Viewing articles tagged 'resettlement'

Pushed off, 1954–57 In 1953 there were about six thousand Vietnamese in our highlands outside Da Lat. By the end of 1956 more than 140,000 Vietnamese refugees from the north had been settled on our land. By 1963 Vietnamese were more than 40 percent of the people of the seven highland provinces. This is how it was done: the French left, the Republic of Vietnam aboli... Explainer 153 views Read More North Carolina The largest community of our people outside Vietnam is in North Carolina, in Greensboro, Charlotte, Raleigh and New Bern. It is there because the American soldiers we fought beside came home to Fort Bragg and would not let the subject drop, and because when the survivors of the resistance walked out of the forest in 1985 and 1992 those soldiers... Reference 132 views Read More The Cambodian camps, 2001–2005 The border between Vietnam and Cambodia runs through the middle of one people. The Mnong of Dak Nong are the Bunong of Mondulkiri; the Jarai of Gia Lai are one of the largest peoples of Ratanakiri. When the crackdown came after February 2001, our people walked east to west across a line that meant nothing to them, into villages where the languag... Explainer 126 views Read More The dams: Yali Falls and the rivers The Se San and the Srepok run west out of our highlands into Cambodia and the Mekong. From 1993 they were dammed. At Yali Falls alone 6,782 people were moved, three in five of them Jarai, Rongao and Bahnar, into standard houses with no kitchen, onto land that was promised and never arrived. Downstream, in Ratanakiri, people drowned in releases f... Reference 117 views Read More Moved by force: hamlets, camps and relocation, 1957–1972 For fifteen years, from 1957 into the 1970s, governments moved our villages. Saigon moved them to make room for Vietnamese settlers, then to empty the country the Viet Cong held. The American army lifted them out by helicopter so that it could fight where they had lived. A South Vietnamese general moved them again at harvest, on a few hours’ not... Explainer 79 views Read More Thailand’s screening mechanism: what it offers a Dega refugee Thailand has no refugee law. It has one procedure, written in 2019 and switched on in September 2023, that can give a person who cannot go home a Thai status called “Protected Person.” In its first thirty months it produced seven of them, out of an urban caseload of more than five thousand five hundred. All seven were granted in the first thirte... Explainer 80 views Read More Our veterans in America Sixty-one thousand of our men fought beside the Americans between 1961 and 1975, by the count the United States Senate itself uses. The United States brought some of the survivors to North Carolina in 1986 and 1992 because of that service, and has twice passed resolutions honoring it. It has never counted one of them as a veteran. This page sets... Explainer 67 views Read More Beyond North Carolina: Canada and other countries Most of us who were resettled went to the United States, and a smaller number to Canada. But the second country to take us was not Canada. It was Finland, in May 2005, a month before the first flight to Vancouver, and about seventy-five of our people went there. Nobody has written a word about them in twenty-one years. That is the shape of every... Explainer 66 views Read More Lower Sesan 2: the dam downstream The Se San and the Srepok carry the water of our highlands into Cambodia, where the same peoples live on both banks. In 2017 the gates closed on Lower Sesan 2, a dam just below the rivers’ meeting in Stung Treng. It flooded some 30,000 hectares and displaced nearly 5,000 people, most of them Bunong, Brao, Lao, Jarai and their neighbors; more tha... Explainer 73 views Read More