The memorial register

This register names the Dega men and women whose deaths since 1975 at the hands of the police, soldiers or prison authorities of Vietnam have been published by an independent source. It is short, and that is the first thing to understand about it. The most-cited figure about our dead — at least twenty-five Montagnards dead in custody since 2001 — has never had a list of names attached to it by anyone. Our own organizations have compiled fifty-one names, and almost none of those has been picked up by an outside body — for the same reason this page is short, which is that nobody from outside is let in to pick anything up. This page keeps every name we can attribute, says who gave each one and when, sets out what stands behind the numbers, and says what it would take to settle the ones still in dispute.

How we keep it

• A name enters the register when we can say who gave it, when, and to whom. For most entries below that is a human rights organization, a UN body or a US government commission, and we name which. Where a name comes from a family or from one of our own organizations, it goes in the same table, attributed the same way. We have not used Vietnamese government or state media sources for any entry.
• We use the source’s own wording. Where it says a person was “reportedly” killed, so do we.
• Where the authorities gave an account of a death, and an independent source recorded it, we print that account beside the family’s.
• We give a person’s people, village or age only when the source does. Names are spelled as the source spells them.
• A family can ask us to remove a name, or to add one. See Adding a name below.
• Where sources disagree on a number, we print every figure with the name of whoever gave it. In a register of the dead, the attribution of a contested count is itself the fact.
• An entry resting on one source is marked as resting on one source, so that a reader can weigh it. This follows the practice recommended for casualty recording, and it is the only way to be transparent about our limits.

The names

Y Ket Bdap is, as far as we can find, the only Dega death in custody for which a Vietnamese court has ever convicted the officers responsible. Eighteen months, and three million dong for the funeral. One of the two convicted men carries an Ede name.

Amnesty International published the eight names from April 2004 just over two weeks after the demonstrations. It wrote that the eight were killed either during the demonstrations or died of their injuries shortly afterward, and that it feared “the final death toll is considerably higher.” It did not say who killed each person, or which people each belonged to. The events are told on Easter week 2004.

A name we cannot yet place

In 2008 the US Commission on International Religious Freedom reported the death of Y Vin Het, “an ethnic minority Protestant man,” in March 2007. It wrote that he was repeatedly beaten in police custody for refusing to renounce his faith, could not afford medical care, and died of internal injuries. It also recorded the official account: that he had been hurt in a drunken brawl, which the Commission said provincial officials had forced him to put his mark to, without any independent medical examination. The report places the death in “Phu Sen province.” There is no such province; Phú Yên is the likeliest reading, but we have not confirmed it, nor that he was Dega. We record him here until we can.

How many died at Easter 2004, and who says so

This is the clearest case of a contested count in our record, and the honest thing is to lay out every figure with the name of whoever gave it.

Two of those lines are the same organization, four years apart. Our own foundation said four hundred in the week of the killings and, by 2008, said double digits, without ever saying that it had changed its mind. We print both, because a register that will not correct its own community has no standing to correct anyone else’s. Amnesty, for its part, wrote in the same document that it feared the true toll was considerably higher, that it held further names it could not yet corroborate, and that it could neither confirm nor verify the conflicting accounts because the authorities would not let independent observers into the area. Those three sentences are the architecture of this whole page, written by somebody else about our dead.

The twenty-five, and the list that does not exist

The figure everyone cites comes from Human Rights Watch in 2011: since 2001, at least twenty-five Montagnards have died in prisons, jails or police lock-ups after beatings or illness in custody, or shortly after being released early to a hospital or home. The report names one of the twenty-five, Y Ben Hdok.

The rest were never published. The footnote behind the number describes a method rather than a roster: interviews between 2001 and 2011 with former Montagnard prisoners, with the families of prisoners, and with Montagnard advocacy groups in the United States, together with state media, wire reports, and US State Department and USCIRF reporting. So the most-quoted number about our dead is an aggregate assembled partly from our own exiles’ accounts — and the names in those accounts were never printed.

The fifty-one

Our own people have compiled a register. In August 2008 the Montagnard Foundation published Vietnam’s Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing, which documents, in its own words, the details of fifty-one killings of Degar, numbered one to fifty-one, most with a village, a commune, a district, a province, a date and an account of how the person died. It runs from Y Hong Nie, taken from his longhouse at Buon Cu Po on October 19, 2000 after refusing to give up his ancestral land and never seen again, to two men drowned at a prayer vigil in Gia Lai in June 2008.

