Refugee crises · CHAPTER 11 ·
Comprehensive Plan of Action
Chapter 11 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Camps, Screening and the CPA”
In the 1980s responses to the boat people shifted to deterrence: Thailand adopted ‘humane deterrence’ in 1981 and Hong Kong held all arrivals after July 1982 in closed camps. From June 1988 Hong Kong screened arrivals to separate refugees from migrants, and in June 1989 the Comprehensive Plan of Action made screening the norm.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Southeast Asia, December 1989 — Hong Kong’s first forced returns.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The region and the West moved in the 1980s from welcome to deterrence and finally to a negotiated system for sorting refugees from migrants, because the will to resettle refugees permanently in third countries, states outside the region, shrank while departures continued. Thailand adopted “humane deterrence” in 1981, holding new arrivals in bleak camps with no access to resettlement, and Hong Kong put every boat arrival after July 1982 into closed camps, detention centres that people could not leave, much like an immigration detention centre today. When departures rose again in 1987–89, Hong Kong began in June 1988 to screen arrivals, interviewing each person to decide whether they met the definition of a refugee in the 1951 Refugee Convention, the treaty on refugees’ rights, or were a migrant seeking a better life. The Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA), a regional agreement adopted by 70 governments at Geneva in June 1989, applied screening across the region, so that reaching the shore no longer guaranteed a new life in the West.
The CPA kept both halves of the Geneva bargain of July 1979, first asylum (temporary refuge in the first country reached) for everyone and resettlement in the West for those recognised as refugees, and added a third: return to Vietnam or Laos for those who were not. Only about 28 percent of those screened after the cut-off dates, the deadlines after which new arrivals had to prove their claims, were recognised. More than 109,000 Vietnamese went home, most under a voluntary programme with a small grant and monitoring by UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. On 12 December 1989 Hong Kong forced 51 people onto a dawn flight to Hanoi, and on the map the colony turns grey-tan again. Meanwhile almost 200,000 Cambodians waited in Site 2 and other border camps until peace allowed their return in 1992–93. The United States also brought over Amerasians, the children of American servicemen and Vietnamese mothers, and former inmates of re-education camps, Vietnam’s prisons for officials of the old regime. The decade ended the crisis by narrowing the definition of who was a refugee.
The full story
Deterrence grew from the belief that generous resettlement, permanent admission to third countries, was drawing more people out of Vietnam. Departures continued after the July 1979 Geneva conference, and by the early 1980s Western governments were taking fewer people while officials in the region spoke of a “pull factor”, the idea that each resettled family encouraged others to follow. In January 1981 Thailand began holding new boat arrivals in austere camps such as Na Pho with no right to interviews for resettlement, a policy it called humane deterrence. From 2 July 1982 Hong Kong detained all new arrivals in closed camps, ending the open camps where refugees had worked in the colony’s factories. In the processing centres, where refugees prepared for resettlement, a group of “long-stayers” formed, people refused by every resettlement country who could neither move on nor go home. On the map the tan of 1979 fades to grey-tan in Thailand and Hong Kong: the shore stayed open only behind fences.
Along the Thai–Cambodian border a second population lived for a decade in camps without exits. Vietnam’s dry-season offensive of 1984–85 destroyed the border settlements controlled by three Cambodian resistance groups, among them Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which China, Thailand and the West backed against the Vietnamese-installed government. The survivors were moved a few kilometres inside Thailand, the short arrow on the map, into camps such as Site 2, which opened in January 1985 and held about 198,000 people by 1989. The United Nations Border Relief Operation supplied food and water, but the camps were run by the factions, residents could not leave and Thailand classed them as displaced persons with no claim to resettlement. Only the Paris peace agreements of October 1991, the settlement that ended Cambodia’s war, opened a route home, and in 1992–93 UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, returned more than 360,000 Cambodians. For a decade these people had been kept alive and kept waiting, because their fate depended on a peace that others had to negotiate.
The Comprehensive Plan of Action of June 1989, the regional agreement that replaced the Geneva bargain of 1979, asylum in the region in return for resettlement in the West, made screening the region’s rule. Arrivals after 14 March 1989, or 16 June 1988 in Hong Kong, were interviewed by local officials with UNHCR observers to decide whether they had a well-founded fear of persecution; those screened in were resettled, and those screened out were to go home. Vietnam agreed to accept returnees without punishment, UNHCR monitored them and paid small grants, and a radio and poster campaign in Vietnam warned that a boat no longer guaranteed a new life. In Hong Kong only about 19 percent of the 60,275 people interviewed were recognised, and screened-out families waited for years in detention centres such as Whitehead, where riots and hunger strikes broke out. The dawn deportation of 12 December 1989 drew protests from Washington and human rights groups, and forced returns paused until a new agreement with Hanoi in 1991. Return, the solution the West had rejected for Soviet displaced persons after 1945, had returned to refugee policy.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Screening and its critics
Screening, the individual examination of each claim against the Convention definition, was presented as a return to legal principle after a decade in which every Vietnamese boat person had been treated as a refugee by presumption. Supporters, including UNHCR officials who designed the CPA, argued that by the late 1980s Vietnam’s economic reforms of 1986 had reduced persecution, so that many new departures, especially from the North, were driven by poverty. Critics such as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and Amnesty International documented short interviews, poor interpretation, lack of legal advice and officers who disbelieved accounts of re-education and discrimination. Recognition rates varied widely between countries, which suggested that the procedure measured the host state’s attitude as much as the applicant’s story. UNHCR kept a power to recognise people whom a host state had rejected and used it in some cases. W. Courtland Robinson concluded that the CPA was both a protection achievement and a containment device. The debate foreshadowed arguments over asylum procedures in Europe and elsewhere ever since: how to sort refugees from migrants fairly when governments want the number of refugees to be low.
