Snehashish Mitra (biltu0717@gmail.com) is a research assistant at Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.
As Aylan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian boy of Kurdis
ethnic background lied lifeless on a sea beach of Turkey, it depicted the
desperation of over 4 million Syrian refugees. The image circulated round the
globe prompted international response over the issue of rehabilitating the
Syrian refugee. The crisis also evoked a similar trajectory of events in
another part of the world in a different time involving the ‘Vietnamese Boat People’.
As Thuan Le Elston, a member of the editorial board of the daily USA TODAY of
Vietnamese background opines, it might be necessary to take a look back at the
case to Vietnamese Boat People to find a reasonable solution for the Syrian
refugee crisis.
When the Americans lost the Vietnam War
there were many citizens of Vietnam, especially in South Vietnam who did not
wish to stay in Vietnam. Those with influence were airlifted out by the
Americans but many had to make do with crowding onto leaky boats and making the
journey from Vietnam to the gulf of Thailand. Nearly 800,000 Vietnamese fled by
boat, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In doing so they
unwittingly wrote themselves into modern pirate history. The Vietnamese populace
who tried to flee Vietnam over boat is termed as ‘Vietnamese Boat People’; they
seemed to encapsulate all the suffering Vietnam had suffered from1965 to 1975. Despite the end of
the Vietnam War, tragedy for the people of Vietnam
continued into 1978-79. The term ‘Boat People’ not only applies to the refugees
who fled Vietnam but also to the people of Cambodia and Laos who did the same
but tend to come under the same umbrella term. The term ‘Vietnamese Boat
People’ tends to be associated with only those in the former South who fled the
new Communist government established in post-war Vietnam. The exodus was the
biggest in peacetime the world had seen. The boat people chose to face the
adversities of the sea and the pirates rather than live under communist
regime with the genuine prospect of attending reeducation camps and face persecution.
About 10% of the boat people died without ever reaching shore, from pirate
attacks, drowning or starvation. Those who survived, overwhelmed Vietnam’s
neighbors as well as Western nations where the refugees wanted to resettle.
Narratives
of the boat people represent the danger they overcame in their endeavour, Thuan
Le Elston describes the experience of her grandmother who fled Vietnam in 1985,
My cousins’
grandmother, Gian Thi Le, was among the boat people. She couldn’t leave Vietnam in 1975 with the rest of us because
her husband was ill. A decade later, after his death, she decided to take her chances by sea, though she was
already 70. When my cousins’ family managed to bring her from a Southeast
Asian refugee camp to Arizona, the grandmother told us of
pirates wielding guns and machetes who beat the men and did worse to the
women. She recounted seeing the pirates rape mothers and
daughters and hearing the screams. “They only left me alone because I was old,”
she said.
Such narrative exemplifies the danger
inherent in undertaking such journeys where challenge is presented not only
from the natural topographies, but also from fellow humans as well; incidents
like that Aylan Kurdi perhaps manifests the continuance of such miseries heaped
on the common people due to political turmoil.
In late 1978,
Indo-China degenerated into wholesale confrontation and war between Vietnam and
Kampuchea (Cambodia) and China. In December 1978, Vietnam attacked
Kampuchea while in February 1979, Vietnam attacked Chinese forces in the north.
These two conflicts produced a huge number of refugees.
As the tendency of several European nations
at the moment to turn away the Syrian refugees, the Vietnamese boat people also
faced rejection in countries like Malaysia and Thailand. In 1979, a U.N.
conference agreed to allow them to stay temporarily in refugee camps in
Southeast Asian countries before being resettled elsewhere. Over the next
decade, though, the waves of boat people were so great, the U.N. had to convene
another conference, in which communist led Vietnam itself was a key player. The
new agreement increased the numbers for legal migration, determined
refugee status of all asylum seekers, and returned those not eligible to their
home countries (sometimes forcibly). To assist those returnees in
their reintegration, UNHCR gave each of them $240 to $360 in U.S. dollars.
Trinh Hoi was
born in 1970 in Saigon[1].
At the age of 15, he left Vietnam and came to Australia as a refugee. Trinh Hoi
was admitted into Melbourne University Law School from which he graduated with
combined degrees of BA and LLB. In an interview with Thuan Elston, Thin tells
in the context of Syrian refugee crisis, “It’s history repeating itself. First, as a refugee community,
we must act and show the world that we are grateful for what was
given to us. Second, to prove that if refugees are given a chance, sooner
rather than later, they would become the responsible world citizens that we all
hope to become: resourceful and responsive to the voiceless." “But in
order to have a lasting solution,” Trinh adds, “we must also act decisively in
Syria — 4 million fleeing is enough reason to stop the
carnage perpetrated by Assad.” While there might be argument over the fact that
who is the bigger evil – Assad or ISIS, there ought to be no debate about
Trinh’s prescription for the current Syrian refugees and the optimism he holds
for them with regards to their probability of positively contributing to the
task of nation building at their host nations.
The boat
people settled in Australia, Canada, and the U.S.A.. In 1979, more than 100,000
of them arrived in America, where they tried to rebuild their shattered lives.
Settling in America has not been easy. The first refugees were generously
welcomed by many, but fiercely resisted by others. The opposition to the
Vietnamese refugees came from racist groups such as the KKK but also from
Americans who ironically mistook the refugees for communist Vietnamese citizens.
It has been
said, however, that no difficulties in the U.S can compare to the hardships the
refugees endured to get there. The new Vietnamese-Americans hunkered down; they
went to school, worked in multiple jobs and eventually built a community that
would flourish into numerous ‘Little Saigons’. The most famous ‘Little Saigon’
is centered in the formerly sleepy residential city of Westminster in \Orange
County, California. City’s records reveal that in 1977, there were three
Vietnamese-owned business in Westminster. In 1982, the number rose to 100. By
2004, Vietnamese owned businesses numbered 11,000 in Orange County. The first
Vietnamese American elected official was Westminister City Councilman Tony Lam
who took office in 1992. By 2005, there has been a Vietnamese American
Assistant U.S. Attorney General, two state legislators, four city council
members, and several school board members.
One of the
important sites where the Vietnamese boat people took refuge initially was the
Bidong Island situated off the coast of Terengganu, Malaysia in the South China Sea. The arrival of new refugees to
Bidong and other locations in Southeast Asia decreased after June 1979. A
Geneva Convention held in July 1979 resulted in Vietnam agreeing to restrain
the flow of refugees and the Southeast Asian countries agreeing to take all
those who came to their shores provided that the Western countries guaranteed
resettlement for the majority of them. President Jimmy Carter raised the quota for permitting
refugees into the United States from 7,000 to 14,000 per month
and other countries followed suit, especially Canada, Australia, and France. The population of Bidong began to
decline as refugees departed for resettlement abroad.
By the time Bidong was closed
as a refugee camp on 30 October 1991, about 250,000 Vietnamese had passed
through or resided in the camp. With the closing of the camp, the remaining
refugees were repatriated back to Vietnam. The refugees strongly protested
their forced repatriation. A total of 9,000 Vietnamese were repatriated between
1991 and 28 August 2005 when the last refugees departed Malaysia for Vietnam.
This marked the end of the saga of the Vietnamese boat people; however similar
fate continues to be shared in different times by different communities due to
political disturbance which ceases to disappear in the light of difference
within the human race.
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