Nhung Nguyen

Abstract
This paper aims to indicate the underlying issues and the source of conflict in the case “The replacement of 6700 trees in Ha Noi” in 2015. This was the local government’s scheme to replace the old, broken, and decaying in the capital city. However, this scheme faced resistance from civil society due to its transparency of implementation. The paper argues that the conflict in Ha Noi is a non-violent conflict, which was caused by the incompatibility amongst basic human needs. The paper, hence, first presents the main actors including the local government and regular citizens. Besides, the role of the sub-actors such as civil society organizations (CSOs), and the enterprises sponsoring the cost of the scheme cost will also be taken into account.

Additionally, social media and mainstream journalism are considered mediators of the conflict. Secondly, this paper aims to indicate the two main dynamics of the conflict with respect to (1) the conflict of whether or not the trees should be replaced and (2) the conflict of how the scheme had been implemented. Finally, the research seeks to explain the root causes of the conflict concerning economic interest, power abuse, and non-transparent urban management.
In addition, the paper chooses to explore the conflict between the local government in Hanoi and its citizens at the local community level. This analysis sheds light on how (1) the conflict has impacted people in realizing their roles in the practice of democracy and public debates, and (2) social management and how it has impacted the local government in taking citizens’ opinions into consideration of urban management.

Introduction
On March, 19th 2015, workers began to use the bucket lifts to chop down the first tree on the Nguyen Chi Thanh Street, Ha Noi. This activity was under the “Scheme of replacement and regeneration of trees in Hanoi 2015.” However, facing the extreme criticisms from the people, the president of the Hanoi’s People Committee (HPC) Nguyen The Thao directed the Hanoi Department of Construction (HDC) and the related divisions to pause the scheme, on March 20, 2015, according to N. Yen, Khanh Vy, and Viet Ha (2015). Furthermore, on March, 22, 2016, the President required the director and vice director of the HDC to suspend those who did wrongdoings in implementing the project from work, including the heads, vice heads, and the officers of the division with related responsibilities to the Scheme (Vietnamnet, 2015). As a consequence, a vice director, a head of a division, and 2 division-level officers have been suspended from work.
Related to this scheme, there is also the debate as to which family the newly replaced trees belong. In this debate, the local government asserted that they used Manglietia fordiana (the family is now on the Red List of Threatened Species of International Union for Conservation of Nature); however, scientists argued that the Magnolia insignis Manglietia phuthoensis were used. This debate surrounding the two different tree families lead to the debate on the actual budget had been mobilizing for the project (My An, nd & Phung, 2015). In other words, by claiming of using different trees, the government can pay less for buying new trees than they need to. Furthermore, some scientists from the University of Forestry were criticized for speaking about the scheme and the determination of tree family. On March 25, 2016, the rector of the university stated that the Hanoi police officers were required to punish those who provide information about the scheme to journalists. This causes by the efforts of the local authorities to stop the leak of information about the cheating on tree family to the public. Therefore, the public was highly critical of the rector’s statement (VnExpress, 2015).
In addition, another by-product conflict of this incident regards the question about where the money of selling the felled trees goes. As this scheme was implemented under the pretext of “social mobilizing,” the local authorities can not only save money for scheme implementation but also earn from selling old trees. Social mobilizing is the methods of the government in order to ask for the contributions of the private sector to the public construction and services. By doing so, the private sector can use those construction works and services as the activities of corporate social responsibilities (CSR). In this method, the government will plan the project; the private sector will pay for the project implementation. However, people were questioning the management of this money.
This paper will present the primary causes for the conflict in Hanoi, which were economic motivation, power abuses, and non-transparent urban management. These main causes had violated the people’s freedom needs, led to the strong resistance in order to prevent the local government from chopping down the trees.
Conflict analysis theories used to explain the Hanoi incident 2015
Beginning in 1976, scholars of conflict analysis, such as Lewis A. Coser, John Burton, and Edward Azar, have asserted that “basic human needs” are the root of each and every violent conflict around the world.
