Viewing articles tagged 'kontum'

BAJARAKA, 1958 BAJARAKA is four peoples in one word: BAhnar, JArai, RAde, KAho. It was the movement in which our educated men, most of them teachers, clerks, soldiers and policemen of the new Republic of Vietnam, asked for our country back with letters, a petition and a march. They wrote to President Diem, to the American, French and British ambassadors and to... Changelog 590 views Read More The first outsiders: Cham, Annam and the missions Three powers came to the edge of the highlands before the French, and each left something with us. The Cham held the coast for a thousand years, traded up our rivers, built one tower in our forest, and when their kingdom died gave their crowns into our keeping. The Vietnamese destroyed the Cham, inherited the shore, set up markets at the foot of... Reference 113 views Read More The Kon Tum mission, 1851 In the last weeks of 1850 a French priest of twenty-five, guided in by a Vietnamese deacon, reached the Bahnar villages of the Kon Tum basin. The mission that followed produced the first written form of any of our languages, the first dictionary, the first school, and the first outside description of who lived in the highlands and where. It is t... Explainer 152 views Read More The prisoner records: what they are and how to search them Our records hold 337 Dega by name, men and one woman imprisoned for their faith, their land or their people in five provinces, arrested between 2001 and 2006. This page explains what the records are, where they came from, what they show, how they compare with the lists kept by others, what the gaps mean, and how to search them for somebody, incl... Reference 142 views Read More The battles fought on our land Both armies agreed that whoever held the Central Highlands would decide the war, so the largest battles of the American war, and the offensives that ended it, were fought where our villages stood. The histories of those battles count sorties, tons of bombs and enemy dead to the last digit. They name the hills by their height and the villages by... Reference 87 views Read More 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 s... Reference 69 views Read More The missions and the doctors In May 1972, with Kontum under siege, the American doctor who ran the highland hospital there put half of it on helicopters and flew out. Before she went she handed the hospital over to Sister Gabriel, her most experienced Montagnard nurse. Earlier in the fighting, more than thirty of our staff and patients had lain on top of her in a human blan... Explainer 96 views Read More Four highland towns The four towns of the highlands that the world knows, Buon Ma Thuot, Pleiku, Kon Tum and Da Lat, all carry highland names, and all grew up on highland land as posts of someone else’s government: a Rhade chief’s village made a French residence, a Jarai village made a militia post, a Bahnar village made a mission and then a province, and a pine-co... Reference 89 views Read More Tet 1968 in the highlands The American field force that held the highlands wrote its own verdict on Tet four pages after it counted the dead: “Heaviest attacks were launched initially” at “the highlands population centers of Kontum and Ban Me Thuot.” The first and hardest blows of the 1968 offensive in the whole of II Corps fell on two of our market towns. Then the same... Explainer 128 views Read More Highland refugees of the war years In the autumn of 1970 a South Vietnamese corps commander ordered the province chiefs of the highlands to empty every one of our hamlets that had been graded C or D. Families were given a few hours’ notice, in the harvest season, and told to leave the gongs and the jars behind. At Plei De Groi, 2,500 people were moved in; by the following October... Explainer 74 views Read More