Indochina's other refugees

Richard West

Udon, North-East Thailand On 30 April, 1975, the day that Saigon fell to the communists, the 'honourable schoolboy', the hero of John Le Carre's recent thriller, was here in Udon, quarreling with an American secret agent, and planning to murder somebody else. On the same day, I was across the River Mekong at Vientiane, the capital of the kingdom of Laos which also was falling to communism, although in a fairly peaceful fashion.

Returning four years later, I find that extraordinary things have taken place in this quiet part of the world. No less than 300,000 people have crossed the river from Laos and constitute, here in North-East Thailand, a far greater mass of refugees than either the boat-people from Vietnam' in the South, or the refugees from Cambodia in the East, or both put together. On the face of it, these refugees should be an appalling problem to Thailand. Why they are not, and why they are treated so much more kindly than are the boat-people or the Cambodians, is hard though not impossible to explain. But first something must be said about North-East Thailand, its problems and its particular ties with Indochina.

Thailand is not the only country in the world whose North-East region is poor, rebellious, and depressed. Brazil is another and so, until recently, was England. But unlike North-East England, North-East Thailand has not employed its problems as an excuse to stop work and go on the dole, because its peasants and artisans, unlike our shipbuilders, get no dole and anyway are keen to work. However, a few discontented peasants have joined with students from the cities in insurrection under the leadership of the Thai Communist Party. Like their comrades in the extreme south of Thailand, the local communists live in the forests and carry out only occasional ambushes, murders and robberies. It has been suggested that the traditionally pro-Chinese Thai Communist Party up in the North-East will turn pro-Russian and pro-Vietnamese to get into line with the communist Pathet Lao, who share their culture and language. There is little evidence to support this theory; and, anyway, the Pathet Lao are now little more than puppets of Vietnam.

Vietnam has a special importance to North-East Thailand and in particular Udon. Throughout the Vietnam war with America (as distinct from the Vietnam wars with Japan, Britain, France, China, Cambodia as well as the Vietnam civil war), Udon was a major US air force base, used especially by the immense B-52 bombers that fly at a great height and can drop their cargo on to a target as small as a tennis court — if, that is, they have the right target. Most B-52 missions from Udon were flown against North Vietnam but some went to pound communist troops in South Vietnam, Cambodia and neighbouring Laos. From Vientiane, looking over the river at dusk, you saw the thin red trails of the northbound B-52s, so high that you could not hear them, bearing destruction and death to that half of Laos ruled by the communists. At that time, January 1973, about one third of the population of Laos were refugees from communism, or bombing, or both. The US Ambassador in Vientiane was asked how he liked making war in this way and replied: 'I'm enjoying every moment of it'.

The war was fun, too, for the Americans in Udon, which offered all the delights of Vietnam but none of the dangers, save gonorrhoea. Some airmen married local girls, retired on full pension if they had served twenty years, and stayed in Udon. These pensioners, some of them under forty, enjoy themselves in the Veterans of Foreign Wars Club; certainly they enjoy themselves more than did the people they bombed. However it must be said that some of the girls they married — those neater, sweeter maidens in a cleaner, greener land — have grown as stout and as cross as any American matron.

Another peculiarity of the Udon district is the presence here of some 70,000 Vietnamese, still called refugees, although they or their parents left their own country in 1954 at the end of the Vietnam War with France. They are sometimes called 'Dien Bien Phu refugees', after the famous battle that year which ended in mortal defeat for the French. They have maintained their different language and customs and, oddly enough, many of them take their politics from the very regime from which they are exiles. I had not believed this until lcame to Udon in 1968 and got into conversation with several young Vietnamese who were hanging about in front of a cinema. They knew a certain amount of airforce English and made their opinions clear in answering my questions. What did they think of Ho Chi Minh? 'Ho Chi Minh number one. And America? 'America number ten thousandr. Since this was said at the height of the B-52 raids, it was as if the East Anglian villages round the bomber bases in World War II had been populated by proNazi Germans.

There are some refugees from Laos here in Udon but most are in camps, of which the largest is near the riverside town of Nong Khai. In the old days this was where one got off the train from Bangkok and took a boat over to Laos and Vientiane, a few miles upstream. I seem to remember that John Le Carre's hero spent some relaxing days in a brothel in somewhere like Nong Khai but I have no copy with me to check this. The refugee camp, with a population of 47,000 is really a town of wood or reed-walled houses with thatched roofs; it boasts hun, dreds of tricycle-taxis, and has vegetable markets, photo shops, barbers, chemists, even a dental surgery. It struck me as incomparably cleaner, happier and more hopeful than other refugee camps I have seen in South-East Asia, In Vietnam during the war with America, for instance, refugees were housed either in stinking, verminous shanties, or crowded in suffocating concrete, tin-roofed huts, where they were fed strange food and grew ill with melancholy.

