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Ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities and combating the exploitation of ethnic issues in our country (Part 2 and end)

23/8/17

Ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities and fighting against the exploitation of ethnic issues: An issue of special importance in national construction and defense
In order to improve effective settlement of this problem, it is necessary to pay attention to the following issues:
First, it is important to fully understand the role and important position of ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities in addressing ethnic issues in Viet Nam.
Ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities is of special importance to the stability and development of the country. It is governed by geopolitical, economic, humane and environmental conditions of ethnic minority areas, the complexity of the ethnic issues due to historical reasons, limited investment resources, and barriers of customs, habits and development levels, especially sabotage activities of hostile forces. Therefore, ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities cannot be implemented quickly by some programs or projects or only through administrative interventions, but through integrated solutions, with short-term, medium-term and long-term development steps; the previous stage creates premise for the following stage. This is a long, arduous cause which needs big investment resources, including human, financial and material resources, the participation of the political system and enterprises of all economic sectors, mutual assistance for development of ethnic groups to arouse self-reliant spirit of ethnic group themselves.
Second, ensuring the rights of ethnic groups is an intersectoral/multisectoral issue, ranging from economic, political, cultural-social, environmental-ecological, international relations, and national defense and security issues.
Economic rights are an issue that needs to be addressed first, as they relate to the rights to livelihood and development, equal access to resources. Political rights are manifested in the rights to equality of citizens in election, candidacy, engagement in state management, policy-making agenda, in which source creation, training and retraining, placement, use and rational structure of ethnic minority cadres in the political system play a particularly important position. Cultural rights do not only imply preservation and promotion of national cultural identity, but also relate to the most fundamental issues for the maintenance and development of the national community. Environmental and ecological issues are closely related to the rights of people to protect the living space and development of the community. The issue of the rights of ethnic minorities in the modern world is no longer confined to national borders, but transnational, including in international political-legal documents.
Guaranteeing the rights of ethnic minorities in Vietnam is the work of many entities including the Party, State, Fatherland Front, socio-political organizations, social organizations, businesses of all economic sectors and the whole social community. It is also the settlement of relations between respect for universal values prescribed in the international conventions that Vietnam has committed, taking into fully account special characteristics in ensuring the rights of minorities in Vietnam.
Third, the relationship between the rights of ethnic members and the rights of ethnic collective. This is a very basic relationship in the process of ensuring ethnic rights and combating the exploitation of ethnic issues of hostile forces. The individual rights of people of all nationalities are equal before the law, unifying individual rights and ethnic collective rights of the national community placed in national-ethnic rights. Equality of human rights is enshrined in the Constitution of 2013 and other laws. However, due to low starting point, geographical conditions and language barriers, there has been limitation to the exercise of ethnic minorities’ rights. Therefore, ensuring this right must be prioritized in development policies. All rights from political rights, cultural rights, the right to access to development resources, and the right to security and development can be exercised in two forms: direct and indirect. Political rights are exercised in the form of direct democracy or representative democracy. While ethnic groups scatter and mix and ethnic minorities have very different population levels and sizes, representative democracy plays a very important role in ensuring the political rights of ethnic minorities through the selection and placement of eligible representatives of ethnic groups into the political system at all levels. Representative democracy has the advantage of selecting representatives to join the political structures that direct democracy cannot do and thereby overcome the big differences of population levels and sizes among ethnic groups of which some have less than 10,000 people. Through the promotion of representative democracy, ethnic minorities, especially ethnic minorities with small population, exercise their rights to political inclusion, thereby reflecting the will of people of different ethnic groups, integrating their interests and aspirations in working agenda, policy-making process as well as effectively implementing policies.
