When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983: A Comparative History of European and Israeli Responses to the South-East Asian Refugee Crisis

This book traces the reception and resettlement of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Israel during the 'boat people' crisis of 1975–79.  These years saw hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the emergence of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and political instability across south-east Asia. Using a comparative historical approach, the authors demonstrate the multiple ways in which refugees were contested, accepted, received and resettled across different national contexts. This episode is held up today as an example of European generosity. Yet this book illustrates how the reception of boat people in Western Europe and Israel was shaped by the Cold War, and by specific national preoccupations over international prestige, immigration, labour supply and the place of foreign-born strangers in their increasingly diverse societies. While the post-2015 refugee crisis in Europe has often been construed as a new challenge requiring an unprecedented coordinated international response, this book shows the longer history of such dilemmas.
Chapter 4 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030642242

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

B. Taylor et al. (eds.)When Boat People were Resettled, 1975–1983Palgrave Studies in Migration Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64224-2_1

1. Introduction

Becky Taylor¹  , Karen Akoka², Marcel Berlinghoff³   and Shira Havkin⁴

(1)

School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

(2)

Institute for Political Social Sciences (ISP), Paris Nanterre University, Paris, France

(3)

Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany

(4)

CERI/Sciences-Po, Paris, France

Becky Taylor (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Marcel Berlinghoff

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

RefugeeVietnameseBoat-peopleUNHCRFranceUnited KingdomGermanythe NetherlandsIsrael1980sResettlement

Over late 1978 and into 1979 saw television screens across Europe being filled, night after night, with images of small boats, overloaded with terrified and exhausted people desperate to escape Vietnam’s new Socialist Republic. The international community’s response to their plight was to produce, within months, the UNHCR’s largest ever resettlement initiative to date. It also spawned the Orderly Departure Programme , which aimed at stopping the exodus of thousands of Vietnamese at source. The drama of the sea rescues, the visibility of a crisis unfolding half a world away and the scale of events created a sense of urgency and often suggested that the crisis was unprecedented. But, while this was the first time that the UNHCR had worked on such a large scale in south-east Asia, relief and resettlement operations supporting populations labelled as refugees had by the 1970s, particularly in Europe, a much longer history.

Although ‘refugees’—here meaning both people seeking refuge, and the acknowledgement of refugees in international law—had become a fact of life over the twentieth century, their place in public consciousness remained rather more ambiguous. They might have been present in every major European state every year from after the First World War to the end of the century, but it often took sudden, very visible and sizeable numbers of arrivals to provoke interest and sympathy from the public, media and politicians alike. With the exception of certain cohorts of Cold War arrivals, after 1945 western Europe remained largely insulated from the mass presence of refugees. ¹ This was to change in 2015, a year which saw nearly a million people crossing the Mediterranean by boat and walking across the Balkans in an attempt to reach the European Union from war-torn Syria and across an increasingly unstable Middle East. At the time the ‘European refugee crisis ’, as it rapidly became termed, was both constructed as a new challenge requiring an unprecedented coordinated international response and elicited comparisons with earlier refugee movements.² And here we find the case of south-east Asian ‘boat people ’ and their widely acclaimed ‘generous reception’ in the early 1980s repurposed. Across Europe it was used in media and public debate to offer a counter-example to the more restrictive and suspicious national and European refugee, asylum and migration regimes which had been constructed over previous decades.³

Despite such claims, and in contrast to the recent swelling of refugee history scholarship, particularly of the ‘forty year crisis’, little attention has in fact been given to the history of refugees from the 1950s to the 1980s, including the reception of the ‘boat people’ in Europe.⁴ Work dealing with these years generally offer vast histories of the great displacement of refugees;⁵ the development of the UNHCR and its struggle for autonomy;⁶ the deployment of refugee studies; and analyses of state asylum policies viewed ‘from above’, which are generally anchored in international relations.⁷ Our intention here is to do something rather different. Through constructing fine-grained accounts of individual reception and resettlement programmes across five countries, we aim to develop a comparative history of the reception and resettlement of people from south-east Asia . Across the introduction and the substantive chapters of this book we seek to join up the international-scale preoccupations and decision-making which worked to produce the UNHCR’s international resettlement programme with individual countries’ efforts to translate participation into their own national contexts. In the process we demonstrate that although certain themes, such as the Cold War, were live issues across all our case study countries, they were always refracted through very specific national lenses. In teasing out both the background to, and execution of, each country’s reception of the ‘boat people’, we are able to unpick unproblematic constructions of ‘generosity’ as well as draw out comparisons, and the often stark differences, between the different countries’ responses

