Vietnamese boat people / 越南船民（逃離越南嘅粵籍難僑）


Boat people is a term that usually refers to refugees or asylum seekers who emigrate in numbers in boats that are sometimes old and crudely made. The term came into common use during the late 1970s with the mass departure of Vietnamese refugees from Communist-controlled Vietnam, following the Vietnam War.

[edit] Overview

Boats have historically been a widely used form of migration or escape for people of limited resources. Most boat people travel without formal right of entry to their destination, but on arrival may seek asylum for various reasons depending on the destination country's laws. They often risk their lives on dangerously crude and overcrowded boats to escape oppression or poverty in their home nations. Some choose to emigrate to better their lives—others, especially political refugees, may be fleeing for their lives.

[edit] Vietnamese boat people



A family of boat people rescued by a U.S Navy ship.


Rescued Vietnamese boat people being given water.
Events resulting from the Vietnam War led many people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam to become refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s, after the fall of Saigon. In Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old government in the South to "re-education camps", and others to "new economic zones." An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.[1] According to published academic studies in the United States and Europe, 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps.[1] Thousands were abused, tortured, and executed.[1] These factors, coupled with poverty and the total destruction of the country that happened during the Vietnam war, caused hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country. In 1979, Vietnam was at war (Sino-Vietnamese War) with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Many ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, who felt that the government's policies directly targeted them, also became "boat people." On the open seas, the boat people had to confront forces of nature, and elude pirates.

[edit] Escape route

People employed many methods to leave the country. Most were secret and transpired at night; some involved the bribing of officials.[2] Some people bought places in large boats that held 400 passengers. Others organized smaller groups or went on makeshift rafts. Many families were split up during this period because they could only afford to send one or a few members of the family. One method used involved middle-class refugees from Saigon, armed with forged identity documents, traveling 1,100 km to Danang by road. On arrival, they would take refuge for up to two days in safe houses while waiting for fishing junks and trawlers to take small groups into international waters.[citation needed] Planning for such a trip took many months and even years. Although these attempts often depleted resources, people usually had several false starts before they managed to escape.[2]

The boats, most not intended for navigating open waters, would typically head for busy international shipping lanes some 240 km to the east. The lucky ones would succeed in being rescued by freighters and taken to Hong Kong, some 2,200 km away.[3] Others landed on the shores of Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, and Hong Kong. The unlucky ones would continue their perilous journey at sea, sometimes lasting over 6 months long, suffering from hunger and thirst before finding safety. Rudolph Rummel estimates that nearly 500,000 of the 2 million Vietnamese boat people died during their escape with "50% not blamed on Vietnamese Government". Many other estimates are considerably lower ranging from 30,000 to 250,000.[4]

[edit] Refugee camps

The plight of the boat people became an international humanitarian crisis. There were untold miseries, rapes and murders on the South China Sea committed by Thai pirates who preyed on the refugees who had sold all their possessions and carried gold with them on the trips. The UNHCR, under the auspices of the United Nations, set up refugee camps in neighbouring countries to process the "boat people". They received the 1981 Nobel Peace Prize for this.

Camps were set up in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. According to stories told by the Vietnamese refugees, the conditions at the camps were poor. The women and children were raped and beaten. Very little of the aid money donated primarily by the United States actually got to the refugees. Refugees at Thai camps were maltreated and many were brutally bullied by the Thai guards. Some 77% of refugee boats leaving in 1981 were attacked by Thais.[5] 863 Vietnamese were known to be raped, 763 people physically attacked and killed, and 489 people abducted.

Most of the refugees came from the former South Vietnam. However, soon after the first wave between 1975–1978, North Vietnamese from seaside cities such as Haiphong started to escape and land in Hong Kong. Among them were genuine ethnically Chinese Vietnamese refugees who escaped from Vietnam and headed to China and Hong Kong.

[edit] Vietnamese refugees resettling in western countries


This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2010)
On June 10, 1977, an Israeli cargo ship en route to Japan crossed paths with a boat full of 66 Vietnamese. They were out of food and water, were extremely lost and scared, and their boat was leaking. The Israeli captain and crew immediately offered food and water and decided to bring the passengers on board and transported them to Israel. There, Prime Minister Menachem Begin authorized their Israeli citizenship, comparing their situation to the plight of Jewish refugees seeking a haven during the Holocaust. Following this rescue, between 1977 and 1979, Israel welcomed over three hundred Vietnamese refugees. In Israel, Vietnamese immigration represented a transformation in the Israeli conception, one that saw the Jewish state as the state of the Jews with a Jewish majority. Even though the absorption of hundreds of Vietnamese did not change the political map in Israel, it still constituted a change of civil identity in the state of Israel who for the first time took in non-Jewish refugees.[6]

The Orderly Departure Program from 1979 until 1994 helped to resettle refugees in the United States as well as other Western countries. In this program, refugees were asked to go back to Vietnam and waited for assessment. If they were deemed to be eligible to be re-settled in the US (according to criteria that the US government had established), they would be allowed to immigrate.

Humanitarian Operation (HO) was set up to benefit former South Vietnamese who were involved in the former regime or worked for the US. They were to be allowed to immigrate to the US if they had suffered persecution by the communist regime after 1975. Half-American children in Vietnam, descendants of servicemen, were also allowed to immigrate along with their mothers or foster parents. This program sparked a wave of rich Vietnamese parents buying the immigration rights from the real mothers or foster parents. They paid money (in the black market) to transfer the half-American children into their custody, then applied for visas to emigrate to the USA. Most of these half-American children were born of American soldiers and prostitutes. They were subject to discrimination, poverty, neglect and abuse. On November 15, 2005, the United States and Vietnam signed an agreement allowing additional Vietnamese to immigrate who were not able to do so before the humanitarian operation program ended in 1994. Effectively this new agreement was the extension and also final chapter of the HO program.

