Knowledgebase
Exile
Leaving the highlands: Thailand, Mondulkiri, North Carolina, and the people still waiting.
Articles
5 articles
Mondulkiri, 1992: the end of the armed struggle
In October 1992 a United Nations patrol in eastern Cambodia found several hundred armed men, with their wives and their children, still fighting a war that had ended seventeen years earlier. They had not been told their leader was dead. They gave up their weapons, asked for asylum, and the Dega armed struggle ended after twenty-eight years and t...
North Carolina
The largest Dega community outside Vietnam is in North Carolina. It is there because the American soldiers we fought alongside came from there, and because when the survivors of the resistance walked out of the forest those soldiers remembered and campaigned until something was done.
The Cambodian camps, 2001–2005
Between 2001 and 2005 the nearest country stopped being a refuge and became a holding area. Thousands crossed into Cambodia after the February 2001 crackdown; UNHCR opened sites in the border provinces; the sites were closed, protection officers were confined to Phnom Penh, and people were sent back. This is how that happened, in order.
Asylum today: Cambodia, Thailand, and the reach of the state
The Dega who leave the highlands are no longer safe once they are out of them. On 28 November 2025 Thailand handed a UNHCR-recognised refugee back to Vietnam, to serve ten years imposed at a trial he was not present at. That single act describes the present situation better than any summary could.
The wider diaspora
North Carolina holds the largest Dega community outside Vietnam, but it is not the only one. There are Dega in France, in at least five other American states, and in Cambodia — where the Jarai and the Bunong were never a diaspora at all, because the border was drawn through them. This page is what we can establish about the rest, and it is thinn...
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