This is important. The search for historical analogies for contemporary events is a dangerous pastime when we ignore historical specificities and shoe-horn present-day preoccupations into past events. Indeed, in significant ways the arrival of large numbers of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians in Europe between 1979 and 1983 was distinct from either the mass movements of people within Europe in the four decades after 1918, or the arrivals of 2015, not least in the fact that the process of selection took place well beyond Europe’s shores.⁸ For it was the neighbouring states of Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand which were to act as immediate hosts to those leaving Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in their hundreds of thousands. And, if we are to count Europe’s contribution to resettlement efforts against those of other non-neighbouring countries, for all the public congratulation which surrounded Europe’s reception of ‘boat people’, numerically it was not significant. Of the some 1.3 million individuals resettled under the UNHCR’s programme, over half—822,977—went to the United States , with both Australia and Canada taking a further 137,000 each.⁹ It was from within this remaining 213,000 people that Europe and the rest of the world’s contribution to the resettlement programme came.

Yet, despite both the pitfalls of making direct historical comparisons and Europe’s relatively modest contribution to the UNHCR initiative, this historical moment still bears attention. Focusing our attention on an earlier international refugee ‘crisis’ reminds us that the challenges associated with receiving and resettling vulnerable strangers have been faced before, and that different states offered up different solutions to enable refugees to build a life in their new country. At a time when Europe’s refugee and asylum policies appears in ruins, looking back at a time when more than two hundred thousand people from south-east Asia were actively relocated to Europe stands as evidence that political will, state resources and public generosity might be successfully mobilised in the cause of international burden-sharing and humanitarian action. Revisiting the arrival of the ‘boat people’ to Europe also enables us to think historically about the deployment of welfare support and voluntary action as well as state attitudes in the management of mass population movements. Over four decades after their arrival, we might now enjoy sufficient perspective to distinguish between short-term difficulties and longer-term trends shaping their resettlement.

If it is useful to look across time, it is equally valuable to look across place. Drawing on five case study countries—France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Israel—this book generates a comparative account of responses to the ‘boat people’ crisis of 1979. Doing so has enabled us to move beyond country-specific preoccupations and analyses which focus disproportionately on the perceived characteristics of this refugee cohort to explain their experiences of reception and resettlement. As we see in the British and German experiences, narratives of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of refugees in their new national context were all too often essentialised and blind to the structural factors shaping the terms of their resettlement. Taking a comparative approach has allowed us instead to move the horizon, to reveal both the importance of wider international and geopolitical imperatives in mediating responses to the situation and the specificity of national contexts in forming their respective reception and resettlement programmes. The ‘Europe’ we look at is carefully qualified: the Cold War ensured that it was only Western European nations that engaged in the UNHCR resettlement programme. And Israel, although geographically located on the eastern Mediterranean, through the personal and historic ties of many of its population, and in its geo-political ambitions, sustained close connection to Europe and sought to align itself with the West.

The arrival of refugees from south-east Asia to Europe was a significant cornerstone of a global Western response to the geo-political turmoil of the region, a response largely but not exclusively co-ordinated by the UNHCR following a conference held in July 1979 in Geneva . But for the Conference agreements to move beyond warm words and promises, international-level commitment needed to be translated into vernacular political contexts and action. And for us, as collaborators and authors, working from our separate national contexts, this was what drove our interest in developing a comparative approach. The Geneva conference-derived mandate may have seen the creation of a single global refugee programme, but it was one fundamentally driven by national concerns and histories. Looking between our different countries, we began to see just how profoundly their separate responses were shaped by their own histories, not simply via (post)colonial connections with the region, but also histories and memories of war, displacement and refuge as well as their own established institutions and forms of governance. And so, what we started to understand was how quickly the apparently global category of ‘refugee’ underpinning the UNHCR’s programme became translated into and enshrined and entangled within individual national histories. We increasingly realised just how slippery were the categories, laws and texts governing the selection, entry and treatment of people from south-east Asia. In fact, as we discuss below, we hesitated sometimes to even be certain of using the label ‘refugee’ without careful qualification.

