Ordeal of the boat people
Richard West
Son gkhla, South-East Thailand In The Rescue, one of his novels about this part of the world, Joseph Conrad describes the tragic affair of an English yacht that goes aground on a shoal off the 'shore of refuge'. The name is ironic, for Conrad's Shore is peopled by warrior Muslim Malays With spears and muskets, who live by piracy off any rich vessels that come too close to their savage kingdoms. The fishermen here In South-East Thailand are also Muslim Malays; they have never desisted from Piracy, .and in fact they have grown very prosperous in the last few months off the helpless people from Vietnam in boats.
'They couldn't have come to a worse shore in the world,' said an American, concerned with these boat-people. 'It's the current that brings them, since some of them tried to head eastwards, trying to go to the Philippines.' Thai naval vessels and Planes keep constant patrol to spot the boat-people and stop them from getting to Shore, but most are spotted first by the fishermen. 'The refugees are robbed, raped or rescued, or all three, according to how ,negotiations go,' the American went on. Most of them have some money, an old ten dollar bill in a shoe or a trouser cuff. The Vietnamese government shakes them down but generally leaves them something. Flowever, some of them have no money and that's what the fishermen can't believe. Sometimes the refugees come in naked.' Last weekend a senior local official announced the arrest of more than 300 fishermen on charges of having assisted the refugees to get ashore. 'Too many people have fishing licences,' he added grumpily, e. specially since the Gulf of Siam is almost fished out.' This statement surprised me, since there are rows of cafés and restaurants here on the beach selling excellent fish resembling mackerel as well as crabs, crayfish and what look like winkles. It is a charming sea-side town, where you sit on Your deck-chair under a wide umbrella and gaze out at Cat Island and Rat Island, and, even further, to where the refugees are trying to find a gap between the naval boats and the pirates. Everybody around is talking about the boat people: 'they jump out as soon as they land, and fall flat on their face with exhaustion. .. and then they burn the boat'. They do so in order to try and prevent the Thai and Malaysian officials from towing them straight back tq sea, to face another ordeal by storm, starvation and piracy. A foreigner told me that 'it's very hard on the immigration people. If they're hard on the refugees, they get the outside world coming down on them. If they're lenient, they get their own Ministry coming down on them. The atmosphere has soured badly during the last few months.'
This was made clear to me at the local camp, where a far from genial immigration man refused to let me talk to the refugees without two permits— although that had not been necessary in the past. Frankly, I was not sorry. It was upsetting enough just to look through the wire at the boat people, many of them small children, and think that they may soon be towed out to sea again, and to probable death by starvation, drowning or cut-throat fishermen. Moreover, I know from experience that, when you interview refugees, asking them for their names and their stories, no explanation will get it into their heads that you are only a journalist and not some kind of British Consul offering them an escape from their plight. That is a high price to pay for another harrowing boat people's interview, of a kind that the world now knows only too well.
Officials can give one a quite good idea, anyway, of the kind of people now coming to Thailand from Vietnam. They are almost all from what used to be called the 'IV corps area', south and west of Saigon, comprising the great agricultural wealth of the Mekong Delta and several big towns such as Can Tho, My Tho and Long Xuyen. They are overwhelmingly townspeople, educated, speaking English or French or both, and Chinese by ancestry. Many of the men can claim, and almost all of them do claim, some sort of past connection with an American, French or British government agency or commercial company — as well as relationships with people living in Western countries. An even higher proportion of boatwomen can claim an unemployment connection, since very many worked as secretaries for the Americans. Those who arrived several months ago had mostly elected to pay their way onto boats, but recent arrivals say they were forced out, waking one morning to read a notice, 'Chinese Emigrating', pinned to their door. Their goods were sold off cheap and they left, whether or not they wished to do so.
'They could not have come to a worse shore' — but not only because of the piracy. The arrival of Chinese on the largely Malay east coast of Malaysia has increased the tension between the two religions and ethnic groups that are fairly evenly balanced in that country. Moreover the mountainous border country of northern Malaysia and southern Thailand has long been the stronghold of those countries' few but nonetheless irritating Marxist insurgents. The Thai Communist Party, which twice recently held up and robbed a train, is loyal to China and plans to emulate Mao's 'long march'. The fact that, in 30 years, they have got only a few hundred yards of the 400 miles to Bangkok in no way deters them. The Malaysian communists, who spend much of their time these days in Thailand, are almost all ethnic Chinese — like their leader, Chin Peng, who has survived 40 years in the jungle, fighting the Japanese, British and Malaysian armies. He is the Rip van Winkle of Marxism.