The recent election results of the National Assembly, and People's Councils showed the rights to political representation of ethnic minority communities were ensured. On 9 June 2016, the National Election Council announced a resolution on the results of the election to the 14th National Assembly. Accordingly, out of 496 deputies 89 are ethnic minority deputies, equivalent to 17.30% of the elected representatives. During the last four National Assembly legislatures, the proportion of National Assembly deputies from ethnic minorities was 15.6% to 17.27% (compared to 14.3% of ethnic minorities in the country’s total population. Of the 500 deputies to the 13th National Assembly, 78 were ethnic minority people from 29 different ethnic groups in 26 provinces and cities (accounting for 15.6%). In the 2011-2016 legislature, 688 ethnic minority people were elected to the provincial People's Councils, accounting for 18%; 4,237 were elected to the district People’s Councils, accounting for 20.1%; 62,383 people were elected to the communal People’s Councils, accounting for 22.46%. The number of ethnic minority deputies to the 12th National Assembly was 87, accounting for 17.6%, to the 13th National Assembly was 86, accounting for 17.2%. Thus, ethnic minority deputies always account for a large percentage of the total number of deputies in terms of total population. According to a census as of 1 April 2009, the population of Vietnam was 85,846,997, including 54 ethnic groups and foreigners living together, the Kinh group boasted 73,594,427 people, accounting for 85.7%, ethnic minorities made up 14.3% of the total population.
Fourth, on resolving the relation between human rights with civil rights, ethnic rights with national rights of ethnic minorities. This is a very basic, important relation that needs to be fully understood and strictly implemented in the process of ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities and combating the exploitation of national issues. Quite a few ethnic minorities, especially those who often migrate across borders, only respect ethnic and ethnic minority rights, and attach less importance to citizen and national rights. This is often taken advantage of by hostile forces, exaggerating ethnic identity, lowering or denying citizen awareness, provoking extreme nationalism, and separatism. In Vietnam’s history, ethnic groups have formed and developed national and ethnic consciousness "all Vietnamese descendants are brothers and sisters", and defined "Vietnam is a common country"(5) as President Ho Chi Minh affirmed in his Letter to the Congress of Southern Ethnic Minority Groups in Play cu (April 1946). This unites the nation in the cause of national construction and defense to build the country of Vietnam with its territory and multi-ethnic structure as today. Consequently, the education of citizenship and national spirit to ethnic minorities is a particularly important task in the process of securing the rights of peoples. People of any ethnic groups in today's world must settle in, live and work in certain national territories, exercise their rights and obligations toward a state and nationality. It is living in a national territory and under the control of a national state that the members of that nation become citizens and have conditions to exercise their legitimate rights and obligations. Hence, the unification of national and ethnic consciousness with citizen awareness, between human rights and citizen rights, between rights and obligations are very fundamental issues in the process of ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities.
Fifth, on the relations between commonality and special features in ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities in Vietnam. Commonality comes from the universal values of human rights, of people coming from either ethnic minority groups or majority groups, large-population minority groups or small-population ethnic groups, especially the right to security and development. The special features derive from the characteristics of ethnic issue and ethnic relations, from the level of development of each ethnic group and of the nation, from the cultural identity of ethnic minorities in the country. These features can be considered at both the national, regional, and local levels. At the national level, the State recognizes full national rights in the Constitution and laws; appropriate structure representing ethnic groups in the National Assembly, Government, ministries/sectors, ensures the right of ethnic minorities to participate in policy development and implementation. However, it is at the regional and local levels that the diversity of ethnic groups and local groups can be manifested in the implementation of policies to ensure the rights of ethnic minorities. Under the context of a single state model, it is necessary to decentralize the formulation of local policies in order to ensure full account of local and ethnic identity in each management and development policies, in the structure of local political system, and further more to better ensure the rights of ethnic minorities. In localities, suitable management and development models can be chosen depending on the size of the ethnic population, the intermingling of ethnic minority and majority ethnic groups, of local ethnic minorities and immigrating ethnic groups, of large-population ethnic minorities and small-population ethnic minorities. At present, in all communes and villages, ethnic minority villages, state institutions have been established with fairly complete apparatus. But this cannot lead to negligence of customary law, traditional social institution in social management, and local cultural identity preservation. Traditional social institutions always exist in parallel with state institutions, even in places where traditional social institutions have a profound influence on the lives of ethnic minorities. In the current state management system, a village is considered a residential unit, a grassroots social unit but not an administrative level. Each village has a leader with the title of "village head", both in compliance with state law and in accordance with the customary law governing the management of residential units, even people. In some places, people often voluntarily obey customary law rather than legal sanctions. Therefore, paying full attention to local and ethnic characteristics in each management and development policy besides strengthening the central administration's management are major issues that need to be addressed in national policy. 
Ensuring the rights of ethnic minorities and fighting against the exploitation of ethnic issues are major issues that need to be fully understood and addressed in the implementation of ethnic policies in our country today.


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