Occupation of Betazed
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In 2374, the Dominion invaded the Federation Planet of Betazed while the Starfleet 10th Fleet under the command of Admiral Koaddar Ma'adeen was on a training run. (DS9 episode: "In the Pale Moonlight")
History of the Occupation
The Conquest of Betazed
On Stardate 51721.3, Dominion-Cardassian forces detected that the Tenth Fleet, protector of Betazed and its outlying colonies, had strayed too far from its home base on a training exercise. Starfleet Command believed a mild subspace fluctuation affected space near Betazed confused the Tenth's navigational sensors. Additionally, Starfleet Intelligence reported discounting the enemy fleet in the Kalandra Sector as a major risk due to its distance from Dominion supply lines probably made Admiral Koaddar Ma'adeen overconfident. Upon detecting the Tenth's miscalculation, the Dominion-Cardassian forces in Kalandra assembled a fleet of nearly 200 ships and launched a five-pronged attack. Admiral Ma'adeen had spread the Tenth Fleet out in a mock battle formation, one quite suitable for training but not for defending against an attack. Of the Tenth's 137 ships, over 20 were lost in the initial assault alone.
To his credit, Admiral Ma'adeen regrouped his forces, but it was too little, too late. The ships of the Tenth fought valiantly for seven hours, but one by one the Dominion-Cardassian ships blew them out of the sky. Admiral Ma'adeen briefly considered surrender but realized he had to buy as much time as possible for Betazed to prepare its defensive systems. On his orders, the Tenth Fleet went down fighting, destroyed to the last ship in a noble effort to save the Betazoids.
Unfortunately, even with the extra time bought by the sacrifice of the Tenth Fleet, Betazed could not resist the Dominion-Cardassian attack. Its planetary defense systems were too obsolete and undermanned, and its planetary defense force too small and undergunned, to stop the enemy. In less than three hours the planet was in Dominion hands.
The Occupation of Betazed
The Dominion acted decisively to solidify its gain, bringing in hundreds of additional ships and thousands of troops to pacify the planet and reinforce its supply lines. Within two days of the initial conquest, the Jem'Hadar eradicated virtually every trace of resistance on Betazed and occupied every major facility. With brutal efficiency, they rounded up all Starfleet personnel, governmental officials, and civic leaders - nearly five million people and executed them. The Dominion took special care to resist the effects of Betazoid psionic abilities: it brought in psionic Vorta to help control the population, and immediately killed any Betazoid who even seemed to try to use his abilities to communicate with his fellows of influence Dominion-Cardassian personnel.
The Betazoids soon felt the harsh hand of Dominion rule. Eager to strip Betazed of its usable resources, the Dominion herded thousands of Betazoids into hastily-constructed labor camps. Labor gangs commanded by Jem'Hadar overseers opened new mines, razed entire forests, used Dominion science to accelerate harvests (ruining the arable land in the process), and exploited every other resource. The Dominion allowed the rest of the Betazoids to resume their daily lives under the unwavering gaze of Jem'Hadar security forces, provided they caused no trouble. The Jem'Hadar summarily executed any Betazoid suspected of even thinking about violating Dominion law.
The Dominion used Betazoid slave labor to construct Sentok Nor in orbit of Betazed. Sentok Nor was used as a Jem'Hadar breeding facility during the Dominion occupation. Starbase 19 was only a few hours at warp from Betazed.
Captain David Gold's son, Nathan, was visiting Ambassador Lwaxana Troi just as the Jem'Hadar attacked. Her assistant, Homn, was killed when the Dominion fired on the surface. However, the inhabitants fought back, and eventually rid the world of Dominion forces, but not until after suffering heavy casualties themselves. (ST - Tales of the Dominion War short story: "The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned"; TNG novel: The Battle of Betazed)
The Betazoid Resistance Movement
Despite these harsh measures, the freedom-loving Betazoids formed a small resistance movement. Composed mainly of Starfleet personnel who escaped into the wilderness before the Jem'Hadar fully occupied the planet, its members used Betazoid telepathic powers to establish communication between isolated "cells" and plan attacks on the invaders. Despite the brutality of the Dominion conquerors, the resistance had no difficulty recruiting Betazoids all over the planet. AFter the Vorta uncovered and killed many early members, the survivors learned how to hide their activities and avoid the enemy.
The Liberation of Betazed
In the final months of 2374, the Second Fleet conducted three separate offensives to free Betazed, all of them dismal failures. Determined to hold Betazed at any cost, the Dominion constantly reinforced and fortified its position. Meanwhile, its exploitation of the planet and her people increased. As the Betazoid resistance became more active, the Jem'Hadar killed innocent Betazoids by the thousands.
