Prisoners of conscience: Kontum

Eleven Dega from Kon Tum province, recorded by name as imprisoned for their faith, their land or their people, arrested in 2004 and 2005. Not one sentence is recorded against any of them. That blank column is itself the record’s clearest statement about how little news left this province. It is a record, not an argument. Every line is a person somebody is waiting for.

Kon Tum is the northernmost of the highland provinces, and our record of it is the quietest. Eleven people, nearly all from the village of Plei Grak in Xa Thai, were arrested in the winters of 2004 and 2005. The youngest was seventeen. Four were sent to Thanh Hoa province in the north; for the rest, even the prison is blank.

The record

What this record shows

A record with eleven names and no sentences says something about access to Kon Tum and nothing about what happened to the eleven. Where a family could not learn even the length of a sentence, the blank is a measure of the wall around the province, and it deserves reading as evidence in its own right rather than as a gap to apologize for. The concentration of the names in one village, Plei Grak, is the shape a single crackdown leaves in a record built from the families it touched.

Set against the other counts

Kon Tum is one of the five Central Highland provinces that Human Rights Watch reported on, and its imprisonments are folded into the regional total of at least 355 Central Highlanders held as of May 2006, of whose trials only 159 had been reported anywhere. A province from which almost no trial news escaped is exactly where a name-by-name record kept from the outside matters most.

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 Kon Tum 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, 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, Prisoners of Conscience in Viet Nam (2016), which gives aliases and places of detention
• Minority Groups in the Republic of Vietnam (US Army, 1966), in our library — Bahnar names, which carry no clan name, 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.