Asia Closing Its Doors : Fewer Safe Harbors for ‘Boat People’

January, 1988: A resurgent flood of Vietnamese “boat people” sweeps toward the palm-lined eastern shores of Thailand. Marine police and local fishermen force them back to sea. By unofficial count, more than 100 Vietnamese are drowned.

June, 1988: Hong Kong authorities, inundated with the largest arrivals of “boat people” since the aftermath of the Vietnam War, announce a strict policy of deterrence. In the months since, more than 9,000 refugees are officially classified as illegal migrants and locked up in a former leper colony. Thousands more are caged behind steel bars and barbed wire in overcrowded factory buildings and army warehouses to make room for the tide that will not turn.

June, in the South China Sea: A U.S. Navy landing ship turns away 112 refugees in a drifting, ramshackle Vietnamese boat. Sailors provide them with food and water but refuse to take them on board. Weeks later the boat lands in the Philippines with only 52 survivors. They describe how at least two passengers were killed and eaten in an act of desperate cannibalism.

November, in the Gulf of Thailand: In stormy weather, a fishing boat carrying 79 Vietnamese smashes into the leg of a Unocal Thailand oil rig and capsizes. The rig crew pulls 57 from the heaving waters. The other 22 are lost.

This has been the year of despair for the Vietnamese “boat people.”

The Southeast Asian nations that opened their doors for more than a decade to the world’s most determined refugees have now drawn the line.

In the resettlement countries of the West, which have given permanent homes to more than 600,000 “boat people” since the Communist victory in South Vietnam in 1975, lawmakers are losing interest in Vietnam’s fleeing masses, and policy-makers are asking with increasing alarm when the human tide will stop.

The fears are grounded in the numbers. In both Hong Kong and Thailand, Vietnamese arrived this year and last at triple the levels of previous years until deterrent measures eased the flow in recent months.

“The great outflux at this point can be attributed more than anything else to people seeing the doors to the opportunity of resettlement closing,” said William Applegate, a senior refugee official who has worked with the “boat people” since 1979. “They see this as their last shot to get out.”

Refugee officials and aid workers throughout the region agree that the flood is also driven by the increasingly harsh economic conditions within Vietnam and by anxiety over delays in an internationally established program for a legal and orderly exodus from the country.

As the camps and detention facilities swell with refugees, the governments of Southeast Asian asylum countries and the resettlement nations of the West are putting unprecedented pressure on Vietnam to stem the exodus.

“The dire refugee problems of the region are rooted not in the first-asylum countries, but in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and this is where they must ultimately be solved,” Jonathan Moore, the U.S. Coordinator for Refugees, told a June conference in Washington called to discuss the overall crisis.

“We need to refine a dynamic long-term strategy” that would include continued U.S. resettlement of the most eligible refugees, Moore added, “because sadly there is no simple or quick fix.”

20,000 a Year Leave

Although Cambodian and Laotian refugees continue to flee their countries in small numbers, adding to the Indochinese drain, most are expected to return to their countries eventually. The Vietnamese, though, who have been pouring out of their country at the rate of more than 20,000 a year in 1987 and 1988, are, in the words of one official, “the ones who are really stuck.”

In an effort to stop the flow at the source, Hong Kong and Malaysia have taken the lead in holding direct negotiations with Hanoi. They are appealing to the Vietnamese government to put a stop to the corruption that has led Vietnamese officials to turn a blind eye to the exodus. More important, they are working to frame official agreements with the Vietnamese on a subject that has, until recent years, been almost unthinkable--repatriation of the refugees to Vietnam.

Most refugees interviewed said they would rather die than return to a homeland that classifies them as criminals.

“Just kill me now,” Tran Van Khinh, a 23-year-old Vietnamese navy defector, told Philippine authorities after they indicated that he would be sent back to Vietnam. Khinh, now among 4,300 refugees at a first-asylum camp in the Philippines, escaped last year while stationed on a remote island in the South China Sea. He swam more than four hours through open ocean before reaching Philippine waters and now says he will surely be killed if sent back to Hanoi.

In Thailand, rumors of repatriation are sweeping the refugee grapevines in the Vietnamese camps. Ngu Thuong Chieu, who has been held in a camp on the Cambodian border for six years and passed over for resettlement, said: “There’s talk of detention, a confinement camp something like Hong Kong. Well, we could stand that. But the people won’t go back. Many would rather die here.”