In many countries of South-East Asia, in fact, the Chinese community has stayed rather separate from its host country and sometimes become unpopular. Arriving first as artisans, or even indentured labourers, the Chinese went into commerce and retail business, often achieving great wealth thanks to their quick wits, hard work and discipline. At the time of China's 'cultural revolution' during the Sixties, some of the young Chinese of the Diaspora became disciples of Mao's thoughts, infuriating their host countries. There were antiChinese riots in Burma in 1967. The following year, the Philippines threw out some of their Chinese community, followed by Indonesia which sent some of the rich to Taiwan or Hong Kong and the revolutionary youngsters to mainland China. That year I flew on a plane from Djakarta, going northwards; I was almost the only passenger not waving Mao's little red book and chanting his ludicrous slogans. They were bound for Phnom Penh and from there to Peking, while I was disembarking at Saigon. I remember this incident well since, when my suitcase did not appear from the aircraft, the airline said it would have to go to Phnom Penh; and, when I grew obstinate, I had to spend 15 minutes in the hold extracting my bag from under the tin Maoist suitcases, while all the revolutionary brats stood about on the tarmac waving the red books and their fists at the US military. The next year, 1968, there was a clamp down on the Chinese in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, where police began to search and question everyone of remotely Chinese appearance. It is not now remembered that the old South Vietnamese government also had trouble with some of its Chinese who fled to Hong Kong in 1973 to avoid military service, and were promptly sent back again to imprisonment, some of them to the infamous 'tiger cages' of Con Son Island. But, although Bangkok has a very large Chinese community, there has never been ill-feeling between them and the Thais.
There have been attempts in left-wing circles in England to justify Vietnam's callousness to the boat people, on the grounds that their Chinese were 'economic criminals'. One article in a once great liberal newspaper said that the Vietnamese Chinese (including, presumably, the four-year olds I have seen here) made their money out of what it described as the two main industries of the American period — prostitution and drugs. Certainly some Chinese in Vietnam grew rich. Some maybe from prostitution and drugs, others from rice-dealing, money-lending to peasants and other distasteful businesses. But Cholon, the Chinese suburb of Saigon, was not entirely composed of millionaire dope-traders and money lenders. I made a television film there during the month before Cholon fell to the Communists, and recollect that the majority of its 750,000 inhabitants lived in conditions, like ten to a room, that would not be thought luxurious by readers of liberal English newspapers.
The Chinese in South-East Asia have, indeed, felt some of the envy and spite often attracted by able, hard-working minority groups in less able, less industrious countries. The Chinese in their Diaspora are comparable , with the Ibos in northern Nigeria, the Lebanese in other parts of West Africa, the Indians in East Africa and perhaps the Europeans in southern Africa. All these minorities have been accused of clannishness, stand-offishness, marrying only their own kind and sending their profits out of the country. It is significant that such minorities normally thrive in countries with open, easy-going governments, but are liable to persecution by authoritarian dictatorships that find them a useful scapegoat for popular discontent. The same is also true of the Jews in their Diaspora. They have prospered most in tolerant societies such as mediaeval Moorish Spain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and modern England; and they have suffered worst in authoritarian or totalitarian states such as Christian Spain in the 16th century, Tsarist and Communist Russia, and Nazi Germany. The accusations of 'economic crime' now levelled against the Chinese from Vietnam, are identical to what was said of the German Jews by the Nazis and outside sympathisers — who at first included much of the Left. Indeed the sort of people in England who call the Chinese refugees 'economic criminals', often tend to criticise other able minority groups, such as the Ibos (Matrams), the Ugandan Asians and the Jews. Their sympathy goes to the poorer, less able, less hard-working majority groups, such as the Hausas, Ugandan Africans and Arabs. Ironically, it is just the people who now talk of 'economic crimes' who would pride themselves on anti-racialism and might even support the Anti-Nazi League. This is not to suggest, as some foreign newspapers have done, that Vietnam's treatment of its Chinese is as bad as Hitler s treatment of Jews. The Chinese have not been murdered as part of a 'final solution': they have a chance, at least, of getting away. And Hanoi may truly regard them as a potential fifth column for Communist China, the mortal enemy. Nor should one be too alarme4 by the hot-headed remarks of Dr Mahathir Mohammed, Malaysia's deputy premier, who called the boat people 'garbage' and threatened to fire on them. This outburst apparently shocked and embarrassed most Malays as well as Chinese in the country. A few days later, in fact, Malaysia's Home Minister, Ghazali Shafie, made a reasoned and subtle statement that clearly exposed the humbug of Western attitudes to the boat-people: 'We cannot find the logic of those countries who these people are refugees and yet will still categorise them. When a person cannot speak English, he is put into a different category. When a person has tuberculosis, he is not accepted anywhere. If you treat them as refugees, it is your privilege. There is no point in calling them refugees and treating them as normal immigrants.' There is much to be said, however, for taking the boat people as immigrants. Like the Ugandan Asians, they would become hard-working British subjects, ready to run shops at all hours, hostile to the trade union mentality and ready to subvert the comprehensive schools. There is already a shortage in London of good Chinese chefs and restaurateurs, as many of these are finding better jobs on the Continent. The United States and France, which took most Inda Chinese refugees after 1975, have found them useful and unwilling to cause trouble. But whether or not we take them as immigrants, the Western countries have an immediate moral obligation to take them as refugees, if only to keep them in camps. Countries like Thailand and Malaysia cannot take the political strain of this great invasion, and may be provoked into putting more boat people back out to sea. Great Britain, with its honourable tradition of welcoming refugees (a tradition hideouslY marred by sending back two million Russians to death or captivity after the Second World War) should offer many thousands of Chinese from Vietnam a genuine 'shore of refuge.'
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