The joining up of the international and the national scales pushed us to move one step further and locate individual experiences as part of a chain running from global to local sites of action.¹⁰ The processes by which someone moved from a coastal village in northern Vietnam to a council flat in Hackney in East London or to a non-state relief service hostel in Norden-Norddeich on the German coast, or found themselves living in Tel Aviv, Paris or Rotterdam, was both a story of human agency—the choice to escape on a boat or overland, the decision to put oneself forward for selection for a particular country—and larger geo-political forces working in tandem with national and local government policies, the actions of refugee agencies and of course, of contingency. For those rescued at sea in particular, the national affiliation of the vessel picking them up—which in turn determined the country in which they were resettled—was a matter of pure chance. Tracing the threads joining these different scales, and setting different national decisions alongside each other, allowed us to move away from the normalisation of in-nation political choices to reveal just how often those choices were mediated by highly specific national histories, pressures and preoccupations. Taken together, exploring these questions across different countries does not only enable us to construct an account of the UNHCR’s largest resettlement programme within Europe in the late twentieth century. Just as importantly, it offers the means to integrate our understanding of refugees within broader trends and experiences of European history during a crucial period of political and social change.

Historical Context and Events

What prompted hundreds of thousands of people over 1978 and 1979 to leave their homes in Vietnam, risking robbery, rape or death to escape? Under European colonial rule Vietnam had existed as French Indo-China, but France’s imperial interests in this period extended right across the region to encompass Laos and Cambodia.¹¹ Vietnam’s independence struggle and the subsequent civil war in which the USA fatally decided to intervene, meant that both the French and Americans were heavily implicated in the refugee exodus after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to North Vietnamese troops. While this event and the resulting establishment of a socialist republic that same year was to produce an initial exodus from Vietnam, mainly of people who had been closely aligned to the regime in the South and the American war effort, they were soon to be followed by thousands more.

Policies rapidly implemented by the new Vietnamese government entailed a profound restructuring of life across the country, including the creation of a one-party state and an extensive relocation programme, which aimed to move urban residents and peasants to ‘New Economic Zones’. Together the policies were intended to increase national food production in the country’s most war-damaged and remote regions, but their lack of infrastructure combined with forcible relocations and punitive taxes imposed on entrepreneurs instead produced severe social disruption and mass hunger. These initiatives operated hand-in-hand with the creation of ‘re-education’ camps which incarcerated around a million people accused of undermining the socialist state. At the same time the government implemented a targeted policy of discrimination against the country’s ethnic Chinese population , many of whom formed part of the commercial elite and who now found their businesses expropriated and their civil rights attacked. Already by 1977, about 15,000 Vietnamese had sought asylum in neighbouring south-east Asian countries, and the hardening of the Vietnamese government’s policies only served to ensure that these numbers kept rising across 1977 and into 1978. The invasion of North Vietnam by China in early 1979 served to escalate matters quickly, increasing instability and anti-ethnic Chinese feeling within Vietnam, so that the numbers fleeing—either overland to neighbouring countries, or in overcrowded boats across the South China Sea to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines, or to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand—rose to over two million people.

Things were no more stable in the rest of the region. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in late 1976, Thailand’s support of Cambodian resistance forces and US support of the Khmer Rouge saw Cold War politics overlapping with national and local preoccupations in a toxic combination producing mass extermination within the country and hundreds of thousands of refugees attempting to reach safety in Thailand. At the same time Laos’ communist government’s persecution of the Hmong , who had become identified with the CIA-sponsored ‘secret army’, caused escalating human rights abuses and economic hardships and led to the eventual flight of approximately three hundred thousand people into Thailand.¹²

In no small part it was the visibility of the sea-based escapes across the South China Sea, and crucially the rescue of boats in distress by vessels registered to Western countries, which helped to push the Vietnamese refugee crisis to international prominence. From early on in socialist Vietnam’s history, those fleeing had used their own fishing boats and small craft, or had commissioned fisher people and others to enable them to escape. As a major shipping route, given the number of boats leaving Vietnam by late 1978 and their often overloaded and unseaworthy state, it was almost inevitable that merchant vessels would come across craft in need of rescue as they crossed the South China Sea. International maritime conventions made it the duty of any captain of a boat in a seaworthy state to rescue those in distress at sea. Even so, despite having set off distress flares and often very visibly being in trouble, passengers reported often being ignored by passing ships. From those who made landfall or who were picked up by other boats, reports filtered out to the West of attacks by pirates, robbery, rape and death for those who resisted or who were too frail to survive prolonged exposure at sea. BBC researcher John-Paul Davidson spent two years in south-east Asia documenting the experiences of the Vietnamese. One of his reports, filed from Pulau Bidong , a previously uninhabited Malaysian island which had become home to 14,000 refugees, gave a sense of the conditions faced by those leaving by boat:

