Influx Called a Danger to National Security : Thais Turn Back Vietnam ‘Boat People’

At the end of a long cement pier, a Thai fisherman set down his bucket, squinted into the sun and pointed south to a long headland. “They come from over there,” he said.

“They” are Vietnamese “boat people,” and they have been coming around the headland in mounting numbers in recent months. The boats come in at night, often carrying 20 or more men, women and children seeking asylum in Thailand. They say they want to go on to the West, most to America.

In recent weeks, the swelling wave of people has hit the shoals of Thai resistance, renewing a debate over Thailand’s refugee policy and its role as a country of first asylum.

Interior Minister Prachuap Suntharangkun has declared that all “illegal migrants” will be turned back.

‘Create Social Problems’

“It’s necessary to prevent the influx not only of the Indochinese immigrants (from neighboring Communist-ruled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos),” he said, “but also of other nationals, because they can endanger our national security and create social problems.”

Somporn Klinpongsa, another top Interior Ministry official, added: “After all, Thailand is not a deserted island where anybody can land and settle down. This country belongs to the Thais.”

At Khlong Yai on Jan. 28, the marine police intercepted a boat carrying 40 Vietnamese and turned it back to sea. According to Thongdam Banchuen, governor of the eastern coastal province of Trat until early February, nearly 1,000 Vietnamese “boat people” had been turned back in the first 1 1/2 months of the year.

Hundreds have been abandoned by refugee-boat skippers on small islands off the Trat coast, Thai authorities confirm. They said that food and water would be provided until ships could be found to carry the Vietnamese out of Thai territory, and that they would not be allowed refuge on the mainland.

Put on Offshore Islands

This week, a top Thai official said marine police patrols had also placed a number of intercepted “boat people” on the offshore islands and put the total at nearly 700, in addition to another 800 encamped on the mainland.

He contended that the crackdown is working, declaring, “At least the news of Thailand taking tough measures against refugee smuggling has reached the Vietnamese who are poised to enter Thailand.”

Refugee officials based in Bangkok have expressed concern. The local office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement, “It would seem to be in the interests of everyone concerned that the implementation of Thailand’s traditional humanitarian policy be restored.”

The Thais insist that there has been no change in policy, that Thailand remains open to foreigners seeking temporary asylum from persecution. Hundreds of thousands have been quartered in camps here, with financial assistance from international refugee agencies, over the past 15 years, and the majority have gone on to permanent asylum in Western countries.

Wary of Vietnamese

But the Thais have no plans for the resettlement of migrants on Thai soil, particularly not the Vietnamese.

“Zillions of Laotians could come across the border and not raise the fuss that accompanies the arrival of 100 Vietnamese,” one refugee official said, speaking on the condition that he not be named.

The Vietnamese are the problem here in Khlong Yai and Trat province, which reaches south like a tendril down the Cambodian frontier. For Vietnamese “boat people,” that tendril has become a lifeline.

Since 1978, when harsh Vietnamese policies focused on the ethnic Chinese minority, the oppressed have left their native shores in unseaworthy boats to seek asylum in neighboring Southeast Asian states. Most sailed for Malaysia and Hong Kong, and some struck out toward the southwest across the Gulf of Thailand for southern Thai ports. Untold numbers were lost in storms or fell victim to pirates.

Refugee Smugglers

The dangers of the gulf, though diminished in the past 2 years by improved, U.S.-backed Thai anti-piracy patrols, led many Vietnamese to follow a shorter, safer route along the Cambodian coast to Trat province. That passage has been refined, in part by highly organized refugee-smuggling networks.

Now, arrivals on the palm-lined beaches of eastern Thailand exceed those at southern Thai ports by 10 to 1. The relative ease of passage tripled Vietnamese arrivals in 1987.

On a recent weekday in February, more than 600 Vietnamese were camped under tents behind the police station in Khlong Yai. The “boat people” who run the gauntlet of storms and pirates to reach southern Thai beaches from Songkhla to Pattani usually arrive in near-desperate condition. The Vietnamese at Khlong Yai looked fit.

Boonsong Tatakua, a low-level Interior Ministry official, told a reporter: “I feel sorry for them. I sympathize with them. But I don’t know what to do with them.”

Boonsong’s superiors in Bangkok said that if the Vietnamese reach land, they will not be sent back.

“We cannot let them float in the sea,” Somporn said.

Will Be Sent to Camp

According to Thongdam, who was replaced as governor of Trat, the new arrivals will eventually be sent to Site 2, a dusty, teeming refugee camp containing 170,000 people on the Thai-Cambodian border.