Together with a French couple, I visited first the part of the camp reserved for the Muongs, a large pagan tribe often confused with the Meos. 'You mustn't call them Meos', I was told rather sharply, 'they don't like it'. There is still much confusion about which are Muongs, Mnongs or Meos, who really do exist, but all of them are what the French called `montagnards' — hill-people — to distinguish them from the racially different plains people of Indochina. The 17,000 Muongs in the camp had to tramp for about a month from their mountain homes to the Mekong River, with little to eat on the way except berries or roots or bark. Further more, many of them had already been pushed about from place to place for months and had no chance to plant crops or raise animals.

What has possessed these Muongs to risk their lives and their children's lives to march hundreds of miles south from their moun tains? 'They love freedom', the Filipino doctor said, 'they originally lived in China but left there to get more freedom'. During the French and American wars, the Muongs fought for the white man against the Viet namese; they were much admired by the 'special forces' or Green Berets. Their principal source of wealth has always been opium. In the days of the French, this was sold by the government to the licensed dens and it provided more than half the revenue of the Indochina colonies.

The traffic continued in the American period, this time for the benefit of South Vietnamese politicians and generals, whom I could name except that some are alive and living in England and allay have discovered our wonderful libel laws. The story and names are given in full in an excellent book, The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia.

The trade was organised by the CIA who found that it both pleased the `montagnard' poppy-growers, who doubled as troops, and gave a revenue to the Saigon regime to buy the continued loyalty of its police and army officers.

Some heroin still comes from Laos into the camp at Nong Khai, where two Ameri cans were arrested recently and charged with trafficking. However the Muongs have left the opium business, and now hope to start a new life in one of the mountainous parts of Thailand where they could cultivate upland rice and raise livestock, as they know how.

The refugees are free to pass in and out of the camp, and some have already got jobs in Nong Khai. This part of Thailand is lacking in people, so there is little resentment at the influx of newcomers, though Laotians are banned from a few trades like fishing in the Mekong. One of the Lao refugees I met (as distinct from the Muongs from Laos) had been in a 'seminar', the gruesome euphemism for what we would call a reeducation or concentration camp. He com plained of forcible work for very low pay; of having his education halted in order to build dams; of Laos being bossed about by the Vietnamese who, in turn, are bossed about by the Russians. The diplomatic Laoswatchers in Thailand say that Vietnam is sending settlers there in addition to its troops. 'It's as much a part of Vietnam', said an American, 'as Lithuania is of the Soviet Union'. One can speculate that the Vietnamese intend to fill the jobs, houses and farms vacated by the refugees, The Bangkok newspapers carried a story last week that 120,000 refugees might be sent back to Laos but there is every reason to think that the Thai government will not apply here the callous methods it has used in dealing with refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. This is a delicate topic. One does not wish to write anything that might injure Thai pride and maybe provoke the government into a harsher treatment of refugees, so I shall not spell out in black and white fashion what I believe is the official attitude. This attitude, I would suggest, is not greatly influenced by the effect of refugees on the country's economic and social life, but greatly influenced by the real or imagined use of refugees in a real or imagined campaign against this country by Vietnam.

As far as one can detect, there has been no attempt to check the enormous flow of people from Laos into North-Eastern Thai land, or any serious threat to return those who are here. The gates of the camp are open; none of the refugees I spoke with mentioned the possibility of a forced return, although camp officials said they had heard of concern; only last week there was yet another reported case of Thais posing as Laotians in the hope of getting a passport to the United States.

The Thai government's thinking grows comprehensible when one compares the treatment of refugees from Laos with that of the Vietnamese in Udon, who have been in the country for 25 years. When the Vietnamese leader Pham Van Dong, visited Thailand last December, he was asked about these 'Dien Bien Phu' refugees and he offered to let them return to Vietnam.

Later, however, a government spokesman in Hanoi said that Vietnam would take a maximum 30,000 Vietnamese from Thailand, which Bangkok considered too low a figure. Negotiations seem to have broken off since Vietnam started to let the boatpeople leave in huge numbers.

There are now signs that Thailand is trying to get rid of its Vietnamese as Viet nam is getting rid of its Chinese, although thus far the Thais have used no severity. Last week the Thai government published an order beginning: 'Vietnamese refugees in Udon are permitted to carry out 27 occupations.' The list included: 'Bicycle repair work. Vehicle body, assembly and repair work. Laundry. Watches, pens and glasses repair work.' Notably absent from this list of permitted jobs were those in which the Vietnamese hold a near-monopoly here in Udon: engine, mechanical and radio repairs.

This proclamation, which did not appear in the English press, serves to strengthen the belief that Thailand's attitude to its refugees is governed by fear and suspicion of Vietnam. Thailand sees the Lao refugees as no threat, even perhaps as allies; Malaysia, to the south, has welcomed refugees from Cambodia who are Muslim and therefore likely to prove loyal. Both countries see a Vietnamese threat in the boat-people as well as in most of the refugees from Cambodia, whom I hope to discuss next week.