained contradictions to the point of resistance, one lost one left. The conflict between a weak part of the population and the government always starts from the state’s violent power, on a huge, well-equipped police force, equipped from advanced weapons to thinking equipment, awareness, not knowing the fate of people, not grateful for the people’s cause, not knowing human values, only protecting the ruling party which provides them with priviliges. Having a powerful repressive tool, the state arrogantly imposes the subjective will of the dictatorship, disregarding the simple, normal, and legitimate aspirations and needs of life, material to the spiritual life of the people.
People of ethnic minorities, small and lonely in the Central Highlands have a separate and sacred living space, the space of Gods, and have their own great and valuable property, not only the mountain land. The immense forest with its own unique and unique culture and a free life is also an invaluable asset of thousands of people who are proud to be the children of the Father Mountain, the children of the Mother of the Forest, but are ethnic minorities. The few, living in poverty, dependent on and closely attached to nature, are the weakest group of people, the most lonely, the most despised, lost, repressed, and inhibited the most.
Weak, vulnerable, people have to suffer loss after loss, going from one repression to another into distraught, risking their lives, accepting to give their lives, sacrifice a lifetime at the ultimate loss for an act, a voice of protest.
2. During the time when the French ruled all of Indochina, even though they were colonial invaders, many French rulers had a rich cultural background when they came to the Central Highlands, they immediately recognized the unique features of the ethnic groups in the Central Highlands enriching human society, making people more beautiful and culturally strong. They immediately discovered the very special long-standing culture of the Central Highlands tribes, contributing to the human cultural treasures more shimmering and brilliant.
Cultural intelligences and humanistic souls discovered the beauty of folklore in the Central Highlands, just like Dr. Alexandre Yersin discovered the cool climate of Da Lat and the Central Highlands. Yersin’s discovery about Da Lat’s climate filtered through leaves, filtered through fog, pure and cool led to the decision of Indochina Governor Paul Doumer to build a resort city in Da Lat. Discovering the folklore characteristics of the Central Highlands, the French colonial government had a policy to preserve the cultural space of the Central Highlands and restrict the Kinh people in the lowlands from exploiting the vast and fertile wild forest and creating the risk of turning primeval forests into rice fields, orchards, and Kinh villages, turning grassy hills into bustling cities, all leading to a cultural identity full of ethnic minorities. The Central Highlands is assimilated by the brilliant culture of the Kinh majority.
Culture is not only the sound of a son’s gong, a girl’s dance, the khan singing of the Central Highlands’ old people, culture is also a belief and faith. Believing in Giang, believing in gods, religious faith is a life value of the people of the Central Highlands, creating the world of the people’s souls in the Central Highlands. Sincerely preserving the cultural identity of the Central Highlands, the religious faith of the people of the Central Highlands is also respected. During the French colonial period, people were free to seek their faith and Protestant sects flourished in the Central Highlands.
The policy of restricting foreign entry into the cultural space of the Central Highlands has kept the mountains and forests of the Central Highlands green, and the forest gods and mountain gods still wander back to the communal house, with the stilt houses hiding under the forest canopy.
Only in 1937, Da Lat’s leader Tran Van Ly saw that Da Lat’s land, although fertile but sloping, was not suitable for rice cultivation, but it was a good land for vegetables and fruit trees, Da Lat leader Tran Van Ly suggested to Governor General of Ha Dong Hoang Trong Phu brought Ha Dong farmers who specialize in growing vegetables and flowers to supply Hanoi to Da Lat. From twenty-eight farming families from Ha Dong to Da Lat in 1937, there have been thousands of families growing vegetables, growing flowers, turning the wild hills on the pine hills of Da Lat into vegetable and flower hills.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1954, out of more than a million people who migrated from the North to the South, only more than fifty thousand migrants were brought to the vast Central Highlands. Going to the Central Highlands, but the Northern people migrated only to follow the traffic route from Ho Nai to Da Lat.
People who grew vegetables and flowers from Ha Dong to Da Lat, migrants scattered along Route 20 do not invade the living space and cultural space of the tribes, creating the soul of the mountains and forests of the Central Highlands, creating Highlands culture. Thanks to that, great forests still covered the Central Highlands. The forest soul and cultural soul of the Central Highlands people were still intact.
But after 1975, workers and peasants only needed an advanced degree in political theory from the Nguyen Ai Quoc Party School, they only needed to persist in Marxism-Leninism and only the will to impose the dictatorship and became the ruler of the legendary sacred land of the Central Highlands.
To rule by the Kinh people, there must be a group of Kinh cadres who have a degree in theory from the Nguyen Ai Quoc party school, and have a model of the Kinh’s social institutions in the plains imposed on the Central Highlands. The whole family, the whole village, the cadres ruled from the coastal plain to the Central Highlands, cleared forests to establish villages, and built streets on the land of villages and swidden fields in the Central Highlands.
Their vision is limited, they see only the immediate, not seeing the long-term, no depth of culture, policies, projects to destroy forests to plant rubber and coffee formed in the air-conditioned room of the governing cadres.
Wild capitalists get rich with land and natural resources at night with the rulers, zoning and occupying the Central Highlands on the map.
Rubber companies destroyed hundreds of hectares of rubber plantations. Hundreds of hectares of forests have been lost for golf courses, resorts, and urban areas. Thousands of hectares of forest are submerged under the reservoirs for hydrodams. The deep forests of gods, legends and epics of the Central Highlands quickly disappeared.
In 1954, ethnic groups in the Central Highlands accounted for 85% of the population, 510,000 people out of a total of 600,000 people. That percentage and number in the following years is: In 1976 it was only 69.7% or 853,000 people in the Central Highlands out of a total of 1,225 million people. In 2004, the rate of ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands was only 25.3% or 1,181 million out of 4,668 million inhabitants. (Central Highlands. Vietnamese Wikipedia)
The Kinh have really mastered the Central Highlands. The Kinh people hold power. The Kinh people occupied the land. Next to the rows of stilt houses in the Kinh town on the hillside, next to the clusters of tiled well houses of the Kinh people in the valley are the lonely thatched roofs of bamboo stilts of the people of the Central Highlands. The owners of thousands of generations of the sacred forest of the Central Highlands, of the culture of the Central Highlands, have become losers, and live in exile right on the land of theirs ancestors.
Forests are both a source of material life, a shoot of bamboo shoots, and a honeycomb. It is also a source of spiritual life. High Mountain Father, Broad Mother Forest are the protection, envelopment, the place to live and send back to the people of the Central Highlands. The Central Highlands forest no longer exists. The source of material life no longer exists. The cultural space of the Central Highlands no longer exists. The source of spiritual life no longer exists. No more the spirit of the forest. The spiritual life is gone. Even religious faith is gone!
On the afternoon of March 22, 2023, parishioners in Dak Nong commune, Ngoc Hoi district, Kontum parish were performing a legal Mass as usual when a group of people wearing civilian clothes and police uniforms burst into the church, claiming to be the government officials to disband the ceremony. People who speak Kinh language, with a northern accent, rushed up to the priest’s podium during the ceremony to ask the priest to stop the Mass and go to the police station to work, then took the priest’s Bible, folded it, and carried it away. The person who cut the circuit breaker, cut the power. Religious faith is no longer the soul of the Central Highlands people!
Every ethnic group present in life needs a space for ethnic existence. There is a space for survival, only the lasting strength of the ethnic group, the only way to keep the identity of the ethnic group, and to be the true self. If there is no space for survival, even if there are individuals of the ethnic group present in life, that individual has been assimilated by the culture where he lives, and that ethnicity has already been dissolved.
Ethnic groups in the Central Highlands are in the process of running out of space to survive and are being dissolved. The millennial owners of the land of the Central Highlands, thousands of years of freedom and generosity with friendly forest trees and tolerant forest land must be in pain and desperate to realize the fact that after 1975 they gradually lost everything. Loss of daily living. Loss of cultural value. Lost all faith. That is the deep root of the gunfire Cu Kuin, Dak Lak night of June 11, 2023.
3. The gunfire of Cu Kuin and Dak Lak on the night of June 11, 2023, killing nine people in the peaceful life is a painful failure in the government’s work of ruling the people, and a heavy failure in the task of ensuring self-rule and social safety of the huge police apparatus, which is maximally equipped, and is absolutely taken care of.
When a person fires a gun, the intention and process of the incident take place silently in his mind, inside, it is difficult for outsiders to detect. But a few dozen people acting together is a long process, mobilizing, gathering, organizing, assigning, and preparing with many activities, although stealthy, but must take place in a large space, including the real space on the surface on earth, in cyberspace and in the sky, and take place over a long period of time. Such aggressive activities that the police force spread throughout the area, grasping the area every second, every minute without knowing it, to prevent it. The blood of police officers spilled right in the bedroom of the police headquarters is a defeat. In that failure, four incumbent police officers were killed with no small part of the responsibility. Yet the officers who did not complete the mission were promoted to the rank of military rank as if they had accomplished outstanding feats!
Again mournfully remember three police officers who died in the event that three thousand mobile police surrounded and attacked people in Hoanh village, Dong Tam, My Duc, Hanoi who were sleeping peacefully on the night of January 9, 2020.
People in Hoanh village complain about land, which is a very common and petty civil dispute. Civil disputes must be resolved in court and those who fiercely sue to keep the land that creates a living source for the villagers are all honest people, party members who are active in the party, no one has been prosecuted. No one has been coerced by state violence. But relying on the power of state violence, the police immediately launched a big violent campaign against the people of Hoanh village, broke the door to their bed, opened fire to kill people like rushing into enemy posts, like killing the enemies of the Vietnamese nation, of Vietnamese history!
Armed with modern weapons, actively hitting the people in their sleep, but three police officers were immediately posthumously awarded the merit medal. The people of Hoanh village are all honest people because no criminal has been prosecuted. Hitting the honest people is a feat that has pushed the honest, hard-working people to pay taxes for the state to become the enemy of the state!
Human blood is precious. The blood of police and army soldiers is extremely noble. The people are quiet but delicate, tolerant and fair. The people know well and do not forget each sacrifice for the life of the people and the country. Only those army soldiers and police officers who shed their blood and sacrificed themselves for the people’s life and the country’s life, and who are mourned and grateful by the people, are remembered by the people.
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