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The photographs of Y Bham Enuol

Y Bham Enuol Reference 37 views 7 min read Back

Seven pictures are gathered here, all of them from our own archive: the studio portrait, two portraits in uniform, the flag at Camp le Rolland, a photograph beside an aircraft, one of him armed in the field, and the family group. None of them has a photographer’s name attached, and only one has a date written on it. We say about each exactly what we know, and we put beside the portrait the copy that the rest of the world uses.

The studio portrait

Y Bham Enuol in a dark suit and tie, a head-and-shoulders studio portrait — Y Bham Enuol. Our own records date this portrait to 1958, the year of the BAJARAKA letters. DCHO archive. The same portrait is on Wikimedia Commons.

If 1958 is right, it was taken within months of his arrest. The same picture is on Wikimedia Commons, marked there as a public-domain photograph of the Republic of Vietnam, dated to the 1950s; the entry names no photographer and gives no first publication, so that marking is a judgment rather than a record. We have put the Commons copy below ours so that anyone can see they are one photograph.

The same studio portrait of Y Bham Enuol, a slightly different copy with a lighter background — The copy of the portrait that is on Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked as a public-domain photograph of the Republic of Vietnam, dated to the 1950s, photographer unknown. Placed here beside ours for comparison: it is the same negative, cropped and printed differently. Via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

In uniform

Y Bham Enuol in a plain field uniform with shoulder boards, facing the camera — A plain field uniform with shoulder boards, photographed straight on, like an identity photograph. DCHO archive.

Between them these two show the change the record describes: the provincial official of 1958 is, by the middle of the decade, the president and commanding general of a movement in the field. He is in uniform in both, and in neither is he carrying a weapon.

Camp le Rolland, 1965

Y Bham Enuol in a suit standing at a flagpole, the flag flying above him, troops drawn up under a thatched shelter behind — The flag flying at Camp le Rolland, the FULRO headquarters in Mondulkiri, with the troops drawn up behind. He stands at the flagpole in a civilian suit. DCHO archive. The same photograph is published by champa.one, credited to FULRO, with the printed caption “Y-Bham Enuol at Camp De Rolland, 1965.”

This is the most valuable of them, because it is the only one that shows him at work: the president of a movement, in front of his own soldiers, at the place he ran it from. Human Rights Watch places the headquarters “near Camp Le Rolland (present-day Dak Dam) in Mondolkiri,” where he and about two thousand followers had gone after September 1964. The flag is the one the 1968 agreement would later concede in writing. The printed caption on the published copy indicates it was scanned from a book, most probably Po Dharma’s history of FULRO, which used the movement’s own archive.

Beside an aircraft

He was flown in and out of meetings more than once. The CIA study records one such flight exactly: in February 1963 General Khanh, then commanding at Pleiku, “had Y Bham brought from Banmethuot jail by Combined Studies Division aircraft to attend the meeting.” There were flights to Ban Me Thuot for the talks of 1965, 1967 and 1968, and in and out of Phnom Penh after that. Any of those journeys would fit this picture, and we are not going to pretend we know which. If you recognize the aircraft, the uniform of the men with him, or the airfield, tell us.

The family

A family group of fifteen people photographed outdoors against a wall, a man in a dark suit at the center — The Enuol family. Y Bham Enuol stands at the center, in the suit. Fifteen people are in the picture, from a grandmother to a baby in arms. DCHO archive.

This is the only picture we have of him with his family, and it is the only evidence in this library of the household that was with him in Phnom Penh. Hickey’s one sentence on the seizure of his headquarters is that “Y Bham and his family were sent to Phnom Penh.” Every published source says his wife and children died with him, and not one of them gives a name. Our own records do: his wife H’Bem Êban, their eight children and a son-in-law are named on the Phnom Penh page.

If you can say which of them is which in this photograph, or where and when it was taken, please write to us. Putting the names to these faces would be the most valuable addition anyone could make to this section.

In the field

A highland fighter in camouflage and a soft cap, a pipe in his mouth, a rifle slung over his shoulder — Y Bham Enuol in the field: camouflage, a slung rifle and the pipe. Identified from our own records. DCHO archive.

This is the only photograph we have of him armed and in the field, and it is the one that answers the portraits: the official in the suit and the president in the flag ceremony are the same man who carried a rifle through the grass on the border. It circulates on Montagnard community pages as well, under his name. We publish it on the identification of our own organization, and if anyone can date it or say where it was taken, tell us.

The photograph in our own gallery

The DCHO gallery holds a picture, long labeled as the president, showing four men in uniform with a tall Western man in a white shirt. We are not able to confirm that Y Bham Enuol is in it, or when it was taken; the composition has as much in common with photographs of the last FULRO unit meeting foreign visitors in the 1990s as with anything from his lifetime. Until we can establish what it shows, we describe it as Dega officers with a foreign visitor, and we do not present it as a picture of him.