The Roman Catholic Church, given its long history with the Vietnamese people, facilitated the relocation of a massive number of Vietnamese boat people through its many Orders and charities. Of note was the work of the Vietnamese Refugee Office of Caritas Italiana, a major Catholic Italian charity, under the leadership of Monsignor Tran Van Hoai.

Hong Kong adopted the "port of first asylum policy" in July, 1979 and received over 100,000 Vietnamese at the peak of emigration in the late 1980s. Many refugee camps were set up in its territories. Frequent violent clashes between the boat people and security forces caused public outcry and mounting concerns in the early 1990s since many camps were very close to high-density residential areas.

The countries that accepted most of the Indochinese refugees were:

The United States - 823,000
Australia and Canada - 137,000 each
France - 96,000
Germany - 40,000
The United Kingdom - 19,000
Japan - 11,000
By the late 1980s, Western Europe, the United States and Australia received fewer Vietnamese refugees[citation needed]. It became much harder for refugees to get visas to settle in those countries.

As hundreds of thousands of people were escaping out of Viet Nam and Laos by land and boat, countries of first asylum in South-East Asia were faced with the continuing exodus and the increasing reluctance by third countries to maintain resettlement opportunities for every exile, they threatened push-backs of the asylum seekers. In this crisis, the Comprehensive Plan of Action For Indochinese Refugees was adopted in June, 1989. The cut-off date for refugees was March 14, 1989. Effective from this day, the Indochinese Boat people would no longer automatically be considered as prima facie refugees, but only asylum seekers and would have to be screened to qualify for refugee status. Those who were "screened-out" would be sent back to Vietnam and Laos, under an orderly and monitored repatriation program.

The refugees faced prospects of staying years in the camps and ultimate repatriation back to Vietnam. They were branded, rightly or wrongly, as economic refugees. By the mid-1990s, the number of refugees fleeing from Vietnam had dwindled. Many refugee camps were closed. Most of the well educated or those with genuine refugee status had already been accepted by receiving countries[citation needed].

There appeared to be some unwritten rules in Western countries. Officials gave preference to married couples, young families and women over 18 years old, leaving single men and minors to languish at the camps for years. Among these unwanted, those who worked and studied hard and involved themselves in constructive refugee community activities were eventually accepted by the West by recommendations from UNHCR workers. Hong Kong was open about its willingness to take the remnants at its camp, but only some refugees took up the offer. Many refugees would have been accepted by Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, but hardly any wanted to settle in these countries.

The market reforms of Vietnam, the imminent return of Hong Kong to China by Britain and the financial incentives for voluntary return to Vietnam caused many boat people to return to Vietnam during the 1990s. Most remaining asylum seekers were voluntarily or forcibly repatriated to Vietnam, although a small number (about 2,500) were granted the right of abode by the Hong Kong Government in 2002. In 2008, the remaining refugees in the Philippines (around 200) were granted asylum in Canada, Norway and the United States, marking an end to the history of the boat people from Vietnam.

[edit] Literature

Martin Tsamenyi The Vietnamese boat people and international law, Nathan: Griffith University, 1981
Steve Roberts From Every End of This Earth: 13 Families and the New Lives They Made in America (novel, a.o. on Vietnamese family), 2009.
Georges Claude Guilbert Après Hanoï: Les mémoires brouillés d'une princesse vietnamienne (novel, on Vietnamese woman and her boat people family), 2011.
Kim Thúy Ru ,2009
Zhou, Min and Carl L. Bankston III Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998. ISBN 978-0-871-54995-2.
[edit] See also

Turtle Beach, 1992 Australian film about raising awareness for the plight of the boat people
Boat People (film), a narrative film made by Hong Kong director Ann Hui, based on research on Vietnamese refugees
Journey from the Fall, an independent film on the same subject
Harragas, a type of North African boat people who cross the Mediterranean in tiny boats.
[edit] Notes

^ a b c "Millions of lives changed forever with Saigon's fall". Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. 2001-04-29. http://www.dartcenter.org/dartaward/2002/hm3/01.html.
^ a b Civilization.ca - Boat People No Longer: Vietnamese Canadians - Leaving Vietnam
^ Chang, Harold (1977-06-26). "Vietnam escape trail paved with gold". South China Morning Post. p. 1. http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/newspaper/view ... 127011.pdf.
^ "Death Tolls and Casualty Statistics Vietnam - Vietnamese Boat People". VietKa – Archives of Vietnamese Boat People. http://www.vietka.com/DeathCasualty.htm. Retrieved 2010-12-11.
^ "Horrible Statistics of Thai Pirates vs Vietnamese Refugees". VietKa – Archives of Vietnamese Boat People. http://www.vietka.com/Vietnamese_Boat_P ... istics.htm. Retrieved 2010-12-11.
^ "Vietnamese refugees in Israel" (pdf). http://www.megafileupload.com/en/file/1 ... l-pdf.html. Retrieved 2010-12-11.
[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Boat people
Through My Eyes Website Imperial War Museum - Online Exhibition (images, video and interviews with Vietnam War refugees, including Boat People)
The Canadian Museum of Civilization - Boat People No Longer
Boat people - a refugee crisis: CBC Archives footage
Flight from Indochina: from UNHCR
Boat People S.O.S
Archive of Vietnamese Boatpeople
Website of a Vietnamese Boat People
Oral History Interviews with 15 Canadian Vietnamese Boat People
Journey to Freedom - A recount of refugee experiences as featured on InÉdit
Vietnam's boat people: 25 years of fears, hopes and dreams, CNN
Sikiew and Panatnikhom (Thailand) Minor/Children Center
Horrible Statistics of Thai Pirates vs Vietnamese Refugees

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_people