BAJARAKA is a combination of the key letters of Bahnar, Jarai, Rade and Kaho, the names of the four great tribes of the Dega peoples of the P.M.S.I. (Pay Montagnard du Sud Indochinois) the country of Montagnards in southern Indochina. Later, P.M.S.I. was known as the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. BAJARAKA is the name of the popular movement of Dega, which resisted the forced assimilation of the Vietnamese government after the French left Indochina in 1954. The goal of BAJARAKA was to have a separate nation with its own administration and army. What it really means is the independence of the Dega people.
The BAJARAKA movement was started by a group of restless young Dega people in 1957 after the Diem government brought hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese from the north to the P.M.S.I. to occupy our territories and begin their assimilation program. They use word assimilation only to soften the language, but in reality and in accordance with their actions, they applied the genocide program. Since 1975, the Hanoi government has carried out the same genocide program against our people. The BAJARAKA movement went to real demonstration in September 1958. Diem crushed the BAJARAKA movement with army and tank, murdered its people and imprisoned all its leaders including Y-Bham Enuol, Y-Thih Eban, Y-Ju Eban, Nay Luet and many others. At this time, the US government knew what was going on between our people and the Vietnamese, but they did not intend to stop the Diem government from destroying our people, our villages, our culture and our traditional way of life. Until February 12, 1964, following the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US Embassy convinced General Nguyen Khanh's government to release Y-Bham Enuol and the rest of his colleagues from prison.
Y-Bham Enuol started organizing the BAJARAKA movement in Buon Ale A, Daklak Province. When Diem found out what they were doing, he transferred everyone to Pleiku Province. Over here, a few more young people from other tribes joined the movement and Y-Bham Enuol was elected as the president of the organization. When they had a peaceful demonstration to ask Diem's government to give back all powers to govern our own peoples and territories, Diem responded forcefully. They used offensive war material to crush the demonstration and arrested our leaders Y-Bham Enuol, Paul Nur, Nay Luet, Y-Thih Eban, Siu Sip Y-Ju Eban, Touneh Yoh on September 15, 1958. All were sent to Dalat and put them in underground solitary cells for three months. After that, they sent them to Hue and put them in criminal custody.
After the Viet Minh defeated the French in 1954, Vietnam was 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 in South Vietnam between Ngo Dinh Diem and Bao Dai, Ngo Dinh Diem was elected to be the first president of South Vietnam with the help of the United States of America. At this point, the U.S. government knew that P.M.S.I. did not belong to Vietnam and even our coastal region did not belong to the Vietnamese. But they did nothing to prevent Diem from merging our territories into one Vietnam. Instead, the U.S. government helped the Diem government make millions of dollars to get hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees from the north to occupy our lands in the P.M.S.I. 1957. Later, many of these refugees became Viet Cong forces that fought against the American forces in South Vietnam and murdered the innocent Dega people. From the point of view of the Dega people, Diem planted the Viet Cong in the P.M.S.I. for just one reason. That is, to camouflage its genocide program against the Dega people.
When Diem first took office as President of the Republic of South Vietnam, he radically abolished Dega's autonomy and annexed our territories to Vietnam. He abolished our tribal courts, our land rights, banned the teaching of our languages in school, burned all our textbooks, confiscated all our weapons that we used to protect ourselves from wild animals. He forcibly took our good agricultural lands and divided the Vietnamese refugees from the north and drove our people to the rocky lands. The Vietnamese refugees that Diem settled in our countries began to steal our household properties, our livestock, took our agricultural land regardless of whether our crops were ready for harvest. When we reported to government officials what the new refugees had done to us, they said we were the French-influenced peoples. Then they tortured us, imprisoned us and murdered us when we were killed in an accident. He also apologized for the security situation to move our people from our ancestral land so that he could move the Vietnamese refugees to our places. In order to bomb and destroy our villages, he wrongly accused us of following the Viet Cong. On the other hand, the Viet Cong accused our people of being Diem's supporters and being the ears and eyes of the US military to kill them.
The Bajaraka's freedom fighters continued to fight as an underground guerrilla movement. Many others were deceived by Ho Chi Minh's promises to align themselves with his cause. The leaders of North Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh, had promised to return the Dega country to its people. At this time, the leaders of the Dega movement in the jungle such as Nai Der, Nai Phin, R'com Briu, Y-Bih Aleo, Y-Ngong Nie Kdam and many others had no choice but to accept the offer of Ho Chi Minh. Therefore, Ho Chi Minh had two fronts during the Second Indochina War:
- 1) Mat Tran Giai Phong Mien Nam Vietnam means "The Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam".
- 2) Mat Tran Giai Phong Tay Nguyen means "The Front for the Liberation of Central Highlands".
Ho Chi Minh deceptively used the Front for the Liberation of the Central Highlands (FLCH) to cheat and force Dega people to follow him against the South Vietnamese. However, despite Ho Chi Minh's promises, after their victory in 1975, the SRV expropriated the Central Highlands, placing all governance of these Dega homelands under their direct control and authority, instead of returning our lands to our people as they had promised. The Dega people were denied their right to sovereignty and instead were brutally oppressed by the Vietnamese government. After the victory, most of the Dega leaders who had been with Ho Chi Minh since the First and Second Indochina Wars were sent home for retirement. The reason given was because our leaders did not have the ability to work. The truth is that the government did not want our leaders to claim what Ho Chi Minh had promised them about self-determination and self-government in our homeland.