We have not adopted those fifty-one names into the register above, and we want to be exact about why. The Foundation collected these names the only way anyone collects them: villagers telephoning relatives in the United States, with photographs smuggled out. That is the road every name on this page traveled, including the ones that reached us through Human Rights Watch. What holds us up is not the method but what we find when we check the entries against each other. About thirty-five of its names appear in no report by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, USCIRF or any UN body we could find, and that tells us about access to the highlands rather than about the names. And where we have been able to check an entry against an independent source, we have found errors: it dates Y Ben Hdok’s death to the day of his arrest rather than to May 1, and it gives Y Ngo Adrong’s death as July 13, 2006 in one version of the same report and July 30, 2007 in another.

The standards for casualty recording are built for exactly this: a single-source entry is published and marked as single-source, so the reader can weigh it. That is what we should be doing, and it is what we are now doing. We are working through the fifty-one name by name against everything else we can reach, and the dating errors above are noted against the entries they belong to. What would settle any one of them is a relative who can say where and when. If one of them is your relative, we would particularly like to hear from you.

How a name gets out of the highlands

Almost every name on this page traveled the same road. A family in a village telephones a relative in North Carolina. An organization in exile writes it down. A researcher interviews the person years later and in another country — Human Rights Watch does not interview witnesses inside the highlands, because doing so would expose them to near-certain retaliation, and says so. Identity is checked against government identity cards and against local police documents people carry out with them.

The reason it has to work that way is that the door is shut. Access to the Central Highlands is tightly restricted. The tripartite agreement on returning refugees collapsed in March 2002 when Vietnamese officials barred UN monitoring teams from the region. UN personnel have been kept out of the border areas of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri.

And there is a further reason our register is short, which has nothing to do with evidence. In 2012 a Montagnard organization told a UN committee that its report would delete specific references to individuals at risk, in prison, or who had suffered violations, and that a prisoner list with names was available to the country rapporteur on request. The names exist. They are withheld from publication to keep the living alive. That is the truest single answer to why this page is not longer.

Deaths counted but not named

• After 1975 — “The Communists executed some Montagnard leaders while others died in prisons or ‘reeducation’ camps,” Radio Free Asia’s Dan Southerland wrote in 2018. No count exists. See Re-education and the forest.
• 1975 to 1992, in the forest — Human Rights Watch puts FULRO’s strength at about 7,000 in the early 1980s, and at about 400 when the last of them surrendered in Mondulkiri in 1992. It offers no figure for the difference, and neither does anyone else. Some were killed, some surrendered earlier, some simply stopped being counted. That gap of roughly six thousand six hundred people is the largest body of uncounted Dega dead we know of.
• April 1975, Phnom Penh — Y Bhăm Êñuôl and the people with him were taken from the French embassy and killed. Many of his followers did not learn of it for seventeen years. A people that takes seventeen years to find out that its president is dead is a people that cannot keep a register, and that is the condition this page was made in. See Phnom Penh, the captivity and the death.
• February 2001 — At Ea H’leo, Human Rights Watch recorded about thirty demonstrators injured, but no deaths. The one killing it documented in the crackdown of 2001 is Rmah Blin’s. See The protests of 2001.
• April 2004 — The counts differ. Human Rights Watch wrote of “as many as ten” demonstrators killed in 2006, and “as many as eight” in 2011. USCIRF reported “at least ten” in Dak Lak. Amnesty named eight. Witness estimates and the government’s own figure are set out on the Easter week page.
• 2001–2011 — Human Rights Watch recorded that “at least 25 Montagnards have died in prisons, jails, or police lock-ups,” after beatings or illness in custody, or soon after being released early to a hospital or home. Only Y Ben Hdok is named in the part of the report we have been able to read.
• About 2014–15 — An elderly man, in poor health from ill-treatment during years in prison, died in the Gia Lai jungle trying to reach Cambodia. Human Rights Watch did not name him.
• 2023–24 — UN special rapporteurs wrote to Vietnam in 2024 about “unexplained deaths in custody” connected with the Cu Kuin attack and the mass trial that followed, according to USCIRF. We have not seen names beyond Y Pum Buonya.

