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Y Bham Enuol
The man who led BAJARAKA and FULRO: his life, his own words, the seventeen years of petitions, the captivity, and how he died.
Articles
7 articles
Y Bham Enuol: the early years and BAJARAKA
He was born in 1913 in the village beside the mission at Ban Me Thuot, went through three schools the French and the missionaries had built, and became an agricultural official in the provinces he would later petition about. In 1958 he put his name to letters asking President Diem, three foreign embassies and the United Nations to look at what w...
Y Bham Enuol: the prison years, 1958 to 1964
He was arrested in the autumn of 1958 for writing letters, and was not finally free until February 1964. The sources disagree about the sentence, the places and even the number of years — four, five, six or seven, depending on who is counting. What they agree on is that the government of the Republic of Vietnam held the man who had asked it for...
Y Bham Enuol
A Rhade official from Buon Ale-A who led both of our movements, spent more than five years in the prisons of the government he was petitioning, put our own name for ourselves before an international conference, was held under guard by his own allies for the last six years of his life, and walked out of the French Embassy in Phnom Penh on April 2...
Y Bham Enuol: president of FULRO, 1964 to 1968
On the morning of September 20, 1964 he was at the radio station in Ban Me Thuot, trying to talk armed highland soldiers back into their camps. By noon he had been taken to the border. For the next four years he was president of FULRO at Camp le Rolland in Mondulkiri, and the record of those years is not mainly a record of fighting: it is a reco...
Y Bham Enuol: Phnom Penh, the captivity and the death
At the end of 1968, days before he was to sign a settlement with Saigon, FULRO men and Cambodian officers took his headquarters and moved him to Phnom Penh. He was held there for six years, still called president by the fighters in the forest and still signing papers for them. On April 20, 1975 he walked out of the French Embassy at the head of...
What Y Bham Enuol actually asked for
Seventeen years of demands, as they were written down at the time. Read in order they show a case that never changed in substance and got smaller every year in what it asked for: a commission of inquiry in 1958, a country in 1964, a statute in 1965, eight points in 1967, a political party and a flag in 1968.
The photographs of Y Bham Enuol
Seven pictures are gathered here, all of them from our own archive: the studio portrait, two portraits in uniform, the flag at Camp le Rolland, a photograph beside an aircraft, one of him armed in the field, and the family group. None of them has a photographer’s name attached, and only one has a date written on it. We say about each exactly wha...
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