Under the Socialist Republic

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. Reference 22 views Read More The land, and what was planted on it Vietnam went from a marginal coffee producer to the world's second largest in about fifteen years, on red basalt soil in the Central Highlands. The story of how that happened and the story of what happened to the Dega are the same story told from two ends. Forest cover in the highlands fell from 42.8 per cent in 1990 to 19 per cent in 2020. Reference 6 views Read More The church they closed Most Dega are Christians, and the state has decided that one form of our Christianity is not a religion at all but a political conspiracy in religious dress. That decision is the legal hinge on which most of the last twenty-five years of persecution in the highlands turns. Explainer 7 views Read More February 2001: the highlands stand up In February 2001 several thousand Dega walked out of their villages into the provincial capitals of the Central Highlands. They asked for three things: their ancestral land, the freedom to worship, and a homeland. It was the largest open protest by an indigenous people in Vietnam since 1975, and it was answered with thousands of troops, twelve-y... Explainer 7 views Read More Easter Week 2004 On the weekend of 10–11 April 2004, thousands of Dega Christians tried to reach Buon Ma Thuot and Pleiku to hold five days of Easter protests for religious freedom and the return of their land. They were met with tear gas, water cannon, electric batons, armed civilians and tanks. The number of dead has never been established. Dozens, and possibl... Reference 6 views Read More Cư Kuin, June 2023 — and the trial that followed Before dawn on 11 June 2023, armed groups attacked two commune headquarters in Cư Kuin district, Dak Lak. Nine people were killed. Vietnam charged the attack as terrorism, tried a hundred people in a single sitting of a mobile court, and used the case to designate a peaceful Montagnard advocacy group as a terrorist organisation. Twelve United Na... Explainer 6 views Read More The schools, and the language they are not taught in Thirty-one per cent of ethnic minority children in Vietnam reach upper secondary school, against sixty-three per cent of Kinh children. Our languages are not the language of instruction anywhere. This page sets out what is measured, what it means, and why a school is the quietest instrument in the whole programme. Reference 5 views Read More Bauxite: the plateau as a mine Under the coffee is the ore. Vietnam holds the world's third-largest bauxite reserves, and almost all of them are under the Central Highlands — 5.4 billion tonnes by the 2007 masterplan, across twenty-five planned mines in Dak Nong and Lam Dong. The projects that followed produced the largest open political argument in modern Vietnam, and almost... Explainer 7 views Read More The dams: Yali Falls and the rivers The Se San and the Srepok run west out of the highlands into the Mekong. From 1993 they were dammed. At Yali Falls alone, 6,782 people were moved — three in five of them indigenous — into houses of thirty-nine square metres with no kitchen and no latrine, onto land that was promised and never arrived. Downstream, in Cambodia, people drowned in r... Reference 7 views Read More The camps, 1975–1990 This is the worst-documented period in our history, and this page exists to say so with as much precision as we can manage. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people from the former South Vietnam were sent to re-education camps after April 1975. We do not know how many of them were Dega, where they were held, or how many came back. What we do know is w... Explainer 6 views Read More