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 possibly hundreds, of people have never been accounted for.
The two days
What was documented
- Twenty-six Dega beaten and arrested at Nhon Hoa commune, Cu Se district, on the Sunday; their whereabouts afterwards unknown
- Police firing on Dega at Ha Bau, Dak Doa district, reportedly killing a villager from Ring village and arresting two others
- Eyewitness accounts of demonstrators beaten to death on 10 April on Phan Chu Trinh road outside Buon Ma Thuot
- Forty injured people recorded at the Dak Lak provincial hospital on the Saturday night
- All the men of Emap village, Cu Mgar district, gone on the night of 10 April
- Police stationed inside the houses of villagers suspected of political activity; military checkpoints on the main roads
A witness from Buon Ale A — the same village where BAJARAKA had been organised forty-six years earlier — described police and Vietnamese civilians carrying sticks lining both sides of the road, and four policemen billeted in her house.
The closing of the highlands
After the weekend, movement within the highlands was restricted, meetings of more than two people were banned, and contact with the outside world was cut. Possessing a mobile telephone capable of making international calls became grounds for arrest, and families were broken up when the person who earned the money was taken for having one.
On the Cambodian side, police in the border provinces were put on alert and ordered to expel anyone crossing without documents. Cambodia had already closed the border-province refugee camps in 2002 and barred UNHCR protection officers from working outside Phnom Penh. The two governments closed the door from both sides in the same week.
The years either side
Easter 2004 was not a beginning. Retribution for February 2001 was intensifying in the weeks before it. Human Rights Watch documented at least a hundred arrests during 2003, thirty-three tried and imprisoned that year, a man shot with an AK-47 in Buon Don district in October 2003, and at least one rape of a young woman by police during three days' detention in August 2003. At least 270 Dega were deported from Cambodia back to Vietnam during 2003.
Several hundred people had by then been in hiding for three years — in camouflaged dug-outs in the forest and in coffee plantations, in holes under houses, in one case in a cave on a mountaintop. Many more went underground after April 2004.
On the numbers
We do not know how many died. Neither does anyone else outside the Ministry of Public Security. There were eyewitness reports of protesters beaten to death and unconfirmed reports of police casualties. The region was sealed and independent observers were refused. When a government declines to let anyone count, the absence of a confirmed figure is not evidence that the figure is small.
What came after, the same year
The crackdown that began at Easter did not stop at Easter. In Gia Lai province alone, police arrested 129 people between 12 and 24 December 2004 — house church leaders organising Christmas gatherings, families of asylum seekers, and people suspected of having organised the April protests. A detainee from Dak Nong, arrested in April 2004, described his interrogation to Human Rights Watch: they beat his head and used two hands to box his ears, until he bled.
In July 2004, after a national security conference, a Department of Central Highlands Security was formally established. Its units — PA43, the Mobile Intervention Police, Political Security Section VI and a special task force — were tasked with finding Dega Protestant leaders in hiding and with sealing the border against people trying to reach Cambodia. April 2004 produced an institution, and the institution is still there.
The following February the state banned the thing itself. Instruction No. 1 of February 2005 prohibited Dega Protestantism by name; Decree 22 of March 2005 banned religious activity judged to threaten national security, public order or national unity, while also, on paper, prohibiting forced renunciations. The renunciations continued regardless: 297 people in Chu Se district on 12 July 2010, 567 households in Krong Pa district in October 2010, and further sessions across the border districts of Duc Co, Ia Grai and Chu Prong. That is the church they closed.
Terms
- Unit 113
- A paramilitary unit of Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security, documented conducting sweeping operations in the highlands with assault rifles and electric shock batons.
- Public self-criticism session
- A compulsory village meeting at which people are required to renounce Christianity and undertake to cease religious or political activity, sometimes by signing a written pledge. In parts of Dak Lak these were convened on Sunday mornings, several times a month.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, Vietnam: Violence Against Montagnards During Easter Week Protests, 14 April 2004
- Human Rights Watch, "Vietnam: New Evidence of Torture, Mass Arrests of Montagnards", 10 January 2005 — the December 2004 Gia Lai arrests and the torture account
- Human Rights Watch, Montagnard Christians in Vietnam (March 2011) — the July 2004 security department, PA43, Instruction No. 1, Decree 22 and the renunciation figures
- Human Rights Watch, No Sanctuary (June 2006) — the follow-up covering the aftermath
Compiled September 2026. The missing of April 2004 have never been listed. If your family lost someone that weekend, we are building a record and we would like their name.