In accordance with these scholars, Johan Galtung has contributed to this school of thought by arguing that human needs are the source of social conflicts. Furthermore, he categorizes needs into four categories: Survival, Well-being, Identity, and Freedom. First, survival needs refer to one’s need for protection against individual or collective violence. Well-being needs, secondly, refer to one’s need for nutrition, water, movement, and protection against illness. Identity needs, thirdly, refer to a need for self-expression, happiness, affection, self-actualization, social transparency, belonging, and a sense of purpose. Finally, freedom needs refer to the person’s need to make decisions concerning one’s way of living, choice of places being able to visit, freedom to choose one’s occupation and being able to receive as well as express information and opinion (Thapa, 2016).According to Galtung (1996 and 2000), no single need is more important, more ‘basic’ than the other needs. Moreover, he assumed that as long as one’s basic needs are not being met, conflict will continue.
To achieve peace, the basic needs of all the people living in the area must be met, and no single basic need can be sacrificed at the expense of having other needs met. For instance, even if one’s basic survival needs are being met; one can still be fighting for identity and freedom needs. This failure to meet these needs contributes to the process of struggling for political, economic, and social freedom all over the world, especially in the countries where the patriotic or single party regimes are applied. In regards of the case of 6700 tree replacement, the main conflict can be seen as the needs of freedom in participating into urban management not being met.
The case of 6700 tree replacement- conflict of freedom needs
The actors of the conflict
In this case, there are two main actors which are the local government and the citizens. Regarding the local authority, the HPC is “an executive organ of the Municipal People’s Council. As a municipal state administrative agency, it is in charge of executing the Constitution, laws, the Government’s documents, and resolutions of the Municipal People’s Council” (Vietnamplus, 2010a). The Committee assigned the implementation of the scheme to the HDC. HDC is “a professional agency that counsels and assists the HPC in performing state administrative functions regarding construction, construction management, construction materials, housing and offices, urban technical infrastructure, infrastructure of industrial zones, export processing zones, economic zones and high-tech zones, urban development, and real estate” (Vietnamplus, 2010b).
According to treepeople.com, there are 22 different top benefits that trees brought to people, including combating climate change, cleaning the air, providing oxygen, cooling down the streets and atmosphere, saving water and preventing water pollution, shielding people from ultra-violet rays, reducing violence, marking seasons, creating economic opportunities, bringing diverse groups together, providing canopy and habitat for wildlife, providing woods, increasing business traffic and property values, and so on.
The people of Hanoi have considered the roles of trees in the city as “offering the welcome refuge from rain and sun to the teeming street traders and many others taking advantage of the kind of walkable space that is rare in other big cities in the region. They are also a source of pride and aesthetic pleasure, most spectacularly in the much-photographed flame trees’ red bloom” (Financial Time, 2015). Moreover, on UNESCO’s list of the Cities for Peace Prize, Hanoi is ranked as laureate in 1998-1999 (Unesco, n.d.). This has led to the people’s sense of pride for their city.
Additionally, there are two main sub-actor groups in this conflict with respects to the CSOs and the enterprises. The roles and the involvement of these two sub-actors will also be indicated in the next session of the paper.
The mediators
The media and social networks and civil society organizations (CSOs) are two more groups that have been considered as mediators in this conflict. Within this context, the roles of media, including social and mainstream media, and the CSOs are conspicuous. Thousands of articles have been published concerning the 6700 tree replacement scheme. Google lists 80,500 results for “6700 cây xanh ở Hà nội” and 333,000 for “6700 tree replacement.” Moreover, numerous networking sites, Facebook groups, and pages have been registered and are actively working to ask for pausing the project. The CSOs have also actively participated in informing, networking, and mobilizing people. For instance, the Institute for Studies of Society, Economics, and Environment (iSEE) is on of the most active CSOs in supporting the social media and civil society in this conflict by supporting the leaders of the facebook group and mobilizing the offline social movement on March 23, 2015 to protest against the scheme (Le, Doan, Nguyen, and Mai, 2015). Professor at City University of Hong Kong Jonathan London said that the activities of the groups “Vi mot Ha noi xanh” (For a green Hanoi) and the can be considered as “signals of a civil society that is gradually maturing (iSEE, 2015). These can be seen as the mediator of this conflict.
