This is the worst-documented period in our history, and this page exists to say so with as much precision as we can manage. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people from the former South Vietnam were sent to re-education camps after April 1975. We do not know how many of them were Dega, where they were held, or how many came back. What we do know is why they were taken: because there were lists.
What happened to everybody
After the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, former officers, officials, police, teachers, religious figures and anyone associated with the Republic of Vietnam or with the Americans were ordered to register in May and to report for re-education in June.
They were told how long it would be. Ordinary soldiers, three days; junior officers, ten; senior officials, one month. In fact people were held for anything from weeks to eighteen years. In June 1976 the Provisional Revolutionary Government promised release after three years, and did not honour it. The legal basis cited was article 3 of a North Vietnamese law on counter-revolutionary crimes of 30 October 1967, carrying twenty years to life or death.
Conditions are well attested by survivors: political indoctrination and written confessions; forced labour clearing jungle, cutting timber, planting corn and cassava, digging wells, and sweeping minefields without equipment; beatings for minor infractions; confinement in metal conex boxes; reduced rations and solitary confinement. Deaths from starvation and disease were common — malaria, beriberi, dysentery, tuberculosis, on top of constant hunger. From 1980, family visits were permitted every three months, and for many prisoners those visits were the only source of additional food.
Total detained: 200,000–300,000 on the conservative estimates. Higher figures of half a million to a million circulate; scholars regard them as inflated, and the million derives from a mistranslation of a statement about people returned to civilian life rather than held.
Why the Dega were taken
Because the paperwork existed, and it had our names on it.
From 1961, Dega men were recruited, armed, trained and paid by American programmes — the CIDG camps, Mike Force, the Kit Carson Scouts, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, the Truong Son cadre programme. Those are administered programmes. They produce rosters, pay records, unit histories and discharge papers. So do a ministry, a provincial administration and a school.
The charge against us after 1975 was that we had been the eyes and ears of the American forces and that we belonged to FULRO. Political and religious leaders, civil servants, former soldiers, students and pastors were jailed, sent to camps, tortured, and in cases executed. Paul Nưr and Nay Luett — the two men who had spent 1964 to 1975 arguing our case inside the machinery of the Saigon state rather than fighting — both died in prison. Neither had carried a weapon in eleven years.
And it reached the Dega who had chosen the other side. Leaders including Y Bih Aleo and Y Ngong Nie Kdam had accepted Ho Chi Minh's offer and held office in the National Liberation Front. Some kept ceremonial position after 1975. None of it produced autonomy, land, or schools in our languages. That disposes of the idea that what happened after 1975 was punishment for having chosen wrongly in the war.
What we do not know
Almost all of it, in our own case.
- How many. The 200,000–300,000 figure is for the former South as a whole. No breakdown by ethnicity exists that we have found.
- Where. We do not have a list of the camps that held Dega prisoners, or whether highlanders were held in the highlands or moved north.
- How long, and who came back. No systematic account of releases, deaths, or people who never returned.
- The dead. There is no roll. Where Vietnamese-American organisations have worked since 2006 to locate graves and identify remains from the camps, nothing comparable exists for us.
Why the gap exists, and why it will not close by itself
Three reasons, and none of them is that nothing happened.
The people who could describe the camps were inside them, and were released under conditions, into a region that was closed to outside visitors for eighteen years. Those who left for North Carolina in 1986 and 1992 were mostly fighters from the forest, not camp survivors. And the generation that was taken in 1975 was in its twenties and thirties then; it is in its seventies and eighties now, where it is alive at all.
This is the part of our history with the shortest remaining time on it. Everything else in this library can be reconstructed from documents later. This cannot.
What we are asking for
An account from anybody who was held, or whose father or grandfather was: the name, the year taken, where they were told to report, which camp or camps, what the work was, when they were released, and whether they came home. A name and a year is already more than we have.
Read reporting safely first if you are in Vietnam, and how to document before you write anything down. If you are in North Carolina, France or anywhere else outside, the risk calculation is different and the urgency is greater.
Sources
- Re-education camps (Vietnam) — the registration orders, the stated and actual detention periods, conditions, the legal basis, the detainee estimates and the 1989 agreement
- Gerald C. Hickey, Free in the Forest (Yale, 1982) — the highlands in the immediate post-1975 period
- Montagnard Human Rights Organization, History — the accounts of the deaths of Nay Luett and Paul Nưr
- Montagnard Foundation, Inc., historical summaries (archive held by DCHO)
Compiled September 2026. This page is deliberately short, because padding it would misrepresent how little we have. It is listed on what we do not know as the largest gap in the library, and it is the one we would most like to close.