This register does not include the nine people killed in the attack on two commune offices at Cu Kuin on June 11, 2023. Their deaths are recorded on Cu Kuin, 2023.

How other peoples have done this

We are not the first people to have to count our own dead because no state would.

• The standards for casualty recording set out the minimum a record should carry — place, date, source, numbers, name, age, sex, type of death, the actors involved — and tell recorders to plan for disagreement between sources by publishing ranges, keeping cases open, and marking single-source entries so that readers can judge them. They also require the method itself to be public. This page follows them.
• The Kosovo Memory Book was built from witness statements, relatives’ accounts and documents, each classed as primary or secondary, with a separate category for reported but unverified victims.
• The Bosnian Book of the Dead accepted records from eyewitnesses, relatives, neighbors and close friends, and required no standardized document to prove a statement. A community with no death certificates can still build a register that holds up.
• The National Student Memorial Register in Canada names the Indigenous children who never came home from the residential schools. It was built from church and government records, it publishes its additions — more than eleven hundred names verified and added in a single year — it states the limits of its own scope, and it treats the family as a source of record rather than a petitioner. It is the closest thing to what this page is trying to become.

Adding a name

If someone in your family died in custody, in a crackdown or while fleeing, and you want them remembered here, we would like to hear from you. Tell us what you know: the name, the village, the date, and how you learned of the death. We will not publish a name without the family’s agreement, and we will not publish anything that could put relatives still in the highlands at risk. If we cannot find the death in a published source, we will say that the account comes from the family. The way we handle what we are given is set out in Sources and method, and names of the imprisoned are kept in Prisoner records.

Sources

• HRW 2002: Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards, chapter XV: “Case Study: The Church Burning and Killing by Security Forces in Plei Lao” (2002)
• Amnesty 2004: Amnesty International, Socialist Republic of Viet Nam: Renewed concern for the Montagnard minority, ASA 41/005/2004, April 27, 2004
• HRW 2014: Human Rights Watch, Public Insecurity: Deaths in Custody and Police Brutality in Vietnam (September 16, 2014) — Y Ket Bdap, his brother’s account, the two officers and the sentence
• Montagnard Foundation, Vietnam’s Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing: Persecution Against the Indigenous Degar People (Montagnards) (August 2008) — the numbered list of fifty-one killings, and the Foundation’s own account of how it collects them; also tabled at the European Parliament in a May 2008 version that differs from it in places
• Montagnard Foundation, report on the Easter demonstration of April 10, 2004, via UNPO — the estimate of four hundred killed
• Our own submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 80th session (February 2012) — the withholding of names to protect the living, and the prisoner list held for the country rapporteur
• Human Rights Watch, Vietnam: Torture, Arrests of Montagnard Christians (January 2005) — the government’s account of two deaths, the “at least ten,” and the witness estimates of ten, twenty, and twenty to twenty-five
• Every Casualty Worldwide, Standards for Casualty Recording (2020); Humanitarian Law Center, The Kosovo Memory Book Database: History and Methodology; Ball, Tabeau and Verwimp, The Bosnian Book of Dead: Assessment of the Database (2007); and the National Student Memorial Register of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation
• HRW 2009: Human Rights Watch, World Report 2009: Vietnam
• HRW 2011: Human Rights Watch, Montagnard Christians in Vietnam (2011)
• Human Rights Watch, No Sanctuary (2006)
• Human Rights Watch, Persecuting “Evil Way” Religion (June 2015)
• USCIRF 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2017, 2025: USCIRF, Annual Report 2006: Vietnam; USCIRF, Annual Report 2008: Vietnam; USCIRF, Annual Report 2009: Vietnam; USCIRF, Annual Report 2011: Vietnam; USCIRF, Annual Report 2017: Vietnam; USCIRF, Annual Report 2025: Vietnam
• UN experts 2024: OHCHR, Experts condemn misuse of counter-terrorism law against Montagnards in Viet Nam, August 28, 2024
• CSW 2025: Christian Solidarity Worldwide, General briefing: Vietnam, May 29, 2025
• Dan Southerland, “An Update on the Montagnards of Vietnam’s Central Highlands,” Radio Free Asia, October 23, 2018

Compiled September 2026. The contested counts, the fifty-one, and the standard of evidence are set out above. This register will change as names are confirmed or families come forward.