Shootout Makes Land Disputes Vietnam’s Priority: Southeast Asia

First came the police and men in uniforms, then the beatings and the bulldozers, said Nguyen Thi Kiem. Within hours, her home and 165 others had been razed -- four generations of rice farms reduced to flattened earth.

“They came and forced us off,” said Kiem of the police and other officials who ejected residents of her village on the outskirts of Hanoi on April 24 to make way for a new suburb. “That is my home they are taking away. Now I have nothing.”