From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Subject: [NEWS] MONTAGNARDS END FIGHT AGAINST HANOI
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Date: 13 Oct 92 23:50:34 GMT

By Wiliam Branigin
(Washington Post Foreign Service)
Post without permission

MANILA, Oct 10, - Nearly 400 Montagnard tribesmen from Vietnam's Central
Highlands today gave up a lonely, 17-year struggle against the Vietnamese
government and turned themselves over to U.N. peace-keeping troops in
Cambodia.

     Now the jungle-dwelling fighters and their families, the remnants of
a force that once numbered in the thousands, want to move to North Carolina
to join comrades resettled there in 1985.

     "We the Montagnard people...have today put down our arms and have
agreed to dismantle our military and political movement," said a handwritten
statement issued by the group's leader, Y Peng Ayun, in the wilds of eastern
Cambodia.  He described himself as a "colonel" in the United Front for the
Liberation of Oppressed Races, a Montagnard guerilla group better know by
its French acronym, FLURO.

    The move by the predominantly Christian hill tribe organization, founded
in 1964 and believed to be the last armed group still fighting the Vietnam
War, appeared to end an obscure but bitter chapter of that conflict.
Formerly armed and trained by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces, the Montagnards
were virtually abandoned when the South Vietnamese government crumbled in
1975 and Hanoi's victorious army reunified the country.

    Since then, the tribesmen headed by Ayun have been waging a hopeless
guerrilla war.  Forced to flee from the Central Highlands into neightboring
Cambodia in 1979, the rebels were reduced to small-scale cross-border forays
as Vietnamese attacks and disease decimated their ranks.  They also faced
hostilities from the Vietnamese-installed Phnom Penh government and the
Kmer Rouge guerrillas.

    Earlier this year, the Montagnards made contact with Uruguayan troops
of the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia.  Then, late last month,
they agreed in principle to lay down their arms to qualify for aid from
the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

    "They have made up their minds that they want to be resettled as a
group in the United States," said UNHCR representative Sergio Viera de Mello
last week in Phnom Penh.  "They don't have many friends.  They feel threatened
by the Khmer Rouge and by the Phnom Penh army."

    The U.S. government has agreed to screen the Montagnards for admission to
the United States, but only on a case-by-case basis.  In 1985, more than 200
Montagnards who trekked across war-torn Cambodia to the Thai border were
resetled in the hills around Raleigh, N.C., under the sponsorship of Lutheran
missionaries.

    Today, 398 Montagnards-more than half women and children - boarded U.N.
helicopters at their remote jungle camp in Mondulkiri Province eight miles
from the Vietnamese border and flew to a U.N. refugee transit center near
Phnom Penh.

    Before abandoning their base, the rebels surrendered 194 old but well
maintained weapons, mostly AK-47 assault rifles, and their supply of 2,557
rounds of ammunition as monkeys screeched from trees, said Annick Roulet,
a UNHCR spokeswoman in Phnom Penh who accompanied the group.

  "I stop fighting the Vietnamese communist government in Hanoi," Ayun
declared as he turned over the FULRO flag to a Uruguayan colonel.

   At a makeshift church at the site, Roulet said, the Montagnards left
flowers in front of a rough-hewn wooden cross and a piece of slowburning
tree resin in a Coca-Cola can.  A few took along pet dogs or monkeys, but
most left the jungle with practically nothing but the clothes on their
backs, she said by telephone from Phnom Penh.  Now they will undergo medical
checkups and refugee screening by the U.S. and possibly other governments.

   Many of the Montagnards suffer from tuberculosis, snakebites, malaria or
other illnesses.  They have been living on corn, squash, pumpkins, yams and
peppers; nearby rivers teem with fish and crocodiles.

    Converted to Christianity by missionares decades ago, the Montagnards have
kept the faith through a few worn Bibles and hymnals translated into their
languages, as well as through weekly shortwave broadcasts of sermons.



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