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Before
The highlands before the wars: who came, what they wanted, and the country we were promised.
Exile
Leaving the highlands: Thailand, Mondulkiri, North Carolina, and the people still waiting.
Records and how to use us
The timeline, the names, the prisoners, and how to bring something to us safely.
The case in law
What we ask for, what Vietnam has undertaken, and where the two do not meet.
The Dega people
Who we are, how many, which tribes, and the country we come from.
Under the Socialist Republic
1975 to today: the land, the church, the protests and the trials.
War and resistance
1954 to 1975: partition, assimilation, BAJARAKA, FULRO, and the men who led them.
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Who are the Dega
We are the indigenous people of the Central Highlands of Vietnam — some thirty tribes, two unrelated language families, one homeland, and a single shared experience of what has been done to it. Almost every name we are known by in the outside world was given to us by somebody else. Dega is the one we gave ourselves.
How many Dega there are
Nobody knows exactly. The published figures disagree with one another by a factor of six, and the disagreement is itself part of the story. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: there are far fewer of us than there were, in a homeland now holding many times the people it did, and we are a minority in every province of our own country.
Dega culture
A village, the land around it held in common, kinship that decides obligation, and a moral order older than any state that has claimed us. Around thirty peoples, each with its own building, weaving, music and dance, held together by an animist thread that runs through all of them — and by a gong tradition UNESCO has recognised as a masterpiece o...
How we died
Hundreds of thousands of Dega were killed in wars fought across our land by armies that were not ours. What has happened since those wars ended is harder to count, and is the reason we use the word genocide. This page sets out the figures we have, where each comes from, and why we think the legal term applies.
BAJARAKA, 1958
Four peoples in one acronym: BAhnar, JArai, RAde, KAho. A movement that asked for our country with letters and demonstrations, whose leaders were arrested for it and held for five years, and whose survivors came out of prison in 1964 to found something that carried weapons.
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