1954 - Viet Minh defeats the French and Vietnam is divided at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh took over the leadership in the north, and Bao Dai took over the leadership in the south. In the 1955 general election, Ngo Dinh Diem was elected to be South Vietnam's first president. Diem then illegally merged the Central Highlands into South Vietnam. The Diem regime committed this seizure without opposition from other governments. Diem's government also classified the Dega people as ethnic minorities in our own homeland in order to deprive us of human rights and the rights of our country. Furthermore, they would begin to destroy our people.
1957 - Diem launches a land development program that requires the resettlement of 850,000 Vietnamese refugees from the north to the heart of Dega's homeland. We were pushed away from our country. Later, many of these Vietnamese became Viet Cong forces fighting the United States Armed Forces and murdering our innocent Dega people. Diem's goal was to assimilate the dough in the Vietnamese cultural sphere by eliminating our tribal courts, banning our languages from school, expropriating our country and denying us our ethnic identity. They used the word "assimilation" to camouflage the word "genocide". The US government donated the money to this project (which was later widely recognized as a failure and a culturally devastating policy). From the point of view of the Dega people, Diem's forces and the Viet Cong created two competing forces, which resulted in a mutually reinforcing plan of genocide against the Dega people. In self-defense, the Dega people formed the Bajaraka movement (a combination of the key letters in Bahnar, Jarai, Rhade and Koho) to resist forced assimilation and to stop Ngo Dinh Diem's genocide policy. The goal of this movement was to make P.M.S.I. (Pay Montagnard du Sud Indochinois) a separate nation with its own administration and army.