FULRO insurgency
The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races waged a nearly three decade long insurgency against the governments of North and South Vietnam, and later the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The FULRO insurgents represented the interests of indigenous Muslim and Hindu Cham, Christian-majority Montagnards, and Theravada Buddhist Khmer Krom against the ethnic Kinh Vietnamese. They were supported and equipped by China and Cambodia according to those countries' interests in the Indochina wars.
Background
The Muslim and Hindu Cham people were the remnants of the Kingdom of Champa settlers, which had been conquered by Đại Việt in a series of wars. The last remnant of the Champa state was conquered in 1832 by the expansionist Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng. The Cham people under the leadership of the Muslim priest Katip Sumat who had returned from Kelantan declared a Jihad against Vietnam but the rebellion was eventually crushed. Ethnic Vietnamese colonists settled on Champa land where today they outnumber the native Cham.The area of the Mekong Delta and Saigon formerly belonged to the Khmer Empire of Cambodia until its annexation by the Vietnamese Nguyễn lords who subsequently settled Vietnamese on the land, where they outnumber the native Khmer Krom.
The Montagnard peoples of the Central Highlands were mostly ignored by the Vietnamese until the French colonialists started to cultivate cash crops in the Central Highlands. The South Vietnamese government of Ngô Đình Diệm began a resettlement program to settle over a million ethnic North Vietnamese Catholic refugees, onto Montagnard lands in the Central Highlands, and the Montagnards opposed this. Montagnards began to protest in mass against the South Vietnamese government's colonialism in August 1958, but were harshly-handed by Ngô Đình Diệm's law enforcement forces; many Montagnard leaders were put into jails, such as Y Bhăm Êñuôl, Y Dhơn Adrong, Y Dhê Adrong, Y Nuin Hmok, Y Wick Buôn Ya, Y Het Kpor, Y Tluốp Kpor, Y Sênh Niê, Y Bun Sor, Y Yu Êban, Y Thih Êban, Touneh Yoh, Siu Síp, Paul Nưr, and Nay Luet. The government also orchestrated assimilation and discrimination policies over the Montagnards, together fueling more distrust and dissatisfaction toward the regime that grew exponential among indigenous communities.
Central Highlands
The native inhabitants of the Central Highlands are the Montagnard peoples, which are themselves split among several ethnicities. Vietnam conquered and invaded the area during its "march to the south". Ethnic Vietnamese people eventually outnumbered the indigenous Montagnards after state sponsored colonization directed by both the government of South Vietnam and the current Communist government of unified Vietnam. The Montagnards have fought against and resisted the Viet colonists, from the anti-communist South Vietnamese government to the Viet Cong to the communist government of unified Vietnam.The Champa state and Chams in the lowlands were traditional suzerains whom the Montagnards in the highlands acknowledged as their lords, while autonomy was held by the Montagnards. After World War II the concept of "Nam tiến" and the southward conquest was celebrated by Vietnamese scholars. The Pays Montagnard du Sud-Indochinois was the name of the Central Highlands from 1946 under French Indochina.
The French, Communist North Vietnam, and anti-Communist South Vietnam all exploited and persecuted the Montagnards in turn. All this discrimination made the Montagnards rebel against them several times.
Up until French rule, the Central Highlands was almost never entered by the Vietnamese because they viewed it as a savage populated area with fierce animals like tigers, but the Vietnamese expressed interest in the land after the French transformed it into a profitable plantation area to grow crops on, in addition to the natural resources from the forests, minerals and rich earth, and realization of its crucial geographical importance.
An insurgency was waged by the Montagnards in FULRO against South Vietnam and then the unified Communist Vietnam. A colonization program of Kinh Vietnamese by the South Vietnamese government and united Vietnamese Communist government was implemented and now a Kinh with northern tribes majority predominates in the highland areas. The Montagnard lands in the Central Highlands were subjected to state sponsored colonization by ethnic Vietnamese settlers under the South Vietnamese regime of Ngô Đình Diệm which resulted in estranging the Montagnards and leading them to reject Vietnamese rule.
