"Boat People"- Viet Kieu

In 1979 the attention of the world was caught by images of rickety fishing boats packed with Vietnamese refugees seeking sanctuary in Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian harbours. An untold number – some say a third – fell victim to typhoons, starvation and disease or pirates, who often sank the boats after raping the women and seizing the refugees’ meagre possessions. Others somehow fetched up on the coast of Australia or were picked up by passing freighters. The prime destination, however, was Hong Kong, where 68,000 asylum-seekers arrived in 1979 alone. The exodus was at its peak in 1979, but it had been going on, largely unnoticed, since reunification four years earlier, and continued up to the early 1990s. Over this period an estimated 840,000 boat people arrived safely in "ports of first asylum", of whom more than 750,000 were eventually resettled overseas.

The first refugees were mostly Southerners, people who felt themselves too closely associated with the old regime or their American allies, and feared Communist reprisals. Some were former nationalists and a few were even ex-Viet Cong, disillusioned with the new government’s extremism. Then, in early 1978, nationalization of private commerce was instituted in the South, hitting hard at the Chinese community, which controlled much Southern business and the all-important rice trade. As anti-Chinese sentiment took hold, thousands made their escape in fishing boats, initially from the South but, as relations between China and Vietnam deteriorated in 1979, the panic spread northwards. Large numbers fled across the border on foot, while others paid huge sums – including bribes to local officials – for a passage to Hong Kong. Though the majority were ethnic Chinese, in the late 1970s more Vietnamese began to leave, driven by a series of bad harvests, severe hardship and the prospect of prolonged military service in Cambodia.

By 1979 the situation had become so critical that the international community was forced to act, offering asylum to the more than two hundred thousand refugees crowding temporary camps around Southeast Asia. Under the auspices of the UN, the Orderly Departure Programme (ODP) also enabled legal emigration of political refugees (mainly former American employees, Amerasian children and those seeking to be reunited with their families) to the West, resettling well over half a million in more than forty Western countries.

It seemed that the crisis was over – until 1987, when suddenly the South China Sea was once again full of Vietnamese people in overcrowded boats. This second wave were mostly Northerners fleeing desperate poverty rather than fear of persecution. Hong Kong again bore the brunt of new arrivals: in 1989, 34,000 Vietnamese entered the camps, bringing the total to 56,000, few of whom had any real chance of resettlement. Governments were less sympathetic this time round and, in an attempt to halt the flow, from early 1989 boat people were denied automatic refugee status. Instead, a screening process was introduced to identify "genuine" refugees; the rest, designated "economic migrants", were encouraged to return under the Voluntary Repatriation Scheme, which offered concrete assistance with resettlement. Despite numerous complaints about the screening procedures, by 1996 more than seventy thousand boat people had returned, keen to leave the prison-like camps and reassured by the changes occurring in Vietnam. In late 1995, in order to encourage voluntary repatriation in a stagnant and increasingly tense environment, the American government proposed a scheme (known as ROVR) under which boat people were invited to register for the opportunity to emigrate to America, but only after they had voluntarily returned to Vietnam.

Then, in early 1996, all parties finally agreed that the only "viable solution" was to send the remaining forty thousand failed asylum-seekers still in Southeast Asian camps back home as quickly as possible. In theory deportations were to take place "without threat or use of force", though clashes with security forces became more violent as the programme gained momentum. The situation was worst in Hong Kong, where there was pressure to clear the camps before the handover to China in 1997. The rate of repatriation – both voluntary and, increasingly, forced – was stepped up throughout the region and by mid-1997 nearly all the boat people had been either resettled or returned to Vietnam. By the end of 1999 only 1400 refugees remained stuck in limbo in Hong Kong detention centres. No other countries were willing to accept them since many had criminal records or were drug addicts but, as refugees, they could not be sent back to Vietnam. Finally, in February 2000, the Chinese authorities agreed that they could apply for resettlement in Hong Kong.

The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which monitored returnees in Vietnam up until 2000, said there was little evidence of persecution or discrimination. Others, however, claimed that the monitoring was inadequate and ineffective, and cited examples of returnees being imprisoned. At the same time, various international bodies, such as the European Union, helped returnees reintegrate into the community through job creation schemes, vocational training programmes and low-interest loans. In 1998 the ROVR scheme finally got under way, resettling mostly Southerners who were able to prove some sort of relationship with the Americans during the war.

As the Vietnamese economy improved and as relations between America and Vietnam started to thaw around the turn of the millennium, so the ODP and ROVR programmes were gradually wound up. Their completion marked the end – at least as far as officialdom was concerned – of the whole sorry saga of the boat people.