Y Bham Enuol: Phnom Penh, the captivity and the death

At the end of 1968, days before he was to sign a settlement with Saigon, FULRO men and Cambodian officers took his headquarters and moved him to Phnom Penh. He was held there for six years, still called president by the fighters in the forest and still signing papers for them. On April 20, 1975 he walked out of the French Embassy at the head of about 150 of our people. Nobody who has written about it saw any of them again. That they were killed is not in doubt. By whose order, and at whose asking, has never been established.

The seizure

Hickey’s account is the clearest: just before Y Bham Enuol was to sign, FULRO dissidents together with Cambodian Cham — including, he writes, a few officers of the Royal Khmer Army — captured his headquarters. The agreement was signed without him by Y Dhe Adrong and Y Bling. Other accounts put it differently: that FULRO militants overthrew him and exiled him to Phnom Penh; that he was detained in Cambodia by FULRO dissidents; that Les Kosem surrounded the headquarters with several battalions and arrested him. The Montagnard Human Rights Organization says instead that he withdrew from FULRO on August 15, 1968 and went on with a separate movement, the Front de Libération des Hauts-Plateaux Montagnards.

The date December 30, 1968 is given in several community accounts for the seizure itself. We have not found it in a contemporary document, and mark it as unconfirmed. Les Kosem, the Cham officer of the Royal Cambodian Army whose objectives were Cambodian, is described on The men of FULRO.

Six years under guard

Human Rights Watch, following Hickey, says Cambodian officers kept him under virtual house arrest in Phnom Penh. He was not silent there, and he was not forgotten.

• In 1969 an American magazine could write of him as venerated by the Montagnards.
• The Montagnard Human Rights Organization says that on October 20, 1973 he named Kpa Koi vice-president of the movement.
• In 1974 the American embassy in Saigon reported that Kpa Koi carried a document in Rhade with a French translation, signed by Y Bham Enuol, authorizing him to head FULRO, and that the former minister Nay Luett had confirmed the signature. The same report noted that Y Bham was still respected by many Montagnards.
• A later cable that year reported FULRO groups in Kontum in contact with Kpa Koi and Y Bham Enuol in Cambodia.
• An academic account of Kok Ksor’s life says Y Bham Enuol named him FULRO’s chief of staff in 1974, from the same captivity.

A man held under guard in a foreign capital was still, on paper, the authority every armed group in the highlands claimed. That is the measure of what his name was worth to our people, and it is why the news of 1992 landed the way it did.

April 1975

The Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Y Bham Enuol, his family, and the FULRO people in the city took refuge in the French Embassy along with several hundred foreigners and about a thousand Cambodians.

The family that went into the compound with him is the one in the photograph we hold, which is on the photographs page. It shows fifteen people. No account we have read says how many of them were in Phnom Penh in April 1975, or what became of any of them.

The only eyewitness account we have been able to read is that of Father François Ponchaud, who was inside. He writes that on Sunday, April 20 the Khmer Rouge demanded that the Cambodians, Chinese and Vietnamese in the compound be sent out, and that around ten o’clock a column of about eight hundred people left. In it were a hundred and fifty FULRO mountaineers, men and women. He names the two who led them: Y Bam, whom he calls the founder of the movement, and Colonel Y Bun Suor. Of our people he writes: “They had counted on France, and she let them down.” He does not say where they were taken.

What happened after the column left the gate is not settled. The versions are these:

A French judicial inquiry in 2010 examined the conduct of the embassy in those days and did not find enough evidence that it had forced anyone out. The embassy’s own position was that it had no legal protection to give: the vice-consul, Jean Dyrac, was holding a compound the new authorities did not recognize.

We state plainly what we believe and what we cannot prove. That he and the FULRO people with him left the embassy on April 20, 1975 is attested by a man who watched them go. That they were killed is accepted by every account we have found, our own and others’. Where, on what day, and by whose order, is not established, and the number who died with him is given as anything from about a hundred to about a hundred and fifty.

Who killed him, and who wanted it

Every published account, ours included, says the Khmer Rouge killed him. Among our own people another belief is widely held: that Hanoi had a hand in it — that the men who took the column at the embassy gate knew who he was because they had been told. We should be straight about the standing of each of those statements.

What is documented. Phnom Penh was in Khmer Rouge hands from April 17, 1975. On April 20 the embassy was made to send out the Cambodians and others sheltering in it, and Y Bham Enuol and about 150 FULRO people walked out into a Khmer Rouge cordon. From that moment they were in Khmer Rouge custody, and no one has reported seeing any of them alive afterwards.

What is not documented. No order, no unit, no officer and no place of execution is named in any record we have found. No Khmer Rouge document naming him has been published, as far as we can establish. There is no grave, and there has never been an inquiry into the deaths of these 150 people, in Cambodia or anywhere else. The accounts that give the Lambert stadium or the Olympic Stadium are later reconstructions, not records.

What our people believe. That the killing was done at Vietnam’s asking, or with its knowledge. We record the belief because it is held sincerely and widely by the people this library is written for, and because a record is worth little if it sets down only the parts that carry footnotes. We also say plainly: we have found no evidence for it. No document, no witness, no captured order.

