In late August 1992, Reuters Phnom Penh Bureau Chief Mark Dodd came across a bizarre bit of information.
According to a UNTAC Aussie Signals officer, there was a small army in the remote jungles of northeastern Cambodia, and they had approached the UN asking for weapons to fight the Vietnamese.
UNTAC’s mandate included the provision to disarm all foreign forces in Cambodia, so who the heck were these guys? It turns out they were remnants of a Montagnard movement started in the 1950s called FULRO, a French acronym that in English means: the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races.
FULRO’s original goal was to create an independent homeland for ethnic minorities, including the Jarai, Rhade, Behnar, Mnong, and sometimes even the Chams. Back in 1964 and 1965, FULRO organized two mini-rebellions in the highlands against the South Vietnamese, which quickly fizzled out.
Ten thousand FULRO members fled Vietnam’s Central Highlands to Cambodia in 1975 when North Vietnam defeated the South. Seventeen years later, only a few hundred were left alive.
Dodd scooped the Phnom Penh press corps with a story that hit the wires on September 1, 1992, a bit of news that probably started bells ringing in Washington, DC, as the Montagnards had worked closely and fought bravely with American Special Forces during the war in Vietnam.
There were – and still are – many, especially veterans, who felt “the Yards” were cruelly abandoned to an uncertain fate when the US pulled out.
The Far Eastern Economic Review’s Phnom Penh correspondent Nate Thayer also caught wind of the story. At the time, Nate was living above the offices of the Phnom Penh Post, a newspaper I co-founded just two months previously.
Working sources in Washington, Nate had our fax machine spitting out hundreds of pages, day and night, on FULRO’s history, a phone bill that eventually ran up to about US$8,000.
Sworn to secrecy by Nate, it was so exciting as a greenhorn publisher to see a seasoned journalist go into overdrive on what was obviously a very big story. Nate decided he’d try to go and meet FULRO in the Mondulkiri jungle. He asked me if I wanted to tag along. How could I resist?
We flew to Stung Treng on the Mekong and he schmoozed the commander of the UNTAC Uruguayan Battalion for two days. Finally, the UN agreed that we could fly with them to near the border, where they would begin negotiations on FULRO’s future.
After a two-hour flight over solid, pristine jungle, and a brief stop in Khao Nhiek, a district capital, we landed in a small clearing, about 25 kilometers from the Vietnamese border. I still remember when we got off the chopper. Nate turned around and, with a huge, shit-eating grin, said to me, “We made it!”
I flew back to Steung Treng that day with the UN folks; Nate stayed for four days on his own, with no clear idea of how he was going to get out.
There were dozens of unknowns about FULRO at the time, and still are. But many of those have now been explored, dissected and explained in a new book by William Chickering.
“A War of Their Own-FULRO: The Other National Liberation Front, Vietnam 1955-1975” is an exhaustively researched, well-written and fascinating book.
Chickering, a former US Special Forces captain who worked with Montagnards in the highlands in 1968, spent 16 years interviewing over a hundred sources in Europe, the US and Asia.
He burrowed through a bunch of archives, making his copy deliciously footnoted. Like a seasoned detective, he tracked down the stories of many of the key individuals involved in FULRO.
Chickering weaves through his story the lives of four key players in the FULRO movement, including the leader, a man named Y-Bham Enoul, whom he met in Phnom Penh in 1973. He tracks their lives, their early education in Vietnam and their struggles.
As the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge approaches on April 17, he has a particularly interesting focus on the roughly 150 FULRO soldiers who ended up in the French Embassy seeking refuge, only to be eventually forced out to probable execution by the Khmer Rouge.
I could go on and on about how much I enjoyed Chickering’s book. For those of us immersed in the region’s history, particularly the wars that ravaged Vietnam and Cambodia for decades, Chickering’s book is an absolutely invaluable new piece to the puzzle.
Chickering didn’t include in his book the FULRO years from 1975 to 1992. He said in an email to this writer, he “lacked enough clear information to do so both accurately and heroically.” Given the octogenarian’s robust health and joie de vive, it’s likely his next worthwhile project.
For Asia Times readers in Bangkok: William Chickering will launch his book at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand on April 10 at 7 PM. Former Reuters Phnom Penh Bureau Chief Mark Dodd will join as a discussant.
