Viewing articles tagged 'fulro'

Books about the Dega A reading list for anyone who wants to understand the Dega properly, our own young people above all: the books and articles we trust, what each is good for, and where it can be read. Many are free online, and the older ones are in our own library. Reference 132 views Read More Mondulkiri, 1992: the end of the armed struggle In September 1992 two journalists walked into the forest of Mondulkiri, in eastern Cambodia, and found 407 FULRO guerrillas and their families living in five villages with six churches, still fighting a war that had ended seventeen years before. Nobody had told them that their president had been killed in 1975. On October 10 they handed 194 weap... Explainer 171 views Read More Names and words Reading about the Dega means reading four vocabularies at once, ours, the French, the Americans’ and the Vietnamese state’s, and they do not agree. Each outside name was given by someone at a particular moment for a particular purpose, and each still carries the purpose. This glossary gives the words you will meet in the records on this site: wh... Glossary 147 views Read More FULRO, 1964–1992 On the night of September 19, 1964, the strike forces of four American-trained camps in Darlac and Quang Duc rose against their Vietnamese officers and marched on Buon Ma Thuot, and a movement announced itself: the United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races, FULRO. It was made by the men of BAJARAKA, released from Diem’s prisons seven... Explainer 621 views Read More The men of FULRO FULRO is usually told as the story of one man. It was never only his. This is a register of the others we can name — the Cham officer who invented the word for what we were supposed to be, the two men called Adrong whom the record keeps confusing, the interpreter who funded a liberation front out of an American payroll, the commander who walked... Reference 101 views Read More Y Bham Enuol A Rhade official from Buon Ale-A who led both of our movements, spent more than five years in the prisons of the government he was petitioning, put our own name for ourselves into the official record, was held under guard by his own allies for the last six years of his life, and walked out of the French Embassy in Phnom Penh on April 20, 1975, i... Spotlight 134 views Read More Y Bham Enuol: president of FULRO, 1964 to 1968 He was president of FULRO for four years and three months, and in that time he fought two battles and held perhaps forty meetings. The record of those four years is not mainly a record of fighting. It is a record of letters carried across a border by couriers, of delegations kept waiting in Buon Ma Thuot, of demands that got smaller every year,... Explainer 75 views Read More 1975, and what came after The Republic of Vietnam began to lose the war in our country, at Buon Ma Thuot on March 10, 1975, and it lost the highlands in two weeks. For our people the spring of 1975 was not an ending. Our minister asked the Americans for protection and was refused. Two thousand of our people waited on a beach at Nha Trang for a ship that never came. Our l... Explainer 117 views Read More The photographs of Y Bham Enuol Seven pictures are gathered here, all of them from our own archive: the studio portrait, two portraits in uniform, the flag at Camp le Rolland, a photograph beside an aircraft, one of him armed in the field, and the family group. None of them has a photographer’s name attached, and only one has a date written on it. We say about each exactly wha... Reference 65 views Read More Massacres of our people This page is a register of the killings of our people that are documented: who was killed, where, when, by whom, and how we know. It names every kind of killer, because our people were killed by all of them — by the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong, by the North Vietnamese army, by the Khmer Rouge, by the governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia, by... Explainer 50 views Read More Kok Ksor A Jarai from Bon Broai who joined BAJARAKA at fourteen, went over the border at seventeen, came home from a war by way of a Khmer Republic training course in Virginia, and spent the second half of his life in a small city in South Carolina making our case in rooms where states have to listen. For thirty years Kok Ksor was the Dega most foreign g... Spotlight 89 views Read More The Dega flags There is no single Dega flag. There have been at least eight, each made by a movement or an organization at a particular moment, and each carrying the history of the people who made it. Before any of them was sewn, a flag of our own was already a political demand: our leaders asked for one in 1955, in 1964, four times in 1965, in 1966 and in 196... Reference 77 views Read More Highland women in the war, 1954–1975 In 1966 the United States Army published a handbook that told its own personnel, in one identical line repeated for nineteen of our peoples, to stay away from our women. The same book recorded that in Darlac six or seven of every ten of our babies died before their first birthday, and that Rhade law puts the land in the women’s keeping. A year l... Explainer 73 views Read More Re-education and the forest, 1975–1992 After April 1975 our leaders went to prison without trial, our soldiers went to the camps or to the forest, and our pastors went to both. The men who reached Cambodia fought on for seventeen years on corn and poisoned potatoes, waiting for orders from a president who had already been dead for most of that time. The men who came home from the cam... Explainer 91 views Read More Customary law and the village court Our law was not a book. It was verse, held in the memory of men who could stand up in a village and recite the clause that settled the case. It priced a human life in gongs measured against a man’s own forearm, made failing to help the unfortunate an offense, and devoted more of itself to the wrongs a chief can commit than to theft. The French w... Explainer 95 views Read More