The dynamics of the conflict
Based on the theories of human needs as the source of conflict, this paper argues that freedom needs are the main cause of this incident. In tracking the whole process of the conflict (March 2015- May 2015), there appears to be two main conflicts dominating the incident which are (1) whether or not the trees should be replaced and (2) how the scheme was implemented.
Looking through the lens of freedom needs, the first angle of the conflict to consider is the question of whether or not the trees should be replaced. In the Thanh Nien newspaper, Le Van Duc, the Director of the HDC writes, “There are 381 trees on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street, including 228 Alstonia scholaris, 81 acacias, and the rest belonged to different tree families. Due to the differences of tree families on the street, the Department has proposed to replace all these trees with Manglietia fordiana, and the HPC has approved this.”
However, this project has faced strong opposition from the Hanoi people. The civil society and scientist community raised a totally different voice concerning the necessity of the project. There are numerous activities directed towards countering the decision of the authorities. For example, on March 20th, 2015, about 500 people wearing special T-shirts and carrying banners saying “Tree Hugs Hanoi” held hands outside a park Sunday morning to protest a government plan to chop down more than a quarter of the city’s trees (VOA, 2015). The Centre of People and Nature (PAN) and The Centre of Communication and Community Education organized the workshop “From Scheme of 6700 trees, reviewing the Hanoi’s tree plan” on March 23, 2015. Mr. Nguyen Lan Dung, the President of the Viet Nam association of Biological research emphasized: “6700 trees are equal to 1/7 total amount of trees in the central urban of Ha Noi. He also proposed that the Government Inspectorate of Vietnam investigate this incident.
On the other hand, the conflict and the cause of the incident in Ha Noi in 2015 can also be considered from the angle of how the scheme should be implemented. Furthermore, there are two main needs of the people concerning the implementation of the scheme which are (1) the fact that people need to be asked for their opinion about the scheme before the scheme implementation and (2) the fact that people want to know where the felled trees are going.
Regarding the people’s need to be asked before implementation of the scheme, on March 19th, 2015, the state-owned company Hanoi Green Tree Park Limited Company (Hanoi Parkco), raised 150 boards of “public consultation” in order to ask people about this plan. However, many people living on the streets affected by the project argued that most of the “public consultation” board had been hanging on the decaying or broken trees. The people want the government ask them about the all the trees rather than just ask them about the tree obviously needed to be replace (Minh Duc, 2015). According to the Petrotimes online newspaper, “there are 2000 trees that had been cut off in a few days, many of them are valuable old trees” (Nguyen, 2015)
Secondly, people want to know where the money goes by asking two main questions: (1) to whom is the government selling those felled trees? and (2) what kind of trees are actually used to replace the felled trees?
With respects to the question that people want to know to whom the government is selling those felled trees, this question first emerged from a press conference about the Scheme of replacement and regeneration of trees in Hanoi 2015. Nguyen Quoc Hung, vice president of the HPC stated that the President of the HPC had decided to halt the project due to the social opposition. “The scheme of tree replacement is a rightful undertaking; however, the urgency of the sponsor and the lack of transparent information lead to the opposition of the people,” Hung said. Journalists also found out that the decision of cutting trees had been signed by Hung. However, the press conference was considered as “one-way information,” in which journalists were allowed to freely ask but Hung did not respond and left the conference earlier than other attendants (Minh Duc, 2015; Nam Phong, 2015a; and Trong Phu, 2015).
In addition, the total budget for this scheme had been mobilized from sponsors that are large enterprises in Viet Nam. The director of Parkco said that “The choices of tree families belonged to the sponsors; the company has no responsibility in this.” By contrast, the representative of the VPBank confirmed that the bank had no requirements on which kind of trees should be planted. This responsibility belonged to the authorities because the sponsor have enough neither knowledge nor the authorization to decide, as reported by Infonet in 2015.

