United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races

United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races
Front unifié de lutte des races opprimées
Leaders	FLC leader: Les Kosem, Po Dharma FLHP leader: Y Bham Enuol FLKK leader: Chau Dera
Dates active	1964 (1964)–1992 (1992)
Active regions	Central Highlands, Vietnam Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia
Wars	Vietnam War, Third Indochina War, Insurgency in Laos, FULRO insurgency

The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races (FULRO; French: Front unifié de lutte des races opprimées, Vietnamese: Mặt trận Thống nhất Đấu tranh của các Sắc tộc bị Áp bức) was a separatist political and militant organization which conducted a decades-long insurgency in Mainland Southeast Asia during the Indochina wars with the aim of achieving autonomy for various indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in Southern Vietnam, including the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, the Chams in Central Vietnam, and the Khmer Krom in the south. It was opposed to all forms of Vietnamese rule.

Preceded by a number of separatist groups, FULRO was founded in 1964. Initially a political movement, after 1969 it evolved into a fragmented guerrilla group that carried on simultaneous insurgencies against both the U.S.-aligned government of South Vietnam under President Nguyen Van Thieu, and against the Soviet-aligned communist government of North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, in the context of the wider Vietnam War. FULRO's primary supporter during the 1960s and early 1970s was Cambodia under Norodom Sihanouk, with some aid sent by the People's Republic of China during the Third Indochina War.

Fractured by nature, FULRO was a symbolic alliance of various indigenous and ethnic groups in southern Vietnam formed as an armed reaction against the ethnic discrimination and land deprivation undertaken by South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and the following right-wing military junta in Saigon. FULRO's nominal leader, Y Bham Enuol, an ethnic Rhade, was put into prison by Ngo Dinh Diem in September 1958. Y Bham Enuol remained exiled in Cambodia after 1963 for the rest of the war, while Y Bih Aleo, the left-wing former co-founder of BAJARAKA (which preceded FULRO), became the Vice President of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF; or "Viet Cong") and leader of the NLF's Montagnard Autonomy Movement in 1961. FULRO organized two Montagnard uprisings among the ranks of US-trained local Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs), in September 1964 and December 1965, which were both violently repressed by the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). After the Vietnam War ended, the Pentagon and CIA aided the anti-communist wing of FULRO, under former US Special Forces interpreter Y Tlur Eban, in renewing the movement, this time against the newly-unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Their bases moved to Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, after which FULRO's strength was diminished irreversibly. By 1987, the movement only survived in refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. FULRO was formally dissolved in 1992, when the last group of 407 FULRO fighters and their families handed in their weapons to United Nations (UN) peacekeepers in Cambodia.

FULRO built its strength mainly by recruiting Montagnard CIDGs (mostly Rhade, Jarai, and Koho). Due to the high-profile proximity and involvement of the United States Special Forces (Green Berets) with the Montagnard CIDGs and FULRO, South Vietnamese and later Socialist Republic of Vietnam governments saw FULRO as a subversive movement used by the CIA to interfere with Vietnamese sovereignty. However, official American policy was in opposition to FULRO so as not to jeopardize its relationship with the South Vietnamese government, and in 1965 U.S. Army General William Westmoreland of the MACV issued an instruction to US soldiers ordering that they "should avoid all contacts with FULRO."