United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races

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 an organization whose objective was autonomy for various indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in South Vietnam, including the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, the Chams in Central Vietnam, and the Khmer Krom in Southern Vietnam. Initially a political movement, after 1969 it evolved into a fragmented guerrilla group that carried on simultaneous insurgencies against the governments of South Vietnam under President Nguyen Van Thieu and North Vietnam of Ho Chi Minh. Opposed to all forms of Vietnamese rule, FULRO fought against both sides in the Vietnam War against the Soviet-aligned North (including the Vietcong) and the American-aligned South at the same time. FULRO's primary supporter during the 1960s and early 1970s conflict in Southeast Asia was Cambodia (under former monarch and then head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk), with some aid sent by the People's Republic of China during the period of the Third Indochina War.

Fractured by nature, FULRO was a symbolic alliance of various indigenous and ethnic groups in South Vietnam formed as an armed reaction against ethnic discriminations and land deprivations by US-backed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and the following right-wing military junta in Saigon. Its nominal leader, an ethnic Rhade Y Bham Enuol, was put into prison by Ngo Dinh Diem in September 1958. After 1963, Y Bham Enuol remained exiled in Cambodia for the rest of the war, while former co-founder of the parent BAJARAKA, left-leaning Y Bih Aleo, became the Vice President of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) and leader of the Viet Cong's Montagnard Autonomy Movement in 1961. FULRO organized two Montagnard uprisings among the ranks of US-trained local CIDGs, in September 1964 and December 1965, both violently repressed by the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN). After the Vietnam War ended, the Pentagon and CIA aided the anticommunist wing of the 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 guerilla bases moved to Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, following which FULRO's strength diminished unrecoverably. By 1987, the movement survived only inside refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. It formally dissolved in 1992, when the last group of 407 FULRO fighters and their families handed in their weapons to the United Nations peacekeepers in Cambodia.

FULRO built its strength mainly by recruiting Montagnard CIDGs (mostly Rhade, Jarai, and Koho). Due to high-profile proximity and involvement of United States Special Forces (Green Berets) personnel with the Montagnard CIDGs and FULRO, South Vietnamese and later Socialist Republic of Vietnam governments deemed the FULRO to be a subversive movement used by the CIA to interfere with Vietnamese sovereignty. Official American policy was however opposition to FULRO and not to jeopardize its allied relation with the South Vietnamese government, and in 1965 MACV General Westmoreland issued an instruction to order that US soldiers "should avoid all contacts with FULRO."