The boat people
Sir: Mr George Heygate has written a mean-spirited and factually distorted letter commenting on Alexander Chancellor's remarks on the Vietnamese refugees in his Notebook for 30 June. Leaving aside who is to blame for the mass exodus from Vietnam as too obvious a question to be worth discussing, let alone quibbling about, Mr Heygate's other criticisms deserve to be rebutted.
It is intellectually dishonest to compare Immigrants to refugees, particularly when the latter are fugitives from a ruthless totalitarian regime. Witness the behaviour of Vietnam's attaché for Information, Mr Khang, on receiving a petition from 156 Conservative MPs, challenging him to defend his government's treatment of the 'boat people'. These refugees have every conceivable incentive to benefit any country which accepts them. The evidence from France and the United States is that that is exactly what they do.
The Vietnamese refugees are to be distinguished. They are cast at the feet of the world in circumstances in which every civilised nation has an overriding duty to respond. The issue is quite simply whether we save them or not. There is no difference .between Herbert Morrison 's.refusal to,allow into Britain 2,000 Jewish children from occupied France in 1942, who were then handed over to the Germans, and the failure of Britain, together with other nations, to agree to receive the 40,000 — 50,000 refugees pushed back out to sea by the Malaysian authorities since February.
The refugees from Vietnam are being expelled by a totalitarian regime which is governed by men who have become beasts. Today, tomorrow and every day for many months, these innocent people will depend for their survival on the exercise of mercy. We ignore that fact at our peril.
J.P. Dean 5 Bentinok Mansions, Bentinck StrecE, London W1 Sir: It was sad to read Nicholas Bethell's highly speciotts special pleading on behalf of the so-called 'boat people'. The difference between the Cossacks and the Vietnamese is that the Cossacks were our prisoners and we sent them to their death, deliberately and knowingly. They were, in short, under our hand, and we delivered them to people who we knew would be•their murderers. The Vietnamese, or indeed the Indochinese as a whole, are not under Our hand, and never have been. If we were to provide refuge in today's circumstances for every country that deports its unwanted ethnic entities, we would render ourselves liable to tens of millions of Indians from all over the earth, ditto Chinese, negroes, and certainly hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese and probably Jews.
None of these people will take up residence anywhere near the home of Lord Bethell. They will go, as they have done for the past hundred years, to the places where are to be found the least articulate, the least wealthy, the most elderly of our countrymen. If however, an island can be found where they can be held with my Lords Bethell, Shinwell, Gifford etc, then I would support him; the process would be highly educational. D.R. Bramwell The Seggin, Eyton, Leominster, Herefordshire.
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