After April 1975 the leaders of the highlands went to prison, and the men who had fought with the Americans went either to the re-education camps or to the forest. For seventeen years a remnant of FULRO fought on from Cambodia while their families lived under suspicion at home. Most of what happened to the prisoners was never tried in any court, and much of it is still not documented.
The camps
“Those who had worked with U.S. Special Forces or FULRO were sent to re-education camps,” Human Rights Watch recorded in 2002. So were “all of the highland leaders from the ministry and those who had been active in provincial administrations and programs.” A CIA assessment of December 1983 said the same: tribal leaders who had served in Saigon’s Ministry of Ethnic Minorities, and those with a long relationship with American advisers, “were arrested in 1975 and placed in reeducation camps.”
Among them was Nay Luett. A Mnong man interviewed by HRW said he was held for ten years; his story, and how he died, is on Paul Nưr and Nay Luett.
Churches were closed too. Amnesty International, in a 1990 report that followed a visit in May 1989, reported that of some 200,000 members the Evangelical Church had claimed in 1975, about 70,000 were highlanders, and that “most ‘Montagnard’ churches were closed,” with their schools, orphanages and clinics. It also reported that most of a group of southern intellectuals arrested in 1976 and sent without trial for “re-education” were held at Gia Trung, a camp in Gia Lai–Kon Tum; and that after amnesties in 1987 and 1988, officials said 130 former officers and officials of the Saigon government remained in custody.
The forest
- April 1975 — Y Bhăm Êñuôl and FULRO members and their families sheltering in Phnom Penh are handed to the Khmer Rouge and killed (see Y Bhăm Êñuôl). The fighters in the forest do not learn of it until 1992.
- Early 1980s — HRW puts FULRO’s strength at about 7,000, based in Mondulkiri and raiding across the border. The CIA in 1983 estimated “as many as 2,000 insurgents” in the highlands, and noted that FULRO itself admitted losing 2,000 killed since 1981.
- 1985 — The Washington Post reports that the main armed resistance in the south is FULRO in the Central Highlands.
- 1985–86 — By 1986 the Khmer Rouge have ended their support. A group that reached the Thai border in 1985 is resettled in North Carolina in 1986.
- 1992 — The last group, about 400 fighters with their families, surrenders to UN peacekeepers in Mondulkiri (see Mondulkiri, 1992).
What the state said, and what it did
The same CIA assessment described a policy of “settling tens of thousands of ethnic Vietnamese” in the highlands and pressing highlanders to abandon the practices that distinguished them (see The great migration). Internal Party documents later obtained by Human Rights Watch record that pastors and believers released from re-education from 1980 “resumed their proselytizing activities” — the state’s own account of how the church it had closed came back. An Ede woman told HRW she was held in a dark cell for a year in 1985 for FULRO activities, and afterward left the armed group and turned to the church (see The church they closed).
What we do not know
We have found no independent record of the trials of FULRO members in the 1980s — the courts, the defendants, the sentences — and no list of those who died in the camps. Amnesty International’s reports of the early 1980s, which may hold some of it, are not online in a form we could read. If a member of your family was held after 1975, their name belongs in Prisoner records, with your consent.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards (2002), chapter III and chapter VII
- Amnesty International, Viet Nam: “Renovation” (doi moi), the law and human rights in the 1980s, ASA 41/001/1990
- CIA Directorate of Intelligence, Vietnam: Repressing Ethnic Minorities and Religious Groups (December 1983)
- Washington Post, “Vietnam: 10,000 still in ‘reeducation’ camps,” April 23, 1985, as filed by the CIA
Compiled September 2026.