Montagnard (Vietnam) - History

History

Although French Catholic missionaries converted some Dega in the 19th century, American missionaries made more of an impact in the 1930s, and many Dega are now Protestant. Of the approximately 1 million Dega, close to half are Protestant, while around 200,000 are Catholic. This made Vietnam's Communist Party suspicious of the Dega, particularly during the Vietnam War, since it was thought that they would be more inclined to help the American forces (predominantly Christian—mainly Protestant).

In the mid 1950s, the once-isolated Dega began experiencing more contact with outsiders after the Vietnamese government launched efforts to gain better control of the Central Highlands and, following the 1954 Geneva Accord, new ethnic minorities from North Vietnam moved into the area. As a result of these changes, Dega communities felt a need to strengthen some of their own social structures and to develop a more formal shared identity.

In 1950, the French government established the Central Highlands as the Pays Montagnard du Sud (PMS) under the authority of Vietnamese Emperor Bảo Đại, whom the French had installed as nominal chief of state in 1949 as an alternative to Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam. When the French withdrew from Vietnam and recognized a Vietnamese government, Dega political independence was drastically diminished.

The Dega have a long history of tensions with the Vietnamese majority. While the Vietnamese are themselves heterogeneous, they generally share a common language and culture and have developed and maintained the dominant social institutions of Vietnam. The Degar do not share that heritage. There have been conflicts between the two groups over many issues, including land ownership, language and cultural preservation, access to education and resources, and political representation.

In 1958, the Dega launched a movement known as BAJARAKA (the name is made up of the first letters of prominent tribes; compare to the later Nicaraguan Misurasata) to unite the tribes against the Vietnamese. There was a related, well-organized political and (occasionally) military force within the Dega communities known by the French acronym, FULRO, or United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races. FULRO's objectives were autonomy for the Degar tribes.

The 1960s saw contact between the Dega and the U.S. military, as American involvement in the Vietnam War escalated and the Central Highlands emerged as a strategically important area, in large part because it included the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North Vietnamese supply line for Viet Cong forces in the south. The U.S. military, particularly the U.S. Army's Special Forces, developed base camps in the area and recruited the Dega, roughly 40,000 of whom fought alongside American soldiers and became a major part of the U.S. military effort in the Highlands.

Thousands of Degar fled to Cambodia after the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, fearing that the new government would launch reprisals against them because they had aided the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The U.S. military resettled some Dega in the United States, primarily in North Carolina, but these evacuees numbered less than two thousand. In addition, the new socialist Vietnamese government has steadily displaced thousands of villagers from Vietnam's central highlands, to use the fertile land for coffee plantations.