Refugees Now Being Urged to Go Back to Vietnam : Positions Harden in Crisis Over ‘Boat People’

Compassion, guilt and vivid images of near-swamped boatloads of half-dead Vietnamese on the shores of Southeast Asia drew the Western powers to Geneva in July, 1979. A deal was struck.

The Vietnamese “boat people” would be given homes and new lives in the West. By that summer, more than 350,000 had reached rude camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. Few conditions were placed on their resettlement. They would be taken in.

“The Western countries just vacuumed them up,” recalled Bruce Beardsley, counselor for refugee and migration affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

Now, nine years later, the pipeline is clogged. In Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia, the Vietnamese boats have hit the shoals of resistance. The Geneva deal of 1979 is unraveling. Vietnamese are piling up in the Asian camps, the so-called long-stayers who have been rejected by the West.

Throughout the region, a crisis is at hand. But a solution is proving elusive.

Pierre Jambor, the Bangkok representative of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), outlined the problem at a refugee conference here in July:

“Many have linked this state of affairs to resettlement: Too little? Too selective? It has turned from the cure-all to the culprit.”

Others argue that it’s a question of too much, that the hope of resettlement has created a never-ending flow of boat people unwilling to take their chances on an established program of legal exodus, the U.N.-sanctioned Orderly Departure Program. On a Southeast Asian trip in July, Secretary of State George P. Shultz told reporters that the Western countries may face a hard decision on open-ended resettlement of boat people, then reflected, “You have to jack yourself up and say you’re just not going to do it.”

The Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which includes most of the first-asylum countries, has already drawn the line, demanding that Vietnam block any further departures and take back the boat people in ASEAN camps.

Among ASEAN members, Thailand has declared that all Vietnamese who arrived in Thailand this year are no longer eligible for resettlement. Malaysia has threatened, without specifics, to close its refugee camp on Bidong Island.

Hong Kong, not an ASEAN member, has begun to screen arrivals to determine their refugee status. Those who fail to meet the international definition of refugees--people with “a well-founded fear of persecution” in their homeland--will be ticketed for eventual repatriation.

Positions are hardening. “The recent new arrivals are not bona fide refugees,” Suwit Suthanukul, secretary general of Thailand’s National Security Council, declared in an interview. “They are economic seekers who long for a better living.”

A ‘Polluted’ Flow

“We are looking at a ‘polluted’ flow,” agreed a regional refugee worker.

So what’s the answer for men like Tran Ngoc Ca, 54, who reached Thailand two years ago in a small boat with his teen-age son and young daughter? He has been interviewed for resettlement by the Americans and the Canadians--and been rejected by both. He doesn’t know why.

“I’ll go anywhere, to any free country,” he told a reporter at Phanat Nikhom, a Thai processing center where arriving boat people were sent before this year.

Would he go back to Vietnam?

“Never,” he insisted, “After the Communists came, they changed the system. I hate the Communists.”

But if he were to be repatriated? Ca shrugged, and put his wrists together, implying that he would be handcuffed and jailed.

Meeting in Bangkok last July, ASEAN foreign ministers called for a new international conference on the boat people. The 1979 Geneva agreement, an official of an international refugee organization here noted, “has run out of steam . . . we got all the possible mileage out of it.” The Western resettlement countries agree in principle that a new conference might help, but Shultz and others have expressed caution, demanding that groundwork be laid first.

Most policy-makers agree that only a comprehensive program would be acceptable, something beyond the 1979 agreement, which was framed at a time of high drama and crisis and laid out a simple formula: The Asian countries would take in the boat people, feed and shelter them with international aid, then turn them over to the Western countries for resettlement.

Jonathan Moore, U.S. coordinator for refugee affairs, detailed the American approach at a Washington conference in June. He described a long-term policy that would mix elements of temporary asylum in the Asian countries, screening of potential refugees, continued resettlement, voluntary repatriation, expansion of the Orderly Departure Program and pressure on Vietnam to stop the exodus of boat people.

“With the increased flows and the effectiveness of resettlement in question, the decade-long consensus that sustained generous first asylum in Southeast Asia is in jeopardy,” Moore said.

No element of his proposals is without pitfalls.

Resettlement is the key point of contention between the Asian asylum nations and the West. Overall, since the fall of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to Communist regimes in 1975 triggered the flood of refugees, 1.28 million Indochinese have reached asylum camps in Southeast Asia and Japan, including 672,036 Vietnamese boat people. More than 1.1 million have been resettled in the West.

