Villagers near Hanoi on Saturday released 19 officials they had held hostage for about a week, ending a rare standoff that underscored tensions over land rights in the country.
Thirty-eight police and security officials were captured about 10 days ago in Dong Tam village, 40km south of the capital, Hanoi, in the dispute, advocates said.
State-run media outlets said that 16 of the hostages were later released and that three had escaped.
The remaining 19 were released after a meeting between the villagers and Hanoi’s top local official, Nguyen Duc Chung, the state-run newspaper Tuoi Tre said in an online report.
Photographs circulating on social media and the Web sites of state-run newspapers appeared to show hundreds of villagers at the scene.
State media outlets have reported that the disputed 60 hectares were originally earmarked for a military airport that was never built.
The land was transferred in 2015 to Viettel, a military-backed telecommunications company, for a defense-related project, the reports said.
However, Tran Cuong, 40, a Dong Tam resident, on Saturday said by telephone that the authorities had allowed 14 local families to build houses on the land after the airport project was canceled and that the exact ownership of the land was still unclear.
“If it really is the military’s land, they need to show us some kind of paperwork,” Cuong said.
On Saturday in Dong Tam, Chung promised the villagers that authorities would investigate the dispute and solve it within 45 days, Cuong said.
“We’re happy that our voices were heard,” Cuong said. “It’s been a frustrating few days, but now the problem will be solved in a positive way.”
Vietnam allows its citizens to own land on a quasi-private basis, but at the same time, all land is technically state property. Villagers are often evicted from farmland to make way for industrial or residential projects linked to state-affiliated companies.
The government reformed its land law in 2013 in an attempt to reduce unrest over such evictions, but analysts say the changes were largely cosmetic and did not address many underlying problems.
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