Prisoners of conscience: Gia Lai

Two hundred and thirty-three Dega from Gia Lai province, recorded by name as imprisoned for their faith, their land or their people, arrested between 2001 and 2006. This is the largest of our five province records, and the one with the most silence in it: for sixty-two of these people the record ends in “whereabouts unknown” or “family believes murdered.” It is a record, not an argument. Every line is a person somebody is waiting for.

Gia Lai carried the heaviest arrests of the whole period, and the record shows it. The Easter demonstrations of 2004 and the crackdown that followed fill these years. In two weeks alone, from December 12 to 24, 2004, one hundred and twenty-nine people were arrested in this province and recorded by name from the outside; eighty-five of them in Chu Se district, written here as Cu Se, with fourteen in Dak Doa, thirteen in Cu Pah, eleven in Ayun Pa and six in Chu Prong. Through 2005 the arrests went on, more than seventy in Gia Lai in that year by one outside count. Siu Boch, a Jarai man, was arrested on March 10, 2001, after riot police raided Plei Lao, killed one villager and burned the church; he was given eight years in Ha Nam.

The record

What this record shows

A sentence is recorded for sixty-three of the two hundred and thirty-three, and for the rest the column is blank. A blank does not mean there was no sentence; it means no one outside was told of one. A prison is named for 114 people, and only eleven of them stayed in Gia Lai. Forty-six were sent to Ha Nam and eleven to Thanh Hoa, both in the north; forty-four were held in Phu Yen on the coast, at Tuy Hoa or elsewhere in the province. For most families, distance alone ended the visits.

The hardest lines are the sixty-two that end in “whereabouts unknown” or “family believes murdered.” Almost every such line in our five records is here, in Gia Lai. Behind each is a household that stopped receiving news after the arrest and never started again. We record what the family told us and mark it as their account. That is not a lesser kind of evidence: it is the only kind Vietnam leaves a family, and the burden of the missing document is the state’s, not theirs.

Set against the other counts

Independent lists of this period agree that more people were imprisoned in Gia Lai than anyone outside managed to name. Human Rights Watch counted at least 355 Central Highlanders in prison across the region as of May 2006, of whose trials only 159 had been reported anywhere. The 129 names it gathered in two weeks of December 2004 have not yet been set beside ours one by one, and they should be: each list was built one family at a time, and together they will show who is on one and missing from the other. If you hold either list, or know a family on it, we would like to hear from you.

Searching this list

Names here were written down by many hands, from several languages, over years, so a name you cannot find is usually present under another spelling. Search the distinctive part of a name rather than the whole of it: drop the Y or H that begins Rhade and Jarai names, try the clan name several ways (Rmah, R’mah, Romah; Rcom, Ro Cham; Rahlan, Ro Lan), and try the name a family used at home, the “father of” name that begins with Ama or Bă. The full method, and the reasons the spellings vary, are on the prisoner records page.

If you know one of these people

Tell us what the record does not say: a sentence, a transfer, a release, a death, or a correction to a name, a date or a village. If you are the family, we will not publish that you contacted us and we will not add anything that identifies you. If somebody has just been taken, the information that matters is easiest to lose in the first hours; go to If a family member is detained and read Reporting safely before you write anything down. To see how these Gia Lai names sit inside the whole record, and the other lists worth searching, read the prisoner records page.

Sources

• The organization’s own prisoner records, compiled from family and congregation reports; the counts here are our tally of this table
• Human Rights Watch, Vietnam: Torture, Arrests of Montagnard Christians (January 2005) — the 129 named December 2004 arrests in Gia Lai, 85 of them in Chu Se; No Sanctuary (June 2006), in our library, whose appendix lists Central Highland prisoners by province as of May 2006; Montagnard Christians in Vietnam (March 2011), in our library
• Amnesty International, Renewed concern for the Montagnard minority (April 2004) and Prisoners of Conscience in Viet Nam (2016), which give aliases and places of detention
• Minority Groups in the Republic of Vietnam (US Army, 1966), in our library — Jarai and Bahnar names, for the search guidance

Compiled September 2026 from the organization’s own records of arrests in the Central Highlands, set against the independent counts named in the sources. The underlying records date from the 2000s; treat every sentence as historical unless you can confirm it, and tell us what you can.