Discussions
Conflict, of course, can be seen as a vital element of the political, economic, and social life. In some cases, conflict can also be the motivation for changes and development. To resolve the conflicts, the main causes should be analyzed and assessed. For the case of the 6700 tree replacements in Hanoi, there are seemingly three main root causes:
First cause is the economic interest underlying the scheme. Even though the authorities are assigned to manage the whole amount of trees in the urban districts of the cities, this scheme can bring economic benefit for the local government. Particularly, the scheme was carried out under the method of “social mobilizing,” in which the local government planned how many trees, which trees on which streets would be felled, what kind of tree would replace the felled trees, and when the scheme would be implemented. Then they asked for enterprises to sponsor and pay for the new trees, the labour, and the equipment needed for tree replacement. This is another form of PPP (Public-Private- Partnership). This method is based on the contribution of the enterprises to public construction or services, thereby helps to save the state budget. However, there is another economic benefit which is the money earned from selling the felled trees. Most of them are old, have large diameters, and are high-quality wood, therefore facilitating the process of selling them at a high price. Selling the felled trees was a non-transparent means of using the scheme as a pretext to earn money for the local government. Because the way this scheme was implemented did not satisfy the people’s right to know from the beginning, this has raised suspicions about the use of money obtained through the scheme.
A second cause of conflict that this analysis will look into is power abuse. This abuse of power can be seen in the process of scheme implementation. Firstly, the local government cut down the trees without clarifying its aims, methods, and benefits of the project for the people of the city. Secondly, facing the people’s opposition, the local authority tried to avoid answering the questions from media and citizens while implementing the project. Finally, there was no independent and reliable assessment of public opinion about the scheme of tree replacement. Although the local government has been assigned to manage infrastructure in the city including trees, prior to making the decision to cut down 1/7 of the total amount of trees in the city in 2 years, public opinion should have been more extensively considered. More importantly, the citizens need to take on a more participatory role in the decision-making process.
Finally, the above causes of conflict result in non-transparent urban management in the city. This non-transparency is demonstrated through two main angles which are the lack of management information and the lack of a scientific and consistent plan of carrying out the political, economic, and social project. Due to a lack of necessary information, people showed their opposition. In addition, because of the lack of a scientific and consistent plan, the scheme was immediately paused after the protest of people. This would be the first sign of a populist trend in the society. Moreover, non-transparent urban management will lead to a conflict of interests. Furthermore, the non-transparency might cause people to become indifferent to the government’s leadership. All these causes will negatively affect to the political, economic, and social life of the city.
Conclusion
After two months of investigation, on May 19, 2015, chief inspector of Hanoi, Mr. Nguyen Van Tan Dung proposed that the HPC need to review the responsibilities of the HDC leaders in tracking and monitoring the implementation of the scheme. . Particularly as follows: (1) Due to the insufficient assessment, some licenses have been issued to replace the trees entangled in the underground infrastructure project; (2) The HDC and the Division of Environmental Technology and Underground Infrastructure have not fulfilled the requirements of the profiles for licensing; (3) The HDC assigned two companies to chop down the trees. However, these two companies’ business licenses do not include tree removal; (4) There was a license which allowed using Manglietia fordiana on Nguyen Chi Thanh street. However, the trees actually planted on the street are Manglietia phuthoensis (Tuoitre, 2015).
In this case, social media and mainstream media can be considered as the mediators to help to resolve the conflict. Media is the platform where the government’s ideas and attitude and the people’s feedback had been presented. This leads to the situation that the government had been forced to transparently assert on what they are doing. Moreover, the local government also need to take people’s feedback into consideration for all decision related to the scheme. Generally, the changes of the scheme implementation carried out by the government were caused by the active insistence of the people and the participations of the media as mediator. That is why the case of 6700 tree replaced can be seen as a typical conflict of the people and its government, which can be analyzed and considered as a valuable experience.

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