Two men who tried the other route. Both were BAJARAKA founders, both went to prison for it under Diem, and both then took office inside the government that had jailed them — one as a province administrator, one as a minister of state. Both died in the prisons of the government that came next.
What happened on 12 February 1964
Diem was overthrown on 1 November 1963. The BAJARAKA leaders, who had been held since the demonstrations of 1958, were released on 12 February 1964 — with American encouragement, and into a Saigon government that needed the highlands quiet.
Two of the men who walked out were given office almost immediately. Paul Nưr was appointed assistant province chief of Kontum. Y Bhăm Êñuôl was appointed assistant province chief of Darlac. Seven months later five CIDG camps rose in revolt and Y Bhăm Êñuôl was in Cambodia leading FULRO.
Paul Nưr stayed. That is the fork this page is about, and both men who took it believed they were doing the same thing by other means.
The ministry
The agreement of 11 December 1968 recognised minority rights and established a ministry for them in Saigon. On 1 February 1969 the final treaty with FULRO was signed by Paul Nưr for the Republic of Vietnam and Y Dhơn Adrong for the movement. A Dega man signed on each side.
The Ministry for the Development of Ethnic Minorities was the only Dega institution in the machinery of any state in the twentieth century. Nay Luett held it in its last years. What it could actually do was limited — it had a budget and almost no leverage over the province chiefs, the army, or the land registry — but it existed, it was staffed by highlanders, and for six years there was a place in a capital city where a village could send a complaint.
4 April 1975
Ban Me Thuot had fallen on 11 March and the highlands were being abandoned. On 4 April 1975 Nay Luett met American officials, asked for protection for the Dega, and proposed raising a Dega force of fifty thousand to hold the highlands.
The request was refused. Twenty-six days later Saigon fell.
It is worth sitting with what was being asked. Not evacuation, not asylum, not money: permission and arms to defend the plateau after the army that had been defending it had gone. The men who made that request had been in the CIDG camps in 1962 and in Diem's prisons in 1958. They were, by then, entirely out of routes.
How both of them died
Nay Luett was imprisoned after 1975 and held for nine years. He died in 1983, shortly after his release. Dega accounts hold that the authorities removed his brain for analysis afterwards; we record that as our community's account and have found no independent confirmation of it.
Paul Nưr died in a prison in Hanoi.
Neither man had taken up arms after 1964. Both had spent the intervening decade arguing inside a state's institutions for the people that state was dispossessing. That is what they were imprisoned for, and it disposes of the idea that the reprisals after 1975 were aimed at fighters.
The argument between the two routes
Dega politics from 1964 to 1975 was a running argument between the men in Mondulkiri and the men in Saigon, and it was never settled because both sides lost. The ministry could not stop the land programme; the movement could not win. Every peaceful route was tried by somebody, and the people who tried them are the ones who died in prison. When we say the case is now pursued only by political and legal means, we are not proposing something new. We are going back to what Paul Nưr and Nay Luett were doing, with the advantage of being outside the country while we do it.
Sources
- Montagnard Human Rights Organization, History — the 12 February 1964 appointments, the 4 April 1975 meeting, and the accounts of both deaths
- United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races — the December 1968 agreement and the 1 February 1969 treaty signed by Paul Nưr
- Gerald C. Hickey, Free in the Forest (Yale, 1982) — the ministry and the highland politics of 1964–1975
Compiled September 2026. We have no photograph of either man that we are certain we may publish, and no dates of birth. Records of the Ministry for the Development of Ethnic Minorities would be a significant find — if you know where any survive, please write.