Mass Violence, Ethnic Conflict and the Expanding State in the Vietnamese Highlands: The Sơn Hà Revolt as Event and Memory
Résumé
The Son Ha Revolt was an incident of mass violence that took place in Son Ha district, Quang Ngai province, Vietnam over a period of three days from 25 January 1950. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research undertaken in 2017-2022, the authors describe the violence – a massacre of Kinh civilians perpetrated by members of the Hrê ethnic group – as a historical event. They examine its causes in the politics of revolutionary Vietnam: the encroachment after 1945 of the nation-building efforts of Democratic Republic of Vietnam state on the economic and political interests of local Hrê elites. The pre-colonial non-state system of rule by Hrê elites had been maintained by the French colonial administration, which practiced indirect rule over this ethnic minority. The 1950 revolt was an expression of those elites’ rejection of the newly established Vietnamese state’s policy to undermine the elites and establish direct rule. The study’s final section traces the evolution of the memory of the violence in social and official contexts through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.