Exasperated after violent interrogations and round-the-clock intimidation at the hands of the Vietnamese government, Y-Man Eban escaped into the forests of eastern Cambodia on July 7, 2015.

“The reason I ran away from my country was that the Vietnamese police interrogated me four or five times and put me in jail for a week. They beat me a lot,” Eban, 30, a Montagnard Christian, said from Dak Lak province.

Asked why he was arrested, Eban said it was because he sought “the freedom and independence for Dega people.”

Eban was one of more than 300 Montagnard Christians, the indigenous peoples of the Vietnamese Central Highlands, also known as Dega, who started fleeing into Cambodia three years ago. They there told of oppression at the hands of the Hanoi government.

The latest exodus is the first in about a decade when thousands fled amid crackdowns on protests in 2001 and 2004.  Persecuted for decades due to reasons such as their support for America in the Vietnam War and their faith, there have been widespread accusations of human rights abuses and land grabs in the rolling hills of the Montagnards’ homeland. “Since I came back to Vietnam, the authorities have viewed me as a criminal,” Eban said.