Still, officials in Hong Kong and Thailand have insisted that their new deterrence policies will be effective only when they begin sending the “boat people” home.

“Our new policy achieves its full impact only when we begin to send these ‘boat people’ and detainees back to Vietnam,” said one senior Hong Kong government official concerned with the refugee problem. “When that happens, they will take with them the clear message that there is no easy route to a better life through Hong Kong.”

‘Ought to Return’

Although Hong Kong officially says it will not forcibly send back “boat people” without a firm guarantee for their safety from Hanoi, there are clear indications in Thailand that such a condition is not essential. “Persons who are not considered bona fide refugees and ignored by other countries for resettlement ought to return to their original homes, regardless of how it’s done or whether or not it is voluntary,” Suwit Suthanukul, secretary general of the Thai National Security Council, said in an interview with The Times.

“Vietnam should also receive her own citizens back without explicit or implicit conditions.”

In a comment likely to reassure U.N. and voluntary refugee workers, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach told a Western journalist in October, “We would not agree to repatriate anyone against his wishes--definitely not.”

Beyond the push factors that drive the Vietnamese refugees into arduous journeys in unseaworthy boats where survival at sea is chancy, there is equal concern over the pull factors from the West that draw the refugees onto the shores of the asylum countries--questions over whether the continued promise of resettlement in countries such as America will simply swell the tide.

Greatest Resettlement

In the United States and elsewhere in the West, policies that beckoned the Vietnamese to the greatest resettlement movement in recent history are being rethought at the highest levels of government.

“People are getting uneasy about this . . . ,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said on a trip to the region in July. “Why? Because it is feared that the policies themselves are creating a potential problem.”

The hope of resettlement, Shultz suggested, will keep the boats on their dangerous voyages, undermining the U.N.-sanctioned Orderly Departure Program for the safe, legal exodus of Vietnamese. “People have said, ‘What’s going to happen here? How can we cope with all these additional people?’ ”

What is worse, international refugee officials note, Indochina and its refugees are no longer the focus of global concern that they once were. The world’s largest refugee population is the Afghans. More than 5 million have fled a brutal war in their country for sanctuary in Pakistan and Iran. Millions of refugees also are fleeing famine, drought and war in Africa. In a changing world, the Indochinese are slipping from the collective conscience of the West in what aid officials call “compassion fatigue.”

Few stated that phenomenon more starkly than Carrie Yao, a senior government secretary in Hong Kong’s security branch, which oversees the 26,000 Vietnamese refugees now being housed there.

‘A Bit Fed Up’

“The community in Hong Kong is a bit fed up with all the money being put into the care of the Vietnamese,” she said in a recent interview. “Rightly or wrongly, the Vietnamese here are not seen as law-abiding people. They are aliens. They don’t speak our language. These are perceptions that we, as a government, must contend with domestically.”

As the “boat people” face the possibility of many years in camps and detention centers in the nations of first asylum, fatigue and prejudice on the part of their hosts have made their future bleaker still.

In Thai refugee camps along the Cambodian border, Vietnamese are given water and food by international humanitarian agencies, and receive money from relatives abroad to spend in the camp markets. But outside the barbed wire, Thai villagers have to scrap for a living.

“The villagers make about $200 a year per family,” said Tanit Vajrabukka, a Thai Red Cross official. “Life is hard. Trees are cut from the forest for building materials for the refugees, but the Thai people are forbidden to cut the trees. The villagers see the treatment as preferential.”

In far more prosperous Hong Kong, when the government attempted in August to send 23 Vietnamese children who had been born in refugee camps there to a Catholic elementary school, dozens of Chinese parents immediately withdrew their own children from the school.

Stage Silent Protest

“Nobody dares to speak up in public because they are labeled racist,” said local school board member Chow Yick Hay. “So parents have no channel to air their dissatisfaction other than make a silent protest by withdrawing their children.”

Other manifestations of frustration in Hong Kong have been more brutal. A food riot by Vietnamese “boat people” inside one of the two island detention centers set up to house arrivals after the policy change last June was followed by the systematic beating of 97 refugees by Hong Kong jail guards on July 19. In the following days, Hong Kong newspapers ran man-in-the-street interviews in which several Chinese residents said they felt the “boat people” got what they deserved. “Maybe now,” one said, “they will want to go home where they belong.”