In the course of 13 years, resettlement has been generous, but not sufficient to avert the present problems.

In the mid-1980s, a Western refugee official explained, “you had a situation where the number of Vietnamese arriving on foreign shores was declining, while the ‘off-take,’ the numbers being removed from the first-asylum (countries) and resettled in the West, was increasing. It looked like at some point the two lines could come together, that the problem of refugee buildup in Asia would go away.

“Suddenly, late last year and this year, those trends are reversed. The off-take levels out and the arrivals increase. Then people begin to reexamine their definition of who is a refugee.”

In Thailand, the numbers jumped in Trat province, on the eastern shore along the Cambodian border. Last December and January, boat people began arriving at the rate of 2,000 a month.

“Trat was the catalyst,” a Western diplomat said. Bangkok authorities, stunned by the rising tide and embarrassed by the implication of Trat province officials in a refugee-smuggling ring, moved to plug the loophole. Refugee boats were pushed back to sea.

Trat had become an unacceptable “pull factor” for Thailand. Too many boat people were coming in. The Thais and other first-asylum governments began asking, “Are we going to be holding the bag when the last act is played?” Increasing numbers of long-stayers in their camps confirmed the trend.

In diplomatic parlance, it was time to send a message to Vietnam and to the refugees. For Thailand, the combination of boat push-backs and no-resettlement status for arriving Vietnamese has worked. The Trat connection has largely evaporated.

Overall, according to the latest figures of the U.N. refugee agency, arrivals of boat people have begun to decline since the first of the year. In October, 1,696 reached first-asylum camps throughout Southeast Asia. The figure for January was 3,334, including 2,191 in Thailand alone.

A second message is screening. In the early 1980s, there was no talk of screening for the boat people. Those who came in were expected to leave for the West.

Now, in the context of a new refugee conference, the Thais and the Malaysians are willing to discuss screening. If the message gets back to Vietnam that new arrivals will face screening, and possible limbo in a Thai camp if they are screened out--rejected for resettlement on grounds they are economic refugees--some potential boat people will think twice.

“Many will be willing to take a shot on the screening process,” said one refugee official, “but not everybody is motivated as a gambler. A farmer, for instance, may not take the chance of rotting in a Hong Kong cell.”

The United States, by far the largest recipient of Vietnamese refugees over the past decade, selects candidates for resettlement according to special criteria, the American connections that are a legacy of the Vietnam War.

Some cases are better than others.

“There was this one man who’d been a C-130 pilot for the South Vietnamese air force during the war,” a Western refugee official recalled. “He’d spent five years in a re-education camp, and when he came out, the only work he could find was as a street vendor. His kids couldn’t go to university. This is political persecution. You don’t get very many of these strong cases anymore.”

The Orderly Departure Program is the established alternative. About 700,000 Indochinese have pending applications, and more than 140,000 have already left. Established in 1979, the program was designed to provide a legal exodus to the West at a time when Hanoi had taken a diplomatic black eye because of the suffering of the boat people.

But progress has at times been checkered by the relations between Hanoi and Washington. For the past few years, departures under the program have topped 10,000 annually, and it’s expected to climb with Washington’s commitment to resettle the estimated 8,000 Amerasians and their families, plus thousands more former inmates of Vietnamese re-education camps. But Beardsley, the American refugee official who also directs the Orderly Departure Program under the aegis of the United Nations, noted, “Even if you could get to 40,000 to 50,000 a year, it would still take a number of years to take just the sort of people we want to take.”

The final factor in a comprehensive plan is repatriation, a normal element of most refugee situations elsewhere in the world but a potentially incendiary concept in Indochina. In early summer, a representative of the U.N. refugee agency left Hanoi with what he said was agreement in principle on voluntary repatriation. Visits by Hong Kong and Malaysian authorities have received the same answer.

Last week at U.N. refugee agency headquarters in Geneva, a Vietnamese official signed a protocol framework for “future voluntary returns to Vietnam,” pledging they could take place “in safety and dignity.”

But so far everything is tentative, particularly because there is no inclination among the boat people to return voluntarily. Hanoi could use the international good will that a repatriation program would bring. But Hanoi is a hard dealer even on refugee matters. A few Vietnamese have already returned home for a variety of personal reasons, but “they could fit in a fairly large phone booth,” a refugee worker said.

In Hong Kong, for instance, about 300 refugees agreed to be repatriated at the urging of government officials. But refugee workers said most of them were boatmen paid to navigate the voyage to Hong Kong and had planned to return to Vietnam anyway.