What can be said about the belief. In April 1975 Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge were not yet enemies; the border war between them began in 1977 and the invasion in 1978, so a request in that direction was possible in principle, and both governments treated FULRO as an enemy force. Against it stands the fact that the Khmer Rouge needed no instruction: that month they were killing soldiers, officials and armed groups tied to the old regime and to foreigners across the whole country, and FULRO was an armed movement inside their territory. And there is the turn that fits neither story neatly. In 1977 the same Khmer Rouge made an agreement with what was left of FULRO to exchange information, and armed it against Vietnam; the movement whose president they had killed became their ally for a decade, until FULRO broke with them in 1986. That part of the story is on FULRO, 1964–1992.

What would settle it. Khmer Rouge records for Phnom Penh in April 1975, now held in Cambodia; the French Embassy’s own files for those days, which a French judicial inquiry examined in 2010; Vietnamese archives of the period; and the testimony of anyone who was in that column and lived. If you know of any of these, or hold anything yourself, write to us. We would rather publish a correction than keep a comfortable version.

Was it genocide?

We say it was. This is not a figure of speech, and it is worth setting out the ground it stands on, and the ground it does not.

The definition. The Genocide Convention of 1948 defines genocide, in Article II, as acts — killing members of the group among them — “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The words that matter here are in part. International courts have held that the part must be a substantial one, and that substantial is not only a question of numbers: the appeals chamber in the Krstić case held that if the targeted part is emblematic of the group or essential to its survival, that supports a finding that it is substantial.

What was destroyed in April 1975. Not a random group of refugees. The president of the Dega movements, the men who had led them for seventeen years, and their families, taken together as a body and killed together. A people that had been governed, taught, petitioned for and represented by that group of men lost all of them in a morning. The fighters left in the forest were still waiting for orders from a man who had been dead since 1975 when they were found in 1992.

How many. Our own count, as it is held in the community, is more than three hundred people, counting the families. The only eyewitness figure that has been published is Father Ponchaud’s: a hundred and fifty FULRO men and women in the column that left the embassy on April 20. Other published accounts say “over a hundred followers” or about a hundred and fifty. Nobody has ever counted the FULRO households that were living elsewhere in Phnom Penh under guard, and nobody has ever tried. Until someone does, we give our figure as ours and the published ones as theirs, and we do not pretend the difference is settled.

What no court has done. The Khmer Rouge tribunal, the ECCC, convicted Nuon Chea of genocide against the Cham and the Vietnamese and Khieu Samphan of genocide against the Vietnamese, in the judgment of November 16, 2018; the appeal chamber upheld Khieu Samphan’s conviction on September 22, 2022. Its jurisdiction ran from April 17, 1975 — three days before our people were taken from the embassy. The Dega were never named as a victim group in any charge, the removals from the French Embassy were never adjudicated as a crime, and no investigator from that court, or from any other, has ever asked our families what happened to them. That is not a finding that it was not genocide. It is a finding that nobody with the power to decide has ever looked.

What we say, and what we would need. We say that the destruction of the leadership of a people, with their families, because of who they were and what they led, is genocide within the meaning of the Convention, and we say it in the same terms as the rest of our case, which is set out on How we died. To have it established rather than asserted would take the Khmer Rouge records for Phnom Penh in April 1975, the French Embassy files, a count of the dead with names, and the testimony of anyone who survived. We are looking for all four. If you hold any part of it, write to us.

Seventeen years of waiting

The men he had left in the forest did not know. In September 1992, when journalists reached the last FULRO unit in Mondulkiri, its commander Colonel Y Peng Ayun asked them to help find the president he had been waiting for orders from since 1975. The answer came in a letter from Pierre K’briuh, a Montagnard leader in the United States, printed in the Phnom Penh Post: the president and his entourage had been executed by the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Human Rights Watch was told by a FULRO veteran in North Carolina that learning of his death was a major element in the decision to lay down arms.

That story is told in full on Mondulkiri, 1992.

What we do not know

• The names of his wife and children, and whether any of his family survived.
• Where and on what day he was killed.
• Whether Kpa Doh, the FULRO commander, was in the compound with him.
• Whether any record of the handover survives in Cambodian or French files.

If a member of his family, or of the families of the 150, is living, we would be glad to be corrected. How to reach us.

Sources

• François Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero (Penguin, 1978), p. 31 — the column of April 20, 1975, the 150, and the two who led them
• Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards (2002), the historical chapter — the house arrest, the executions, and the effect of the 1992 news
• Gerald C. Hickey, Accommodation and Coalition in South Vietnam, RAND P-4213 (1970) — the seizure of the headquarters and the December 1968 signature
• “Montagnard Army Seeks U.N. Help,” Phnom Penh Post, September 12, 1992 and Nate Thayer, “Lighting the darkness: FULRO’s jungle Christians” (1992, reposted 2013) — Colonel Ayun’s question and K’briuh’s answer
• US Embassy Saigon, weekly report, July 24, 1974 (State Department cable 1974-144543) and US Embassy Saigon, November 8, 1974 (State Department cable 1974-243335) — the 1974 authority carried by Kpa Koi
• Montagnard Human Rights Organization, history page — August 15, 1968, October 20, 1973, and the account of his death
• Joe P. Dunn, “Kok Ksor and the Struggle for Cultural Survival,” Athens Journal of History (2024) — the appointment of Kok Ksor as chief of staff in 1974
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Article II
• ICTY, Prosecutor v. Krstić, appeals judgment, April 19, 2004, paras. 8–12 — destroying a group “in part”
• ECCC, summary of the judgment in Case 002/02, November 16, 2018 — the genocide convictions for the Cham and the Vietnamese

Compiled September 2026. The place and date of his death are not established; every version we found is in the table above.