The “Others” in Our Community: A view from the Lowlands

A very long time ago, Lac Long Quan – the dragon king from the sea and Au Co – the immortal fairy who lived high in the mountains met, fell in love and got married.  On the day of giving birth, Au Co bore an egg sac from which hatched 100 children who grew up quickly and became as strong as their father and as kindhearted as their mother. Despite their love, Lac Long Quan and Au Co became unhappy. The dragon king yearned for the sea while the mountain fairy always found her heart longing for the highlands. They decided to part and divide their children, of whom fifty would dwell with Au Co in the mountains. Lac Long Quan would lead the other fifty to live along the coasts. They made a promise that despite distance and separation, they will always look after each other and lend a hand should one be in need.

Source : Lac Long Quan and Au Co dividing their children

The children of Lac Long Quan and Au Co are, according to this myth, believed to be the ancestors of all Vietnamese ethnic groups. The fifty children that went with Au Co are called “highlanders” while the other fifty led by Lac Long Quan are called “lowlanders.” The legend has become the pride of Vietnamese people as it implies an unbreakable bond of unity for all Vietnamese. When Ho Chi Minh, the nationalist revolutionary leader of Vietnam, returned to his home country after 30 years being abroad, he wrote a poem that likened Lenin to a river and Marx to a mountain waiting to be “united in the same country” (Vietnamese: Kia suối Lê-nin, đây núi Mác/Hai tay dựng một sơn hà). The road to communism, for Ho Chi Minh, seemed to go from nationalism as he brought home a complex and alien ideology by linking the fathers of communism to a familiar Vietnamese mythical theme – the unification of mountains and rivers from Lac Long Quan – Au Co legend. This recurring theme of “national unity” appeared even more during the Vietnam War when the country was divided in two: North Vietnam backed by the Soviet Union and communist allies and South Vietnam backed by the United States and other anti-communist allies. Lowlanders or highlanders, bounded by their shared identity as “descendants from the Dragon and Fairy,” were ready to fight for a united Vietnam.

However, after the Vietnam War, the split between lowlanders (dominated by an ethnic Vietnamese elite: Kinh people, accounted for 86.2% of Vietnamese) and highlanders (mostly ethnic minorities) became larger. It is not just a geographical division but also a cultural and economic split. The living conditions in the highlands lag behind those in the lowlands, in part because many highlanders live in remote areas and are generally disconnected from the economy. Highlanders also have higher illiteracy and school drop-out rates than the ethnic Kinh majority, some of whom tend to treat the highlanders as an underclass. In the lowlands, highland ethnic minorities are seen by a lot of people as superstitious, backward and primitive while their “slash-and-burn” agricultural practices are regarded as the main cause for the rapid deforestation. Minorities are insufficiently represented in the government; the elevation of Nong Duc Manh (an ethnic Tay) to the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party is an exception. Most highlanders do not speak Vietnamese and have customs of their own. The distance between the highlands and lowlands only contributes to the persistence of societal discrimination against ethnic minorities. 

Source: Highlands

Source (me): Lowlands (Hanoi)

As a consequence, many ethnic groups feel that they are being repressed, and ethnic minority activists started to emerge. Nevertheless, all these protests quieted down when the government arrested the leaders on charges of “causing public disorder” and “undermining the unity policy.” The problem of ethnic minorities, along with Vietnamese fear of Chinese encroachment in South China Sea, has always been central to Vietnamese national-security policy. For many years, the government has tried to address this problem by developing plans to strengthen national solidarity such as population redistribution and political integration. I personally think the gap between two communities has been generally narrowed as a result of government policy to acknowledge and celebrate cultural diversity. Customs and languages of highlanders appear more and more on television, in music and in our textbooks. Nevertheless, most of what I’ve learned in high school about highlanders were through stories of them fighting alongside lowlanders against foreign invasion to gain the right to national self-determination. In all of these stories, the state border is always the most important and relevant dividing line as lowland and highland ethnic groups are united within the frame of the Vietnamese nation.

My Political Identity

Political Identity | Piktochart Infographic Editor

Post-World War I Borders and the Kurdish Question

News source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/turkey-pkk-iraq_55b8aa32e4b0a13f9d1ace1e

In the 19^th century, the tensions in Europe had been culminating as the fear of German expansionism threatened the balance of power in Europe. In the summer of 1914, war finally broke out. The continent was then divided into two armed camps. The Triple Entente was made up of France, Russia and Great Britain; in opposition to the Entente powers was the alliance of Central Powers: Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy. After Russia declared war on Ottoman Empire, it entered the war in October 1914 as one of the Central Powers after three months of remaining neutral. World War I ended with the victory of the Entente and the dissolution of Ottoman Empire. 

The formulation of a postwar division of the Ottoman Empire was discussed between the victors. At that time, Britain already had control of India since 1857 and Egypt since 1888. Middle East lay right in the middle of these two important colonies, and London was ready to claim its spoils of war. Initially, the British government made an agreement with Shalif Hussein bin Ali to revolt against the Ottomans. As an exchange, Britain promised to support his plan of creating an Arab Kingdom in the Middle East. At the same time, Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary of Britain, sent a letter to Rothschild, the leader of the Zionist movement, expressing British’s favour of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” However, behind the scenes, the great powers had a different plan. What came to be known today as the Sykes-Picot Agreement was a secret deal between two diplomats – Sykes of Britain and Picot of France about the future fate of the Arab World.

Source : Sykes-Picot Agreement

The Middle East’s future was then in dispute. The borders of the conquered Ottoman lands were redrawn without the regard for indigenous wishes. The League of Nations managed to create a system of new state entities, whose borders are basically unchanged from their post-World War I creation.

Source : Map of the Middle East today

The boundaries of the Arab World that the great powers divided among themselves left the issues of identities, religions and sects unresolved. When the Allied Powers carved up the Middle East, Kurdistan was erased from the world map. The Kurds, who now live in parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, were denied a nation-state. 

Source: Kurdistan

The Kurdish Question has been the protracted problem of Turkish politics. Even though the Kurds span across three other countries (Iran, Syria and Iraq), the majority of Kurdish people live in Turkey (Source), which gives Turkey a unique position when addressing the Kurdish conundrum. There has always been a deep-seated hostility between Turkish and Kurds. “Non-Turks” were perceived as a threat to a united Turkish republic, and in an attempt to deny Kurdish ethnic identity, Turkish government designated them as “Mountain Kurds” and banned Kurdish names, customs and language. 

Originated in the early 1970s, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) initially aimed for a fully independent Kurdistan and has always been a thorn in Turkey’s side. Its first full-scale insurgency began in August 1984 and ended in 1999. The armed conflict was ignited again in 2004, and in the same year, the organization is designated as a terrorist group by US and NATO. At the end of December 2012, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to start a peace process with the imprisoned PKK’s leader Ocanan. However, the cease-fire appeared to end in July 2015 when Turkey launched air strikes against PKK’s northern Iraqi camps after an IS’ bombing killed Kurdish inside Turkey’s border (Source). Turkey’s air strikes have scuttled peace talks between Ankara and PKK, and in a statement Erdogan told the reporters: “It is not possible for us to continue the peace process with those who threaten our national unity and brotherhood.” (Source) 

Source: Kurds in Turkey celebrate their holiday of Newroz

Even though the Kurds is the fourth largest group in the Middle East (Source), they do not have a self-ruled region for themselves. Ongoing conflicts between Turkey and PKK can be traced back to the Treaty of Lausanne after World War I which settled the borders of Middle Eastern countries. Although the European countries should not be blamed entirely for the tensions that have been flaring between the Turkish and Kurds today, they are still held responsible for drawing the imperial borders without considering carefully the ethnic diversity of the region. The Kurdish-inhabited regions were incorporated into Turkey, and the bitterness between these two ethnic groups has been nourished ever since.

A remapped Middle East?

Where I live. Where they live.

Twisting streets, a churning sea of motorbikes, plastic chairs, beeping horns, amazing coffee, delicious street food, early morning flower parades, etc. – Hanoi can certainly be described with a plethora of things. It is where the 90-percent-humidity weather is blamed for almost everything: from headache, backache, heartache to being tired, being late and so on. Born and raised in this frantic city, I have learned how to blend into this sheer madness and chaos of life.

But if anything Hanoi is an ancient city with a lot of old traditions and practices. Most people in Hanoi, and even in Vietnam, consider ancestor veneration to be of utmost importance. People have altars in the houses to honor and remember their ancestors. The predominant religion in Vietnam is Buddhism, but Catholicism, Protestantism, Caodaism, Hoahaoism and Muslim have their own religious followers in Vietnam as well. However, almost all Vietnamese people consider themselves atheists. Buddhism is indeed influential, but it is viewed more as a philosophy or a way of life or even a study of the mind than as a religion in Vietnam. Of course this greatly depends on how one defines “a religion” in the first place. Nevertheless, it certainly does not influence the political arena. We have a tendency to dissociate religious activities from those of the state.

In the Middle East, on the other hand, the role that religion plays is arguably embedded in the politics of the region. After all, the Middle East is the cradle of three prominent monotheist religions in the world – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Religion has been the heart and soul of Middle Eastern societies for thousands of years. The Iranian Revolution in 1979, Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem in 2000, etc. remind us of the important role that religion plays in politics. States such as Israel rely on religion for national identity, leaders use religion to rally support, radical groups recruit members in the name of religion and politicians cite guidance from religious commandments. Religion does matter, but perhaps not to a degree some people may believe. There is a misconception that religion is responsible for the violent conflicts that are plaguing the Middle East today. But conflicts always result from a cocktail of problems, not just from a single variable or issue.

A hindrance on my path to understand the Middle East lies in the way I have been raised to view religious practices. As mentioned above, religion is indeed present in Vietnam, but Vietnamese do not traditionally consider it as the most important factor in life, let alone in politics.  Middle East Studies does not even exist in my country as the public is generally unfamiliar with the region's cultures and history. Nevertheless, these barriers can be overcome as cultural exchanges can happen every day and the internet also makes it easier for people to get access to information. There is definitely more to Middle East than trouble or violence. It is the multifaceted nature of the cultures in the region that always seems appealing to me.