Kin across the border: Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri

The border between Vietnam and Cambodia runs through the middle of our country. On the other side of it, in the Cambodian provinces of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, live Jarai, Bunong (Mnong) and other highland peoples who are our kin by language, by marriage and by history. It is where FULRO’s last fighters came out in 1992, where our refugees ran in 2001, and where Vietnamese rubber companies have taken land since.

The same peoples on both sides

The colonial border was drawn for the convenience of French administrators, not of the people who lived along it. It cut the Jarai country in two, and the Mnong country — the Bunong, as they are called in Cambodia — likewise. In the 2019 Cambodian census there were almost 27,000 Jarai in Cambodia, as against more than half a million in Vietnam.

• Ratanakiri — created as a province in 1959; about 236,000 people in 2024, roughly half of them highland peoples. In 1996 the highland population was estimated as Tampuan 35 percent, Jarai 24, Kreung 23, Brao 11, Kachok 3 and Kavet 3. In 2006 fewer than one in ten of them spoke fluent Khmer.
• Mondulkiri — Cambodia’s largest province by area and its least densely populated: about 98,000 people in 2024, some 80 percent of them from ten highland groups, mostly Bunong.

A shared history

The Khmer Rouge moved their leadership into Ratanakiri in 1966, among the highland peoples. In 1968 a Brao uprising against Sihanouk’s government was answered with reprisals that burned settlements and killed hundreds of villagers. American bombing followed from 1969. In Mondulkiri, about half the population died in the Khmer Rouge relocations of the 1970s. Bunong and Jarai soldiers served in the Khmer Republic’s army, some of them with FULRO backgrounds (see The men of FULRO). And Mondulkiri was where FULRO’s last fighters held out until 1992 (Mondulkiri, 1992), and where Dega refugees crossed in 2001 and after (The Cambodian camps).

The land, again

Cambodia’s 2001 Land Law allows indigenous communities to register their land collectively — on paper, a stronger protection than anything the Dega have in Vietnam. In practice the process has been slow, and the same pressures have arrived. In 2013 Global Witness documented, in Rubber Barons, how the Vietnamese companies Hoang Anh Gia Lai and the Vietnam Rubber Group had acquired huge concessions in Ratanakiri and in southern Laos, clearing forest and village land. After the report, investors pulled out, and in 2015 affected communities began a dispute process with Hoang Anh Gia Lai under the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. Forest still covered about 78 percent of Ratanakiri in 2015. It is falling.

The rivers are shared too. The Se San and the Srepok rise in the Dega highlands and flow into Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri; the dams built on them in Vietnam have changed the lives of the villages downstream (see The dams).

See also: Lower Sesan 2: the dam downstream, A map of the highlands.

Further reading

• Global Witness, Rubber Barons, May 2013
• Ratanakiri province and Mondulkiri province — populations, history and land
• Mathieu Guérin, Paysans de la forêt à l’époque coloniale: la pacification des aborigènes des hautes terres du Cambodge, 1863–1940 (AHSR, 2008) — the Bunong and their neighbors under French rule
• Mathieu Guérin, Andrew Hardy, Nguyễn Văn Chính and Stan Tan Boon Hwee, Des montagnards aux minorités ethniques: quelle intégration nationale pour les habitants des hautes terres du Viêt Nam et du Cambodge? (IRASEC / L’Harmattan, 2003) — free on OpenEdition
• Catherine Scheer, “Subaltern soldiers: Overshadowed Bunong highlanders in the Khmer Republic’s army, 1970–75,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 53 (2022)
• Ian G. Baird et al., A Study of the Downstream Impacts of the Yali Falls Dam in the Se San River Basin, Ratanakiri (2000)

Compiled September 2026. Population figures are from Cambodian censuses and estimates as reported in the sources above.