SON LA (Vietnam): Lo Van Huong’s house is better than most in his poor northern Vietnamese village, with rough concrete flooring, a refrigerator, fan, a quadruple bed for the whole family and a bamboo attic.

The house seems larger than others in the village of 63 newly-built residences nestled in a shallow valley, but Huong is not happy.

This just isn’t home.

Huong, 39, and the others in his village are among an initial 4,000 people recently relocated to make way for construction of the country’s largest-ever infrastructure project, the Son La dam and hydroelectric development.

A total of 91,000 people are to be removed from the areas to be flooded by 2010. Most of them are members of ethnic minority groups, including the Thai minority to which Huong belongs.

The government has ordered the relocation of more than 8,600 people from the site of a reservoir by November when the blocking of the Da River is to begin.

“The state arranged for us to come here, it was not our choice,” says Huong, the local Communist Party chief.

He spoke during a rare visit by a foreign reporter to the area in Son La province about 100 kilometres east of Dien Bien Phu, where Vietnamese communists defeated French forces about 50 years ago.

Resting mostly on stilts, the wood and bamboo houses are similar to those in the old village, with the ground floors used as storerooms or sheds for cattle and poultry.

They line both sides of a new road that winds its way for miles and miles across the valley.

In distance it is not far to the old village, just about 30 kilometres, but in a culture rooted to the land it might as well be 1,000 kilometres away. The uprooted villagers have left behind their ancestors’ graves, an activist in Hanoi said.

The new village, known as Muong Chum, looks cramped.

“We have less than half the amount of land we had in the village where we lived previously,” says Huong, one of the few adults in Muong Chum who can speak Vietnamese.

“Our income will go down drastically because the land under cultivation has been reduced,” he says.

Mindful that an official from the provincial foreign affairs department is present, he adds: “Everyone wants to have more land but conditions in this district do not permit that, so we have to accept what we have now.”

The group, who speak an ancient form of Thai, settled in the region between the 11th and 14th centuries.

An official of the ministry of agriculture and rural development in Hanoi, who asks not to be named, voices disquiet over the mass resettlement.

“They are being forced to leave the habitat and environment that they had been used to for a long time and to give up all of a sudden their old customs and activities,” the official says.

“They are being made to sacrifice in the name of national interest.”

Vu Duc Thin, deputy general director of the state-run company Electricity of Vietnam, in Son La, admits that resettlement leads to hardship, saying, “when they have to leave their homeland it would hurt...”

He argues that the people are currently poor and with government help after resettlement, they would be better off.—AFP