The Se San and the Srepok run west out of the highlands into the Mekong. From 1993 they were dammed. At Yali Falls alone, 6,782 people were moved — three in five of them indigenous — into houses of thirty-nine square metres with no kitchen and no latrine, onto land that was promised and never arrived. Downstream, in Cambodia, people drowned in releases from a dam they had never been told about.
Yali Falls
The original plan was to move 5,384 people in 1,149 households. The figure that was actually moved is a quarter larger, which tells you how the reservoir was surveyed.
Who was moved
| People | Share of those resettled |
|---|---|
| Kinh (Vietnamese) | 40% |
| Jarai | 35% |
| Rơngao | 19% |
| Bahnar | 6% |
Three in five of the people displaced by Yali Falls were indigenous. That matters for what comes next, because the resettlement did not treat the two groups the same.
What resettlement meant
The houses. Standard issue, uniform, and built to a smaller specification for Kinh families and 39 square metres for ethnic minority families — with no kitchen, no bathroom and no latrine. In the study's survey, 31 of 45 households said they were not satisfied with the quality: poor construction, leaking roofs. A Jarai or Bahnar family that had lived in a longhouse was issued a box.
The land. Cultivable land was promised and never materialised. That is the whole failure in one sentence: a farming people was moved off its fields and given a house instead of a field.
The food. Only 4 of 42 households surveyed had enough rice to last the year. A third faced a shortage of seven to nine months.
The money. Compensation was wildly uneven. Moving expenses ranged from 200,000 dong — about thirteen US dollars — to 800,000. For lost crops, Kinh households in one village received up to 120 million dong; ethnic minority households received minimal amounts. Two families, moved by the same project on the same day, could be compensated a hundredfold apart.
What happened below the dam
The people who were not resettled were not consulted either, because nobody classified them as affected.
In 1999 two large releases sent water 25 to 30 metres high down the Se San. Two people were killed at Bi village and one injured at Nu village. Boats were swept away — seven at Dip village, worth 11.3 million dong, ten at Nu, six at Dom — along with crops, salt and animals. No compensation was paid, although the state routinely assists after a natural disaster. This was not a natural disaster; it was a gate being opened.
The fishery went. Before the dam a haul might bring three or four baskets; by 1999–2000 a day's fishing brought a few fish, and the large species were gone entirely. Villagers began calling the river cement water — turbid, shallow and foul. People reported itching, eye irritation, rashes, diarrhoea and respiratory infection within an hour of bathing in it. The wild vegetables that had been gathered from the banks — bong tang, la ngoi, dam boong, ra phi — disappeared as the water changed, and with them the seasonal round that went with collecting them.
Across the border
The Se San crosses into Ratanakiri, and the Srepok into Stung Treng, and the Bunong and Jarai on the Cambodian side are the same peoples as the Mnong and Jarai on ours. They received the floods with no warning at all: flash floods several times a year, drowned livestock, destroyed riverside gardens, lower rice yields, and in one commune roughly thirty drownings. Villagers along the Srepok dated unusual flooding from 2004 and blamed construction upstream; Vietnamese authorities disputed the connection. By January 2007, four of six planned Srepok dams were already under construction, and some 11,000 Cambodians live along that river's banks.
Cambodian villages organised — the Sesan, Srepok and Sekong Protection Network came to represent 59 villages in the north-east — and the Lower Se San II dam, begun in 2015 with Chinese, Cambodian and Vietnamese ownership, displaced around 5,000 more people on the Cambodian side.
Why this belongs in a Dega library and not only an environmental one
Because the Yali Falls resettlement is the clearest documented case of the pattern this whole library describes, and it was recorded by outsiders with numbers attached. The same project, the same day, the same official procedure — and a Kinh household received up to 120 million dong for its crops while an indigenous household received almost nothing. Nobody wrote a policy saying that. It emerges from a system in which compensation attaches to registered, certificated, individually-held property, and our land was none of those things.
That is the mechanism. It does not require anyone to intend the outcome, and it produces the outcome anyway, which is why we keep saying that recognising communal tenure as tenure is the single change that would matter most.
Sources
- International Rivers Network / Fisheries Office of Ratanakiri, Study into Impact of Yali Falls Dam on Resettled and Downstream Communities — resettlement numbers and ethnic composition, housing, food security, compensation, the 1999 releases, deaths, boats, fisheries and water quality
- Yali Falls Dam — location, dates, capacity, reservoir area, and the 59-village protection network
- Mekong Eye, "Trapped Between Two Dams", 26 January 2016 — the Lower Se San II displacement and downstream accounts from Ratanakiri
- International Rivers, "Sharing the Srepok River" — the Srepok cascade and the 11,000 affected Cambodians
Compiled September 2026. The Yali Falls study is from the early 2000s and we have no account of what those resettlement sites are like now, twenty-five years on. If your family was moved for Yali Falls, Se San 3, Se San 4 or any of the Srepok dams, we would like to know what happened after.