The photograph guide explains how we handle pictures whose subjects are uncertain.

The photographs that existed and are lost

There is one set of pictures of him whose existence is on the record and whose whereabouts is not. In July 1974 the American consulate’s representative in Darlac was shown the document, in Rhade with a French translation, by which Y Bham Enuol appointed Kpa Koi to lead FULRO in Vietnam. The embassy’s report to Washington says: “Photographs accompanying the document add to its verisimilitude.” Photographs of him, then, taken in Phnom Penh during the years under guard, were in the highlands in the summer of 1974, in the hands of Kpa Koi’s group. They are the only pictures from the last six years of his life that anyone has mentioned. If they survived the year that followed, somebody’s family has them.

What is not to be found

No photograph of him at the Conference of Indochinese Peoples in Phnom Penh, March 1965, has surfaced in any archive we searched.
Nothing in the United States National Archives catalog or the Library of Congress shows him by name.
The American press agencies hold Montagnard pictures from 1964 and 1965, but none we found is captioned with his name; their licenses would not let us republish them in any case.
No film of him is known to us. If any exists it is most likely in Cambodian or French television archives of 1965 to 1970.
Nothing at all from April 1975.

If you hold a picture of him

Families in North Carolina, in Cambodia and in France hold photographs that have never been copied. A photograph of Y Bham Enuol — at home, at a meeting, in the camp, with his family — belongs in the record of our people. We will copy it, credit it as you ask, and return the original. How to record an elder explains how we take copies, and this page says how to reach us.

Sources

The DCHO archive — all seven pictures on this page, and our own records for the datings of 1958 and 1964
champa.one — the Camp le Rolland photograph, credited to FULRO
Wikimedia Commons — the studio portrait, marked public domain
Human Rights Watch, Repression of Montagnards (2002), the historical chapter — Camp Le Rolland
CIA, The Highlanders of South Vietnam (June 1966), DCHO library — the flight of February 1963; Gerald C. Hickey, Accommodation and Coalition in South Vietnam (1970), DCHO library — the family sent to Phnom Penh
US Embassy Saigon, Mission Weekly, July 18–24, 1974, DCHO library — the photographs that accompanied the document of 1974

Compiled September 2026. Where a photograph’s photographer or first publication is unknown to us, this page says so rather than inventing a credit. If you are the photographer or the rights holder of any picture here, write to us and we will credit it properly or take it down.

y bham enuol photographs pictures archive camp le rolland 1958 1964 1965 family provenance fulro

Y Bham Enuol: the early years and BAJARAKA He was born in 1913 in the village beside the mission at Ban Me Thuot, went through three schools the French and the missionaries had built, and became an agricultural official in the provinces he would later petition about. In 1958 he put his name to letters asking President Diem, three foreign embassies and the United Nations to look at what w... Explainer 41 views Read More What Y Bham Enuol actually asked for Seventeen years of demands, as they were written down at the time. Read in order they show a case that never changed in substance and got smaller every year in what it asked for: a commission of inquiry in 1958, a country in 1964, a statute and a flag in 1965, eight points in 1967, a political party and a flag in 1968, and, from a house in Phnom... Reference 41 views Read More Y Bham Enuol A Rhade official from Buon Ale-A who led both of our movements, spent more than five years in the prisons of the government he was petitioning, put our own name for ourselves into the official record, was held under guard by his own allies for the last six years of his life, and walked out of the French Embassy in Phnom Penh on April 20, 1975, i... Spotlight 101 views Read More Y Bham Enuol: the prison years, 1958 to 1964 He was arrested in the autumn of 1958 for writing letters, and he was not free again until February 1964. The sources disagree about the sentence, the prisons and even the number of years — four, five, six or seven, depending on who is counting. What they agree on is that the Republic of Vietnam jailed the man who had asked it for schools, kept... Explainer 51 views Read More Y Bham Enuol: president of FULRO, 1964 to 1968 He was president of FULRO for four years and three months, and in that time he fought two battles and held perhaps forty meetings. The record of those four years is not mainly a record of fighting. It is a record of letters carried across a border by couriers, of delegations kept waiting in Buon Ma Thuot, of demands that got smaller every year,... Explainer 43 views Read More FULRO, 1964–1992 On the night of September 19, 1964, the strike forces of four American-trained camps in Darlac and Quang Duc rose against their Vietnamese officers and marched on Buon Ma Thuot, and a movement announced itself: the United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races, FULRO. It was made by the men of BAJARAKA, released from Diem’s prisons seven... Explainer 114 views Read More