The Republic of Vietnam collapsed in our highlands first: Ban Me Thuot fell on 11 March 1975 and the retreat from the plateau turned into a rout that reached Saigon seven weeks later. What followed for the Dega was not peace. It was reprisal, and the reprisal has not clearly ended.
Where the war ended
The final North Vietnamese offensive opened against Ban Me Thuot on 10 March 1975. The town fell the next day. President Thieu ordered the abandonment of the Central Highlands, and the withdrawal down Route 7B became one of the worst military disasters of the war, with a column of soldiers and civilians destroyed on the road. Saigon fell on 30 April.
Our country was where the Republic lost the war, as both sides had always expected it would be. It was also where the accounting began.
The charge
Dega leaders and a great many ordinary people were detained, imprisoned and in some cases executed after the victory, on two grounds: that we had been the eyes and ears of the American forces during the war, and that we belonged to FULRO. We were convicted as traitors for having fought for the United States.
We have one answer to that charge and we have never varied it. We cannot have betrayed the government in Hanoi, because we are not Vietnamese. A man cannot be a traitor to a state he never consented to be a citizen of, on land that state acquired by force from an administration that had recognised the land as ours.
What was done
- Political and religious leaders, civil servants, former soldiers and students jailed, sent to re-education camps, tortured, and in cases executed
- Churches closed, and Dega Christians accused of working for the CIA — a charge that has outlived every person who could have been guilty of it
- Private property and land confiscated and reallocated to Vietnamese settlers
- Families evicted from farmland and moved onto barren soil unsuitable for cultivation
- Forced labour on collective farms subsequently handed over to settlers
- Our languages barred from the schools; our children excluded from higher education; no schools at all in areas away from the towns
- Customary courts replaced by a system of justice weighted against us
- Graveyards desecrated and funerary carvings looted
- Women raped, and forced into prostitution to soldiers
- The public health system left to decay and, in practice, closed to Dega families
The programme with a name
The reprisals were individual. The restructuring was systematic, and it had a name: Định canh định cư, fixed cultivation and fixed residence. Its stated purpose was to end what officials described as the unstable nomadic life of the highland peoples by settling them in valleys to grow rice. Its effect was to move an indigenous population off long-rotation land it had farmed for centuries into small controlled areas of poor cropland.
Alongside it ran the New Economic Zones programme. Between 1975 and 1980 over a million northerners moved south and into the central regions, and between 750,000 and more than a million southerners were displaced into what the planners called uninhabited mountainous forested areas. The highlands were neither uninhabited nor unclaimed. Human Rights Watch later concluded that state resettlement schemes had quadrupled the population density of Vietnamese and other migrants in parts of the highlands since 1975.
In 1976 the Ministry of Culture announced that it would be necessary to eradicate all outmoded customs. That sentence was policy, not rhetoric, and the customs in question were ours.
The promise that was broken first
Not every Dega had fought against the North. Leaders including Y Bih Aleo, Y Ngong Nie Kdam, Nay Der, Nay Phin and R'com Briu had accepted the offer made by Ho Chi Minh, on the understanding that a victorious revolution would recognise the highland peoples and their land. Several held senior positions in the National Liberation Front and were photographed at its congresses.
Some kept ceremonial office after 1975. None of it produced autonomy, or the return of land, or schools in our languages. The Dega who had backed the winning side received the same programme as the Dega who had backed the losing one. That is worth stating precisely, because it disposes of the argument that what happened to us after 1975 was punishment for choosing wrongly in the war.
What did not end
FULRO fought on from Mondulkiri for another seventeen years, unaware until 1992 that its leader had been dead since April 1975. Inside the highlands, the confiscations continued, the coffee boom of the 1990s accelerated them, and in February 2001 several thousand people walked out of their villages into the provincial capitals to ask for the land and the church back. That is where the modern chapter begins.
On the word "after"
Histories of Vietnam treat 1975 as an ending. For the Dega it is the middle of the story and arguably not even a turning point — the land programmes of 1956 and of 1976 differ in vocabulary and scale rather than in kind, and both were run by governments that had reclassified us as a minority in order to run them. This library is organised by period because readers expect it, but the periods are a convenience. The process has been continuous since 1955.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards (April 2002) — post-1975 resettlement, New Economic Zones and land confiscation, pp. 2, 25–26
- New Economic Zones programme — the 1975–1980 movement figures
- Gerald C. Hickey, Free in the Forest (Yale, 1982)
- Montagnard Foundation, Inc., historical summaries (archive held by DCHO) — the account of the reprisals and the named leaders who took Hanoi's offer
Compiled September 2026. The re-education camp period is the worst-documented part of our history, because the people who could describe it were released under conditions and many are still in the country. If you can give an account safely, read reporting safely first.