They were 20 days at sea, for what is normally a three or four day voyage. They had encountered pirates many times, and on the eighth day, two large Thai fishing boats had approached them. They stopped, fearing that they would be rammed, and allowed the pirates to board as they had done before. The pirates searched the boat and passengers, taking everything that had not already been stolen, including the spare engine, tools and petrol. They then chose the youngest and prettiest of the girls and ordered them at gunpoint on to their boat … When these refugees arrived on the beach in Kelantan … they had been without food and water for three days. Twenty-seven had died of exposure, including the infants who had lost their mothers.¹³

Although definitive figures do not exist, one source estimated that ten per cent of boat escapees died in the attempt, either drowned or lost at sea, falling victim to pirate attacks, or from dehydration.¹⁴

As we shall see across the chapters of this book, it was the high-profile sea rescues which elicited the most reaction in the West, as this was the means by which most European countries found themselves being drawn into the crisis. But although the press often focussed on European merchant vessels picking up people in distress at sea, it was Vietnam’s neighbours which were faced with hosting the vast majority of the exodus. By 1978 the scale of the departures and the size of the boats had grown dramatically: instead of small wooden fishing craft, steel-hulled freighters run by regional smuggling syndicates and carrying over two thousand passengers were regularly arriving on the shores of Malaysia and other countries bordering the South China Sea. Such movements were not possible without the complicity of the Vietnamese regime. Indeed Hanoi had moved towards a deliberate policy of ridding itself of ethnic Chinese and other disaffected elements and exacting payment in the process. In exchange for their life savings, which often needed to be converted into gold bars, people were given places on outgoing vessels. This had the twin benefits for the Vietnamese government of removing dissidents and earning foreign currency exchange at a time when its economy was close to collapse. But although there was often a very fine line between those who were ‘encouraged’ or virtually forced to leave, and those who risked non-authorised escape in small boats, attitudes in surrounding countries hardened considerably with the use of large freighters. ¹⁵

By 1979 Malaysia had seen 124,103 arrivals by boat, Hong Kong nearly 80,000, and Thailand just over 25,000. But this latter figure belied the scale of the situation: at the same time Thailand was faced with mass arrivals on its land borders, with some 15,000 Vietnamese refugees dwarfed by 171,000 Cambodians and over 21,000 Laotians seeking safety from their own regimes.¹⁶ As the situation intensified over the first half of 1979, receiving nations started to take matters into their own hands. Facing over 54,000 arrivals in June alone, Singapore refused to allow anyone ashore without an accompanying guarantee of resettlement within ninety days; Thailand began to resort to physically repelling boats from their coastlines; while Malaysia announced would put out to sea the 70,000 refugees already on its soil and shoot on sight any boat people entering its waters.¹⁷ Jointly the five members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations released a statement that they had ‘reached the limit of their endurance and [had] decided that they would not accept any new arrivals’.¹⁸

The scale of the exodus, media coverage in the West highlighting the plight of the ‘boat people’, the increasingly intransigent reactions to the refugees from surrounding nations and the wider Cold War context caused matters to come to a head in the summer of 1979. Although, as we see in Chap. 4, the new British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher , sought to claim the credit, it was this broader confluence of events which drove the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Poul Hartling , to call a conference to seek a resolution to the crisis. Held in Geneva in July 1979, the conference aimed to end the mass departures from Vietnam, improve conditions and rights for those who had sought refuge in neighbouring nations and develop a coordinated international resettlement strategy to reduce the pressure on south-east Asian nations.¹⁹

To a notable extent the conference was successful in its aims. In return for Vietnam’s agreement to impose a moratorium on illegal departures, and therefore address the problem at source, the UNHCR declared all those arriving in first countries of asylum as refugees prima facie . In essence, this allowed it to move away from the model implied by the 1951 Refugee Convention , in which an individual’s own experiences, or their ‘well-founded fear of persecution’, defined claims for refugeehood. Instead, the simple fact of arrival in a first country of asylum was taken as evidence enough of refugee status. In turn, the states in the region which had borne the brunt of arrivals accepted that the refugees’ right to asylum should be respected, so ending the boat push-backs and some of the worst treatment in the camps. This was part of what became known informally as ‘an open shore for an open door’ policy, in which international pledges to resettle Vietnamese refugees were substantially increased in return for countries of first asylum accepting the refugees onto their shores, confident now that arriving refugees would only remain within their borders temporarily. For its part, the UNHCR stepped up its involvement in the existing camps, and worked with both the Philippines and Indonesia to establish regional processing centres to facilitate resettlement. ²⁰ Underpinning both the political drive of the conference and the financial resources it was able to attract—over US$160 million of new pledges—was the USA , which saw solving the region’s refugee crisis as part of its wider Cold War strategy. It also saw, in the crisis, the potential to build a positive legacy from the disasters of the Vietnam war: giving near-unconditional refuge to the ‘victims of Communism’ enabled it to draw a clear distinction between the progressive West and oppressive totalitarian states.