The South Vietnamese and Communist Vietnamese colonization of the Central Highlands has been compared to the historic Nam tiến of previous Vietnamese rulers. During the Nam tiến Khmer and Cham territory was seized and militarily colonized by the Vietnamese, which was repeated by the state sponsored settlement of Northern Vietnamese Catholic refugees on Montagnard land by the South Vietnamese leader Diệm and the introduction to the Central Highlands of New Economic Zones by the Communist Vietnamese government. The South Vietnamese government was strongly against the autonomous Montagnard CIDG who were fighting against the Viet Cong because they feared that the Montagnards would gain independence. The South Vietnamese and Montagnards violently clashed. The Vietnamese Communists implemented harsh punishment against the Montagnards after the defeat of South Vietnam.
The Vietnamese viewed and dealt with the indigenous Montagnards in the CIDG from the Central Highlands as 'savages' and this caused a Montagnard uprising against the Vietnamese. The Rhade Montagnard mounted a revolt, seizing hundreds of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, assassinating officers of the Vietnamese special forces and seizing American advisers on 19–20 September 1964, but the 23rd Division of the South Vietnamese army stopped them from seizing Ban Me Thout, the provincial capital of Darlac Province. In the Central Highlands the Montagnard FULRO organization fought against both the Communists and South Vietnamese due to discrimination by the South Vietnamese army against the Montagnards. After the victory of the Communist North Vietnamese, the Vietnamese refused autonomy to the Montagnards, and on Montagnard land they settled around one million ethnic Vietnamese in addition to using 're-education camps' on the Montagnards, leading the Montagnard FULRO to continue the armed struggle against the Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese were originally centered around the Red River Delta but engaged in conquest and seized new lands such as Champa, the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands during Nam tiến, while the Vietnamese received strong Chinese influence in their culture and civilization and were Sinicized, and the Cambodians and Laotians were Indianized, the Montagnards in the Central Highlands maintained their own native culture without adopting external culture and were the true indigenous natives of the region, and to hinder encroachment on the Central Highlands by Vietnamese nationalists, the term Pays Montagnard du Sud-Indochinois PMSI emerged for the Central Highlands along with the natives being addressed by the name Montagnard. The tremendous scale of Vietnamese Kinh colonists flooding into the Central Highlands has significantly altered the demographics of the region. Violent demonstrations with fatalities have broken out due to Montagnard anger at Vietnamese discrimination and seizure of their land since many Vietnamese Kinh were settled by the government in the Central Highlands.
Long tails and excessive body hair were attributed as physical characteristics of Montagnards in Vietnamese school textbooks in the past. Ethnic minorities in general have also been referred to as "moi", including other "hill tribes" like the Muong. The anti-ethnic minority discriminatory policies by the Vietnamese, environmental degradation, deprivation of lands from the natives, and settlement of native lands by a massive number of Vietnamese settlers led to massive protests and demonstrations by the Central Highland's indigenous native ethnic minorities against the Vietnamese in January to February 2001 and this event gave a tremendous blow to the claim often published by the Vietnamese government that in Vietnam There has been no ethnic confrontation, no religious war, no ethnic conflict. And no elimination of one culture by another. The same state sponsored settlement of ethnic minority land by Vietnamese Kinh has happened in another highland region, the Annamite Cordillera, both the Central Highlands and Annamite Cordillera were populated by ethnic minorities who were not Vietnamese at the start of the 20th century, but the demographics of the highlands was drastically transformed with the mass colonization of 6 million settlers from 1976 to the 1990s, which led to ethnic Vietnamese Kinh outnumbering the native ethnic groups in the highlands.
Leaving out any plans for autonomy for ethnic minorities, an assimilation plan was launched by the South Vietnamese government with the creation of the Social and Economic Council for the Southern Highlander Country, the South Vietnamese based their approach to the highlanders by claiming that they would be "developed" since they were "poor" and "ignorant", making swidden agriculturalists sedentarize and settling ethnic Vietnamese colonists from the coastal regions into the highlands such as Northern Vietnamese Catholic refugees who fled to South Vietnam, 50,000 Vietnamese settlers were in the highlands in 1960 and in 1963 the total number of settlers was 200,000 and up to 1974 the South Vietnamese were still implemented the colonization plan even though the highlands natives experienced massive turbulence and disorder because of the colonization, and by 1971 less than half of a scheme backed by the Americans to leave Montagnards with just 20% of the Central Highlands was completed, and even in the parts of the highlands which did not experience colonization, the South Vietnamese threw the native tribes into 'strategic hamlets' to keep them away from places where communists potentially operated and the South Vietnamese consistently spurned any attempts to make overtures to the native highlanders.