BAJARAKA, 1958

Four peoples in one acronym: BAhnar, JArai, RAde, KAho. A movement that asked for our country with letters and demonstrations, whose leaders were arrested for it and held for five years, and whose survivors came out of prison in 1964 to found something that carried weapons.

The founding date

Three dates circulate in the published record: May 1955, 5 January 1958 and 1 May 1958. We are not able to resolve them, and we would rather say so than pick one. What is not in dispute is the sequence: the movement was organised by the first Dega generation educated in the French schools, in direct response to the merger of 1955 and the land programme of 1956, and it became publicly visible in 1958.

What happened, in order

• 1955–57 — Diem merges the highlands into the Republic, abolishes the customary courts, bars our languages from the schools and begins resettling Vietnamese onto highland land. The educated Dega of Buon Ma Thuot, Kon Tum and Pleiku begin meeting.
• May 1958 — BAJARAKA sends letters to the embassies of France and the United States and to the United Nations, protesting discriminatory acts by the government of the Republic of Vietnam against the highland peoples. This is the first time a Dega organisation addresses the international community in its own name.
• August–September 1958 — Demonstrations in Kon Tum, Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot. They are unarmed and their demands are public: the land, the schools, the courts, and recognition.
• September 1958 onward — The Republic arrests the leadership. Around fifteen named leaders are taken, among them Y Bhăm Êñuôl, Y Thih Êban, Y Ju Êban and Nay Luett. Y Bhăm Êñuôl is held at Hue and later at Da Lat.
• 1 November 1963 — Diem is overthrown and killed. The BAJARAKA prisoners are released over the following months, with American encouragement; the movement's leaders return to the highlands after roughly five years inside.
• March 1964 — The movement reconstitutes as the Front for the Liberation of the Highlands (Front de Libération des Hauts Plateaux).
• September 1964 — The FLHP merges with the Front for the Liberation of Champa and the Front for the Liberation of Kampuchea Krom to form FULRO. The political route is not abandoned, but it is no longer the only one.

What BAJARAKA asked for

The demands were consistent across the letters and the demonstrations, and they were modest by the standard of what had been taken: representation of highlanders in the National Assembly and in the provincial administration of their own provinces; the restoration of the customary courts; instruction in our own languages; an end to the expropriation of village land for settlement; and recognition of highlanders as the original inhabitants of the region rather than as one minority among many.

None of this is separatism, and that is the point worth holding on to. BAJARAKA asked for a place inside the Republic of Vietnam on terms that acknowledged who we were. It was answered with five years in prison. The armed movement that followed did not come out of nowhere; it came out of the demonstrated closure of every other route, and the men who founded it were the same men, released from the same cells.

Sources

• BAJARAKA — the name, the founders, the May 1958 letters, the August–September 1958 demonstrations and the arrests
• United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races — the March 1964 reconstitution and the September 1964 merger
• Gerald C. Hickey, Free in the Forest (Yale, 1982) — the fullest outside account of BAJARAKA and its leadership
• Montagnard Foundation, Inc., historical summaries (archive held by DCHO)

Compiled September 2026. An earlier version of this page carried the 1964 releases before the 1958 arrests; the order is corrected here. We are still looking for the text of the May 1958 letters — if a copy exists in a family archive, in Paris or in the UN records, we want it.