A Tale of the Valiant Fight of Local People in Huong Tra District, Hue City Against Sand Pirates.

Writing in English is not my strong suit, but I will try my best to summarize the article for people unfamiliar with Vietnamese. However, I strongly suggest you to read the article yourselves with the assistance of translation tool. The author has a very compelling jounalistic language which makes reading it is such a treat.

In the context of sand pirates becoming increasingly aggressive in their exploitation of sand in many rivers, which leads to the accelerated erosion of lands around them, people living around the Bồ River began to push back since it started to affect their livelihood and swathes of lands have collapsed. The seemingly innocuous sand extraction from Tuan Hai Company, whose activity is permitted by the local authority, had turned their lives upside down.

Initially, they appealed to the local authority to do something about the problem but there was no change, so they took matters into their own hands and began establishing a team to actively supervise any unusual activities on the river. Once they noticed a boat that sucked the sand outside the legally defined zone, they pursued the boat, forced it to go with them and handed the people inside to the local police force. However, there had been at least 10 sightings of illegal sand extraction activities since the establishment of the supervising team, all of them were handed to the local authority to take care of but nothing changed. They decided to take a more proactive approach when things got too far.

They began constructing bamboo spikes to prevent sand extraction boats from entering. People from other villages where impact of sand extraction could be felt also joined in the endeavor by providing money and manpower. It was a collective effort from the start to the finish, from purchasing blocks of rocks, cutting the bamboos, to securing the bamboo spikes on the river. Men, women, children, and the elderly all participated in the activity. The local authority tried to intervene multiple times by saying that the people were violating the water traffic law and demanding them to have a meeting to lessen the heat, but the villagers refused to budge.

“If we are wrong then you are more than welcome to arrest us. People are ready to be jailed,” they said when confronted by the local authority.

The fight did not stop on the river, they also kept track of illegal activities on the bank. One night they noticed trucks full of sands and handed them to the local authority, but this time they insisted on supervising the process of handling the case themselves.

After 14 days, in response to the heated fight on the Bồ River, the Ministry of Resources Environment opened an investigation (with the supervision of the villagers) and discovered evidence of Tuan Hai Company having been involved in illegal sand extraction. The amount of sand extracted by the company was found to be several times larger than the amount permitted in the licensing record. The company was fined 1.6 billion VND by the People’s Committee and had to take measures to recover the land to its initial state.

The fight against sand pirates did not stop there. Villagers living in the downstream of the Bồ River also had to participate in a similar fight by deploying the same tactics, but on a much larger scale. In May of 2020, they constructed an entire bamboo bridge to prevent sand extracting boats from entering.