There are 54 ethnic groups in Vietnam

The issue of religious involvement is sensitive for the government, which hopes that the United States will ratify a trade pact with its former enemy this year.

Allegations by church groups that Vietnam restricts religious rights could delay this.

The US has a powerful human rights lobby, and many ethnic Montagnards fought alongside US forces in the Vietnam War.

February's wave of apparently co-ordinated protests involved several hundred people in Buon Ma Thuot, the capital of Daklak province, and about 4,000 people in Pleiku, in neighbouring Gia Lai province, officials said.

Religious differences

Minority groups in the central highlands have complained that the government has placed restrictions the practice of Protestantism.

Wanh, speaking to foreign journalists on a government-organised visit to an ethnic village in Gia Lai province, said local communist authorities opposed conversion of the ethnic peoples to Protestantism.

Locals resent the influx of coffee growers

"Only members of the church knew about the programme [for the protests]," he said. "If they adhere to Protestantism, the villagers have to abandon all their cultural values.

"That's why the government doesn't want them to adhere to Protestantism."

All Protestants in the area belonged to illegal underground house churches, he said, since the government had not given approval to build a church,

But the Vietnamese Government has insisted it does respect freedom of religion and that it does recognise the mainstream Protestant church.

Press restrictions

Vietnam's state press has accused a US-based minority exile group, the Montagnard Foundation, of whipping up the violence over land issues.

Minority groups are angry that the government is turning the hill tribes' ancestral forests into the country's largest coffee-growing region. It is also attracting more of the Vietnamese lowland majority to the region.

A ban on foreign visitors to the central highlands has been lifted. The Foreign Ministry arranged a visit for foreign media shortly after a senior US official said lack of independent reporting could complicate ratification of the trade pact by the US Congress.

But local officials have failed to deliver on promises that journalists could meet people involved in the protests. They have closely monitored attempts to interview local people freely and some locals said they were afraid to talk because journalists were being watched.

There are about 54 minority groups in Vietnam, making up about 15% of its population. In 1998, 75% of all ethnic minority people were below the poverty line, compared to 31% for the majority Kihn population.