Boat people without a plan

In 1975, South Vietnam bowed to the military superiority of North Vietnam. Shortly thereafter began a mass emigration of those fleeing forced labor conditions and also the harshly discriminated ethnic Chinese. The latter especially fled overseas. The boat people became an icon of the world in which the most powerful country on earth, the United States, had lost a war.

Door: Eduard Nazarski, directeur Amnesty Nederland

Their numbers quickly ran up to tens of thousands per month. Their boats were often rickety and almost always overcrowded. Vietnamese smugglers extorted exorbitant prices. The route to Thailand or Malaysia was extremely unsafe. The boat people died in tropical storms, they fell prey to rape and murder by pirates, they were towed back to sea by marines of the countries that did not want them, and sometimes their ships were sunk at high sea. At the height of the exodus in the early 1980s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that 200 to 400 thousand people had perished, 20 percent of all who had started the trip. Those who survived ended up in overcrowded camps. The host countries soon declared that their capacities had reached the limit.

Then a rescue operation was set in motion: the 1979 Orderly Departure Program, coordinated by the US embassy in Bangkok. Vietnam promised that those who wanted to leave the country would no longer have to do so clandestinely by boat. The US, Canada, Australia and France accepted a total of 623,800 refugees up to 1982. Another thirty other countries participated, the Netherlands welcoming more than six thousand Vietnamese including individuals previously rescued by Dutch merchant ships.

The number of boat people diminished sharply. Then, for various reasons, their number started to grow again. In 1989 in Geneva, Western countries and Vietnam agreed on a Comprehensive Plan of Action. Boat refugees and other emigrants could now benefit from an assessment procedure. In ports spread over the region UNHCR established reception centers. At Shek Kong for example, an abandoned airport in Hong Kong, up to ten thousand asylum seekers were housed in former hangars. Legal experts were flown in from all over the world to screen them. Those with a well-founded fear of persecution were eligible for resettlement, those without it had to go back. The number of boat people that had come close to a hundred thousand in 1987, fell back to a grand total of 41 in 1992.

At the time, the programs were controversial. Rescue at sea and resettlement would have a pull effect; economic migrants were bound to abuse asylum procedures; the Vietnamese would anyway never really adapt to living in the West; there was a danger of communist infiltration; and more. Nevertheless, up to the late 1990s 1.6 million Vietnamese were resettled of whom 18 thousand in the Netherlands. In their new countries, the Vietnamese merged into the local population with little dissonance.

History repeats itself, and it does not. Once again there are hundreds of thousands of boat people, refugees as well as migrants. This time there is no Orderly Departure Program and no Comprehensive Plan of Action.

De Nederlands versie van dit blog is hier te lezen