Clearly, though, they will not.

As stubborn as the asylum countries have become in resistance, the refugees are more than a match in their persistence--stubborn themselves, and, according to all accounts, cunning.

‘Strong-Willed People’

“The Vietnamese as a people are very strong-willed,” said refugee official Applegate, who heads the Manila office of the Joint Voluntary Agency, an organization under contract with the U.S. government to interview all refugees for possible resettlement in America.

“You have a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. You have a very strong-willed government (in Hanoi) and a very strong-willed population that wants to leave--two strong wills with opposing ideas of what life is all about, and that’s why we’ve seen this situation persist for 13 years.”

Statistically, that persistence has been staggering: According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 1.28 million Indochinese have fled to other Asian countries since the human flood began at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, not including the more than 250,000 Cambodians given sanctuary in Thailand as displaced persons since 1985. Of that number, 1.1 million have been resettled abroad, 863,000 of them in America.

The remaining refugees--Vietnamese, Laotians and a few thousand eligible Cambodians--are stuck at varying points in the bureaucratic labyrinth of resettlement, a complex procedure involving first-asylum governments, the resettlement countries and the UNHCR, all with different priorities.

Refugees in 17 Camps

This year alone, the UNHCR is spending more than $40 million to care for Vietnamese refugees in a total of 17 camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Indonesia--the first-asylum nations that have spent tens of millions more dollars of their own on the refugees.

The average length of a refugee’s stay in those camps ranges widely, from one year to 10 years, and the trend is toward longer detention, creating a stubborn caseload of so-called long-stayers, the key point of friction between first-asylum and resettlement countries.

As the number of arrivals jumped in Hong Kong and Thailand early this year, the level of the “off-take”--Vietnamese accepted for resettlement--remained relatively constant. Looking ahead, the Southeast Asian nations see themselves ultimately stuck with large numbers of Vietnamese unwanted in the West and adamantly opposed to returning to their homeland.

With enormously high birthrates within the camps, an institutionalized generation is growing, adding to the refugees’ despair and determination.

In the overcrowded billets of those camps are human stories that explain the persistent, often-repetitive sagas of death, prison, poverty, starvation, rape, robbery and repression.

‘Fear of Persecution’

At the heart of the issue is the fundamental question of which of these tens of thousands of Vietnamese living in the limbo of the camps are, in fact, refugees--migrants who fit the international definition of people with “a well-founded fear of persecution” in their native land.

Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia have unilaterally declared that all new “boat people” reaching their shores will be immediately classified as illegal immigrants, presumed economic refugees who ultimately will be sent back to Vietnam.

Hong Kong is the only one of the three that is screening new arrivals for refugee status, but aid workers and refugee officials privately say they believe that no more than 10% of the recent arrivals--a handful of such obvious cases as former South Vietnamese military officers or former U.S. government employees from Saigon--will be classified as refugees.

Thai and Hong Kong officials, as well as immigration officials from Western resettlement nations, insist that the new policies in Southeast Asia are no different from that of the U.S. government’s approach in turning back illegal immigrants from Mexico.

Economic Refugees

“People coming out now are small businessmen, teachers,” said a Western refugee official in Bangkok. “They don’t talk about harassment. They say, ‘I’m seeking justice, freedom and human rights.’ ” Most of them, he concluded, are economic refugees, not fleeing persecution but seeking a better life.

Adding to the problem in Hong Kong is the fact that between 70% and 80% of all recently arrived “boat people” are northern Vietnamese, a population that the U.S. government generally does not accept as refugees.

“No one really wants to admit it, but no matter what happens, you are going to be left with a long-term refugee population that is stuck out here,” said refugee official Applegate.

“The suggestion (that) you’re beginning to hear more and more is, ‘Just set up some long-term camp for displaced persons on some island somewhere and just let it be.’ ”

Exodus: Vietnam’s “Boat People” From 1976 until Oct. 31, 1988, a total of 672,036 Vietnamese reached the shores of “first asylum” countries in Southeast Asia by boat. This is where they arrived: Malaysia. . . 233,885 Hong Kong. . .133,5l7 Thailand. . .102,604 Indonesia. . 101,685 Philippines. .53,629 Singapore. . .30,743 Japan. . . .8,854 Macao. . . .7,119 Source: Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees