Timeline: 875 to today

The Dega story in one place, from the fall of Champa to the extradition of a refugee from Bangkok in November 2025. Where an article in this library covers an entry in more depth, it is linked.

Before 1800A country of our own

• Held For more than two thousand years the Dega govern themselves in the highlands — farming, hunting, worshipping, judging disputes in our own courts. Before 1800
• 875 The Cham invade the northern coast around Danang. They do not come up into the highlands.
• 1471 The Annam destroy the Cham kingdom; its people are driven south, reaching Bien Hoa and Cambodia by 1697. The first outsiders
• 1815 Father Buzumi and Father Carvalho land at Danang; Catholic missionaries later establish the mission at Kontum — the first outsiders on our land.
• 1851 1 January — Father Pierre Dourisboure reaches Kon Phar. The Kon Tum mission produces the first written form of any of our languages. The Kon Tum mission

1876–1954The French

• 1876 The French begin exploring the highlands — Sêdang country, Rhadê country, and up from Saigon. The French arrive
• 1890 They reach our mountain country. Most tribes welcome them, hoping for the return of the coast.
• 1892 French missionaries and administrators transcribe highland languages into the Latin alphabet; the first elementary school opens at Buon Ma Thuot in 1901.
• 1899 2 November: an autonomous administration for the Montagnard people is created at Daklak. No Vietnamese are living in our territories at this date.
• 1914–29 Léopold Sabatier builds Banmethuot, schools, clinics, roads; records Rhadê customary law; argues the highlands should stay with the highlanders, and is removed for it.
• 1918 The first Vietnamese are brought into the highlands, as servants of French officials.
• 1946 27 May: High Commissioner d’Argenlieu creates the Federal Government for the Montagnard people of South Indochina. A country of our own
• 1950 The highlands become the Crown Domain, placed under Bao Dai. We are not consulted.
• 1951 21 May: Bao Dai’s statute guarantees our “free evolution” — and records that we are “non-Vietnamese populations”.
• 1953 July — the autonomy is suppressed and the PMSI is renamed the PMS.
• 1954 21 July — the Geneva accords partition Vietnam. The Dega are not represented and are not consulted. Pushed off

1954–1975Partition, resistance, war

• 1954 The Viet Minh defeat the French. Vietnam is divided at the 17th parallel.
• 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem merges the Central Highlands into South Vietnam by force. We are reclassified as an ethnic minority. Pushed off
• 1957 850,000 Vietnamese are resettled from the north into the heart of the homeland, paid for by the United States.
• 1957–58 BAJARAKA forms — Bahnar, Jarai, Rhadê, Koho. BAJARAKA, 1958
• 1958 September: the demonstration is crushed with tanks. 15 September: Y-Bham Eñuol, Paul Nur, Nay Luet, Y-Thih Eban, Siu Sip, Y-Ju Eban and Touneh Yoh are arrested; Dalat, then Hue.
• 1961 The CIA begins arming, training and paying Dega units. The American years
• 1964 12 February — the BAJARAKA leaders are released after the fall of Diem. Paul Nưr is made assistant province chief of Kontum and Y Bhăm Êñuôl assistant province chief of Darlac. The ministry years
• 1964 12 February: the leaders are released. 20 September: FULRO is founded under Y-Bham Eñuol. FULRO, 1964
• 1965 At Phnom Penh, Y-Bham Eñuol uses the word Dega before an international conference.
• 1967 4 May — Y Bhăm Êñuôl puts an eight-point proposal to Saigon: special constitutional status, Dega armed forces, a demarcated boundary, and a seat at any international conference. Y Bhăm Êñuôl
• 1968 26 January — during the Tet offensive, 82 Dega students are killed at Hue.
• 1968–69 11 December 1968 — an agreement with Saigon recognises minority rights and creates a ministry; nineteen days later Les Kosem seizes Camp le Rolland and places Y Bhăm Êñuôl under house arrest in Phnom Penh. A final treaty is signed on 1 February 1969. FULRO
• 1975 1 May: the war ends. Over 200,000 Dega dead, 85 per cent of villages destroyed or abandoned. Y-Bham Eñuol is executed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge with his wife, his children and over a hundred followers. Y-Bham Eñuol
• 1975 4 April — Nay Luett, Minister for the Development of Ethnic Minorities, asks American officials for protection and proposes a Dega force of 50,000. The request is refused. The ministry years

1975–1999Under the Socialist Republic

• 1975–76 Leaders, civil servants, former soldiers and students jailed, sent to re-education camps, tortured, executed. Churches closed. Land confiscated. 1975, and what came after
• 1976 Dinh Canh Dinh Cu — fixed field, fixed residence. The Ministry of Culture undertakes to “eradicate all outmoded customs”.
• 1977 20 September: Vietnam joins the United Nations.
• 1981–82 Vietnam ratifies the Genocide Convention (9 June 1981), ICERD (9 June 1982), the ICCPR and the ICESCR (24 September 1982). What Vietnam signed
• 1983 Nay Luett dies shortly after nine years of imprisonment. Paul Nưr dies in a prison in Hanoi. The ministry years
• 1986 Two hundred FULRO fighters reach a camp in Thailand and are resettled in North Carolina.
• 1990s The coffee boom. Vietnam becomes the world’s second-largest exporter; the highlands are cleared and settled. The land, and what was planted on it
• 1993–98 The Yali Falls dam is built on the Se San. 6,782 people are moved, three in five of them indigenous, into standard houses on land that was promised and never arrived; downstream releases kill villagers who were never told the dam existed. The dams
• 1992 Mondulkiri: around 400 fighters and families make contact with UN peacekeepers and end a seventeen-year war. In December, 402 people — 269 men, 24 women, 80 children — are resettled in North Carolina. Mondulkiri, 1992
• 1993 The highlands are reopened to visitors, shortly before the eleventh session of the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. Signs prohibiting entry meet those who test it.

2001–2011The protests, and the answer

• 2001 February: several thousand Dega march on Pleiku, Buon Ma Thuot and Kontum for land, faith and a homeland. Tanks and elite troops. February 2001
• 2001 May: “goat’s blood ceremonies” — forced renunciation using our own oath practice. September: fourteen organisers sentenced to up to twelve years. By year end, 36 sentenced to four to thirteen years.
• 2002 Cambodia closes the border-province camps and bars UNHCR outside Phnom Penh. 2,300 extra soldiers deployed to the highlands.
• 2003 At least 100 arrests; 33 tried and imprisoned; at least 270 deported from Cambodia.
• 2004 10–11 April, Easter Week: tear gas, water cannon, electric batons, tanks on Highway 14. Dozens, possibly hundreds, never accounted for. Easter Week 2004
• 2005 February: Instruction No. 1 bans Dega Protestantism. March: Decree 22. The church they closed
• 2007 1 November — Decision 167 authorises extraction of 5.4 billion tonnes of bauxite from the Central Highlands: 25 mines across Dak Nong and Lam Dong. Bauxite
• 2009 5 January — General Võ Nguyên Giáp asks the Prime Minister to halt the bauxite projects; a petition follows on 12 April, signed by 135 intellectuals. In the largest public argument in modern Vietnam about our homeland, the plateau is a watershed and a security risk, and rarely somebody's home.
• 2008 May: Y Ben Hdok, 29, dies after arrest. His family describe his head, ribs, leg and teeth broken. The authorities call it suicide.
• 2011 Human Rights Watch records more than 350 Montagnards sentenced since 2001, at least 250 still held, at least 25 dead in custody.

2023–2025Terrorism law, and the reach abroad

• 2023 11 June, 00:35: attacks on two commune headquarters in Cư Kuin district, Dak Lak. Nine killed. Cư Kuin, June 2023
• 2024 20 January: a hundred people convicted in one sitting of a mobile court. Montagnards Stand for Justice designated a terrorist organisation.
• 2024 8 March: Y Būm Byă dies in custody after torture, per UN experts. 28 August: twelve UN special procedures find the trial lacked legal basis and independence.
• 2025 February: 68 Montagnards detained in a raid on a funeral service near Bangkok. 26 November: the Thai Court of Appeal upholds extradition. 28 November: Y Quynh Bđăp, a UNHCR-recognised refugee, is handed to Vietnam. Asylum today

Last reviewed September 2026. Sources are given on the individual articles linked above.