Britain and the boat-people
Nicholas Bethel'
'Yes, but that will hardly be the responsibility of Her Majesty's Government,' said the Foreign Office spokesman last week. I had just pointed out that, although it was excellent that a world conference would meet on 20 July to consider the plight of the Chinese boat-people from Vietnam, many thousands would probably drown in the meantime. It made me wonder how the dilemma might now be presented in inter-office memoranda. We have some chilling precedents in the actual Foreign Office memoranda 35 years ago on Jewish refugees from Hitler and the forcible repatriation of Russian prisoners to the Soviet Union.
In the case of the Jews, it was argued from the outset that the main aim of the German expulsions was to introduce agents into neighbouring countries and so destabilise them. 'We have no check whatever over them,' wrote an official, 'In times like these we cannot afford to take risks or allow our authority to be openly flouted.' The situation worsened. Unseaworthy ships foundered in the ocean and refugees perished in large numbers. 'There could have been no more opportune disaster from the point of view of stopping this traffic,' wrote another Foreign Office official after one such sinking.
Such disasters provoked an outcry in liberal circles. When it was proposed to tow another ship and its 750 passengers out to sea and cast it adrift, a member of the Foreign Secretary's private office was moved to write, 'Can nothing be done for these unfortunate refugees? Must HMG take such an inhuman decision? If they go back, they will all be killed.' Could Britain not give them refuge? But other more sober heads observed that `if we were to accept these people, there would of course be more and more shiploads of unwanted Jews later' and, furthermore, 'What is perhaps worst of all, they will have succeeded in breaking through our policy'.
The point was then emphasised that 'we simply cannot have any more people let into the United Kingdom on merely humanitarian grounds'. A junior official also observed: 'In my opinion a disproportionate amount of the time of this office is spent on dealing with these wailing Jews'.
On the foreed repatriation of Russians, the memoranda reflected the same degree of compassion. 'We shall only get into the most hopeless muddle ... if we decide cases of this nature on humanitarian grounds and not on the facts as we know them.' Finally the Foreign Secretary advised the Prime Minister: 'We cannot afford to be sentimental about this,' noting that `if these men don't go back to Russia, where are they to go? We don't want them here.' This was the same Anthony Eden who had said of the Jews: 'It would be more merciful in the end to turn these ships back.'
How could our fathers have been so callous? But, we assured ourselves, the lesson has now been learnt and such a thing could never happen again. Or so we thought, until the boat-people gushed out of Vietnam, dying by the shipload, pricking our consciences and raising in our minds the terrifying idea that history was well on the way towards repeating itself.
It is not, of course, a perfect analogy. Britain was, if you want to be harsh, Hitler's accomplice in the Holocaust and guilty of the genocide of the Cossack nation, but we are not actively instrumental in the mass murder of boat-people. I doubt whether cold mandarin hands are at work on quite such deathly prose as that of 1941-45. For one thing, in the year 2010 most of the officials will still be alive and some may still be in the service. They are probably being more cautious. And we are, I almost dare believe, a little more alive to the importance of 'merely humanitarian' considerations than we were then. Anthony Eden never visited the Jewish or Russian camps, as did Lord Carrington last week. He preferred to deal with these things from afar.
But there are still too many similarities for comfort. Who was the Malaysian official, I wonder, who thought up the idea of enticing Chinese refugees on to boats with the story that the Americans were waiting to rescue them from a nearby island? No doubt it was the same sort of person as the one who got the Cossack officers into trucks on 28 May 1945, with the lie that they were on their way to a conference with Field-Marshal Alexander. Chaos and unnecessary unpleasantness can be avoided by the judicious use of deceit. Without it, as the senior British officer involved explained to me, we might have got some of them, but certainly not the 100 per cent we had to aim at'.
Another recurring theme, referred to by Richard West in these columns last week, is the need to blacken the name of the persecuted category, in the case of the Chinese by dismissing them as pimps and drug pedlars. The wholesale elimination of the Russians was justifiable, because they were traitors and war criminals. (Traitors to whom? And were they all war criminals, even the women and children?) And as for the Jews, the PRO documents of the late Thirties abound with dark references to unscrupulous psychiatrists and, after war broke out, profiteers. There were, wrote Eden's deputy 'Bobbety' Cranborne, 'far too many' Jews in Britain already.
And so a matter of large-scale life and death becomes a matter of balance, judgement and official explanation. How is it that, if the United States can take 240,000 Vietnamese refugees. Britain can only manage 4,500? Well, you must appreciate that it was their war that exacerbated the problem. Have not the French taken 49,000? Yes, but these are almost all relatives of Vietnamese already resident in France.
Would not a decision to admit, say, another 10,000 doomed people give a boost to Mrs. Thatcher's initiative with the United Nations commissioner? Perhaps, but it would undermine our negotiating position at the conference. It would fly in the face of the new government's election pledges and strain our social services at a time of economic crisis. But in the meantime these 10,000 people will die? Probably, but that is none of our responsibility.
'We surely do not wish to be permanently saddled with a number of these men „ . if once we start to modify [our policy] on humanitarian grounds, there would be a very long list of candidates for lenient treatment ... we don't want them here ... ' The strangled cries of the ghosts of Anthony Eden and his colleagues ringing in my ears, I replace the telephone, breathe a sigh of helplessness and pray that in ten years time my sons will appreciate the fact that there was really very little that I could do.
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