In the years following the conference, 623,800 refugees from Vietnam were resettled under the UNHCR’s programme, with over 450,000 of these resettled in the eighteen months following the conference. While the majority (458,000) went to the USA , Canada and Australia , around 160,000 were taken to Europe , primarily France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, but also Norway. Independently of the UNHCR programme, by the mid-1980s, the French government had also brought 130,000 Cambodian, Laotians and Vietnamese to France as part of its own national resettlement programme. And on top of these numbers, non-governmental rescue and resettlement initiatives such as Bateau pour le Vietnam or Cap Anamur brought another twelve thousand people to Europe. At the other end of the scale Israel , separate from the UNHCR programme and, as we shall see in Chap. 6, keen to be seen by the international community as both Western and European, instigated its own reception programme for three hundred Vietnamese.

The early 1980s saw the pace of resettlement outstripping new arrivals, in part because third countries maintained their pledges to accept refugees, but also owing to the success of the Orderly Departure Programme (ODP ). This was the other side to the Vietnamese government’s crack-down on unauthorised departures, as it allowed those with compelling humanitarian reasons and those with relatives resettled as part of the UNHCR’s programme to join them in their country of final destination. By 1984, those leaving under the ODP exceeded the number of clandestine departures by boat, a situation which superficially suggested that the policy was working. But the scheme’s success raised a bigger question: if people leaving under the ODP had neither experienced individual persecution in Vietnam nor had survived the trauma of sea escape, in what sense were they refugees and deserving of UNHCR and international attention?

Refugees, Boat people, Expellees, Returnees or Migrants?

The unease felt by the UNHCR in the final years of the ODP, when it acknowledged that many of those who benefited from the programme could no longer be classified as refugees according to international criteria, highlights the importance of paying attention to the language used to describe those coming from south-east Asia to third countries for settlement.²¹ As we have seen, even at the height of the exodus from Vietnam in 1978–79 there were ethnic Chinese Vietnamese who had not directly experienced persecution as defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention , but rather had been heavily persuaded by the Vietnamese government to leave the country in return for a cash payment.²² And yet, the images played out on European television screens of overloaded boats of desperate people—people who had often faced storms, pirates, rape, as well as thirst, hunger and dangerous conditions in order to escape an oppressive communist regime—dovetailed precisely with popular understandings of refugeehood.

The tension between official definitions of refugeehood and individual decisions to flee and seek refuge is as old as the construction of the international refugee regime. This had emerged alongside national efforts to introduce passports, visas and border controls, a process which had begun in the nineteenth century but which had swelled and gathered pace after the First World War.²³ Before then, while people fled war, famine, disaster and persecution, their paths had rarely been barred by bureaucratic means. Most European countries had progressively extended control over their borders during the nineteenth century, but it was during and after the First World War that the scale of movements into exile—across the European continent and beyond—multiplied. For this reason historians have seen the twentieth century as the ‘century of refugees’, a time which saw millions of people on the move, but who often could find nowhere which was willing to grant them entry or leave to remain.²⁴ And so, as Hannah Arendt was to observe, the plight of refugees and stateless people was not an aberration but rather the structural effect of the modern national order, where citizenship —the condition of belonging to a state—became also the condition for having rights.²⁵ It was also the result of the progressive establishment and institutionalisation of an international legal and administrative asylum apparatus. Thus the tendency of governments to pick and choose between those seeking refuge within their borders was neither an anomaly nor simply a phenomenon of the early twenty-first century, but was rather embedded in the emergence of the modern international order.²⁶

Although the roots of the modern asylum regime can be traced back to the end of the First World War and the institutions established by League of Nations , its manifest failings in relation to Jews and dissidents fleeing Nazi persecution signalled its ultimate weakness.²⁷ Thus although the League generated two Conventions on refugees—in 1933 and 1938—it was the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention , and the UNHCR as its organisational body, which is largely considered as the legal foundation of the contemporary refugee regime. The Convention formally enshrined for the first time in international law a definition of refugees , one which shifted away from the collective approach used by the League, and towards an individualised conception of refugeehood which centered on the concept of persecution . Its terms were initially explicitly restricted, both temporally and spatially, to those affected by events occurring before 1951 within Europe alone. But its global extension in 1967 and removal of the date limit ensured the Refugee Convention was