The people at Site 2, mainly Cambodians, have been designated by the Thais as displaced persons, ineligible for resettlement in the West. They are awaiting only safe conditions in their war-torn country before they are sent back.

Thai officials make the decision on who will be made eligible for resettlement as refugees fleeing persecution in their homeland. Many of the recent arrivals from Vietnam and Laos, they insist, are economic migrants seeking a better life.

The Vietnamese at Khlong Yai, Boonsong said, “have money . . . lots of it.” He said they have been allowed to send telegrams to friends and relatives in the West from the nearby post office, asking for more money.

Bribes Add to Trip Cost

The trip to Khlong Yai is costly, according to refugee accounts. Vietnamese and Cambodian officials have to be bribed along the way, they say. Estimates run to $2,000 or more per person. The Vietnamese are moved by bus or other land transport from southern Vietnam to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and then to Kompong Som, the major Cambodian port on the Gulf of Thailand. From there, they say, it costs $1,000 for the four-hour boat trip to the eastern Thai coast. The charges are paid in dollars or gold.

The final leg follows a contraband smuggling route that has blossomed since 1985, when an offensive by the Vietnamese occupation army in Cambodia destroyed black-market trade across the Thai-Cambodian land border farther north, near Site 2. In its first few years, the Kompong Som-Trat route sent manufactured goods into Cambodia in exchange for commodities, often fresh water fish from Tonle Sap, the big Cambodian lake. The exchange was made at sea by Thai and Cambodian fishing boats.

In the past year, particularly, the trade from the Cambodian end has been in Vietnamese seeking asylum.

“It’s a regular ferry service,” a refugee official said.

Issue Came to a Head

As the issue of the “boat people” came to a head in late January, it was accompanied by a Thai government crackdown on corruption in Trat, presumably including the smuggling of refugees. At least five officials have been transferred from the province, and Gov. Thongdam replaced. No specific charges have been brought against the men. Thongdam has resigned from government service.

Other than the Jan. 28 incident and Thongdam’s statement that nearly 1,000 Vietnamese have been pushed back to sea, there have been no first-hand reports of refugee boats being turned back. A marine police officer, overseeing maintenance of his 40-foot boat in preparation for night patrol, said his orders since Jan. 29 have been to intercept and turn away any refugee vessel in Thai waters, but he said he had encountered none. There have been no reports of ships being turned back along the southern Thai coast.

According to fishermen on the Khlong Yai pier, the boats often drop their passengers in shallow water and then head back to Kompong Som or, according to some unverified reports, to Koh Kong, a Cambodian island reported to be another departure point for a run to the beaches.

A group of about 70 Vietnamese who made it to shore and were held three days in a Buddhist temple before being taken in in February told a monk that their boat had been piloted by a Thai fisherman. The monk said that one of the Vietnamese, a girl of about 12, had a gunshot wound in one leg, but no Thai official interviewed in Khlong Yai would confirm this.

Thai Message to Hanoi

In Bangkok, Thai officials admit that their announced crackdown, under what they say is longstanding policy, was designed to send a message to the Vietnamese government in Hanoi, an effort to force the regime to funnel asylum seekers through the U.N.-sponsored Orderly Departure Program. Somporn said that Hanoi appeared to be allowing the refugees to leave in large numbers in order to force a Thai crackdown, which could hurt Thailand’s reputation in the international community.

Over the years, the Thais have on at least two occasions forcibly repatriated land refugees, provoking strong protests from international agencies.

But any action against the Vietnamese receives support from some quarters in Thailand. On the Khlong Yai pier, a provisioner of fishing boats described the increase in “boat people”--from 3,886 in 1986 to more than 13,000 last year--as “obvious and suspicious.”

“The people in town are frightened,” he said.

U.S. Applauds Efforts

In Washington last month, the State Department said that the United States applauds Thailand, Malaysia and other first-asylum countries in Southeast Asia for “their persistence in coping with this burden (of accepting Indochinese refugees), urges them to continue their generous policy . . . and assures them that they will not be left alone to deal single-handedly with this challenge.”

The statement also said: “Some in Thailand have reacted to this continuing pressure by interdicting boats carrying Vietnamese that attempt to land on Thailand’s east coast and adopting other measures intended to discourage this flow. While we sympathize with the difficult situation in which Thailand finds itself, we cannot condone any measures that pose a further threat to the lives and well-being of persons attempting to escape Vietnam. . . . U.S. officials have pursued urgently intense discussions on this subject with high officials of the Royal Thai government.”

In all, more than 400,000 Indochinese are now camped on Thai soil, the majority of them designated as displaced persons, not refugees.