To secure their position in the very heart of the Federation, the Cardassians begin constructing space station Sentok Nor in orbit of Betazed. The station was to serve as both the seat of the Dominion occupation and the site of horrific experiments by Cardassia's foremost exobiologist, the infamous Dr. Crell Moset who was authorized by the Founders to breed a batch of Jem'Hadar gifted with telepathy.
Recognizing that the roots of the Dominion on the planet were growing deep, Starfleet Intelligence drew up Operation Spark, a bold plan to send a number of field operatives to the planet to organize the resistance into an effective force. This Starfleet insurgent force consisted of 24 volunteers that were brought in from various other operations in the immediate theatre of action and were ferried to Betazed aboard the USS Challenger. A diversionary skirmish was enacted by a small task force, meant to draw away a large portion of Dominion forces in orbit. After they withdrew, the Challenger warped into the system in order to offload the Intelligence operatives. However, it was discovered that the Dominion had enacted a planet-wide net of transport inhibitors that made insertion via transporter impossible. The backup measure was taken, and the volunteer operatives were jettisoned via 48 of the Challenger escape pods, twice the number of actual operatives in order to increase their odds of getting through to the planet’s surface. Spread out across Betazed, the volunteer operatives went about the process of building up resistance elements and coordinating their efforts to disrupt the Dominion’s foothold.
The Federation's efforts to free Betazed through the first three months of 2375 continued to meet with dismal failure. Hoping the Romulans could work the same magic they had done at liberating Benzar from the Dominion, Starfleet Command brought in a fleet of Romulan vessels to assist the Fourth and Tenth Fleets (which it had moved into position while reconstituting the Seventh Fleet). But the Dominion-Cardassian outer and inner perimeters around Betazoid, which included orbital defense platforms and a large number of Dominion capital ships, withstood the attack easily. The enemy destroyed no less than twenty-seven Romulan warbirds and a like number of Federation capital ships. The Dominion followed this victory with an assault on and destruction of nearby Starbase 19 where the Alliance fleet had originated. Betazed would remain in Dominion hands as the Jem'Hadar employed increasingly brutal means to root out and destroy the resistance movement.
The Battle of Betazed
With Starfleet's forces spread too thinly in the ongoing struggle to outright retake Betazed and the destruction of Starbase 19, Starfleet Security Operative Elias Vaughn, using intel gathered from the resistance, assembled a team of operatives from the U.S.S. Enterprise and U.S.S. Defiant to carry out a dangerous and desperate liberation plan, Operation Ignite. The operation involved a three-pronged attack. The first was sending a team to free convicted telepathic serial killer Hent Tevren from prison on the colony world of Darona in the Betazed System and placing him on Betazed where he could teach the resistance how to kill the enemy with their minds. The second was planting a team on Sentok Nor to destroy the station and weaken Dominion defenses. The third was the use of a small diversion wing composed of the U.S.S. Enterprise and three Saber-Class escorts, the U.S.S. Tulwar, U.S.S. Katana, and U.S.S. Scimitar.
With the success of Operation Ignite in combination with the work of Operation Spark, The Betazed resistance was able to greatly weaken the Dominion hold on the planet. And with the Dominion occupiers of Betazed completely cut off by the Federation alliance's success in the Battle of the Three Suns, Starfleet Command initiated its final effort to free Betazed. It assembled the Seventh, Tenth, Twelfth, and Thirty-Seventh Fleets, supported them with Klingon and Romulan Wings, and alerted the Betazoid resistance to its plans.
As Federation alliance ships attacked the Dominion-Cardassian-Breen planetary defense perimeter, the resistance assaulted Dominion military headquarters in Medara-Rixx. Exposing themselves to deadly counterfire, resistance members used ultritium rockets and isomagnetic disintegrators to vaporize the target. The Dominion forces switched their command functions to secondary outposts within minutes, but the temporary loss of command played a crucial role in the space battle. Taking advantage of the enemy's momentary confusion, using the Klingons and Romulans to turn the Breen wings on the enemy's flanks and expose the enemy formation to additional attacks from the sides. With nowhere to run and no allies to call on, the enemy fought to the last ship, but the Federation alliance's triumph was inevitable. At long last, Betazed was free.
The Aftermath and Recovery
But even as the Betazoids cheered, and helped the Starfleet Ground Forces round up the Jem'Hadar and Cardassian soldiers on the planet, the occupation's terrible toll lay like a shroud over their world. Directly, through punishment or execution, or indirectly, through overwork and disease, the Dominion killed 75 million Betazoids, with four out of ten telepaths killed during the final drive to push back the Jem'Hadar. Hundreds of millions of survivors still carry the physical and emotional scars of the occupation. Following the war, many Betazoids left the planet to aid in the recovery effort or to start new lives on planets untouched by the tragedies of the Dominion War bringing the planet's population from 5.6 Billion in 2374 to 1.3 Billion in 2377.