A decade at the border
The Cambodian border camps were humanitarian settlements and political bases at once. Site 2 was administered by the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, the non-communist resistance led by Son Sann, while other camps belonged to Prince Sihanouk’s movement and the Khmer Rouge, and all three formed a coalition that kept Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations until 1991 because China, ASEAN and the United States opposed Vietnam’s occupation. Camp residents received rations and medical care from UN agencies and private charities, yet they lived under faction leaders who recruited fighters and controlled movement, and in Khmer Rouge camps civilians were held as a population base. Thailand refused to call them refugees, so most had no route to resettlement, though Khao-I-Dang remained a UNHCR camp from which some were resettled. The repatriation of 1992–93, organised by UNHCR during the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia, returned more than 360,000 people before the 1993 elections. Historians present the camps as a case of “warehousing”, long-term confinement of displaced people whose fate waits on a peace process they cannot influence.
Return, voluntary and forced
The CPA marked the first large-scale return of Indochinese asylum seekers, and how they returned became the most contested part of the plan. Vietnam agreed to accept returnees without prosecution for having left, and UNHCR set up a monitoring programme that visited returnees and reported few cases of punishment, though critics doubted that monitors could see everything. Most people returned through the voluntary programme with a small resettlement grant. Hong Kong, under pressure from a public that resented the cost of detention, began involuntary returns with the flight of 51 people on 12 December 1989; the United States protested, and only in 1991 did Hong Kong and Vietnam agree on an “orderly return” programme for people who had not volunteered. By the time the plan formally ended on 30 June 1996, more than 109,000 Vietnamese and about 27,000 Laotians had gone home, while about 74,000 refugees had been resettled after screening. The last Vietnamese detention camp in Hong Kong, Pillar Point, closed only in 2000. The comparison with Europe is sharp: the West had stopped forcing Soviet citizens home in 1946–47, yet four decades later it accepted forced return once people were judged not to be refugees.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue set in once the crisis left the news. By the mid-1980s resettlement countries had taken more than a million Indochinese, and public enthusiasm had faded as the crisis left the news. Quotas fell while departures continued, so the number of people waiting in first-asylum camps stopped falling. The bargain of 1979 assumed that resettlement would keep pace, and once it did not, the first-asylum states looked for other ways to limit their burden.
A changing exodus. Later departures came more often from northern Vietnam and from people with no link to the old regime, driven by poverty after years of failed planning, a trade embargo and the cost of occupying Cambodia. Officials in Hong Kong and the region concluded that many were economic migrants. Vietnam’s reforms of 1986, known as Đổi Mới, also made persecution seem less systematic, which strengthened the case for individual screening.
Fear of a pull factor. Host governments believed that the promise of resettlement drew people out, so they set out to make departure less attractive through detention, deterrence and finally return. Whether a pull factor really drove the numbers is debated, since conditions inside Vietnam also changed, but the belief shaped policy. It is the same argument heard in debates about asylum in Europe and Australia today.
The Cambodian stalemate. Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia from 1979 to 1989 and the resistance war that followed kept hundreds of thousands of Cambodians at the Thai border. Great-power support for the resistance coalition, including the Khmer Rouge, prolonged the war, and no one would resettle a population that each side wanted as its base. The border camps lasted as long as the Cold War in the region lasted.
THE TURNING POINT
Geneva, 14 June 1989, and the Whitehead camp. The adoption of the Comprehensive Plan of Action is the hinge because it ended the presumption, in place since 1975, that every person leaving Vietnam was a refugee. From the cut-off dates onward each arrival had to prove persecution, and those who could not were to be sent back. Whitehead, the fenced detention centre in Hong Kong where screened-out families waited, shows what the change meant in practice. The CPA did end the exodus by 1996, and it also showed that the international refugee regime would protect people by narrowing who counted as one.
What it changed
Screening becomes the norm. The CPA’s individual screening became the model for asylum systems across the world in the 1990s, as Europe faced refugees from Yugoslavia and arrivals from further afield. Its strengths and its flaws, from fair hearings to disbelieving officials, run through every later debate. The epilogue compares this end point with Europe’s group recognition of Hungarians in 1956, when no one was asked to prove an individual fear.
Return as a solution. Voluntary repatriation, rejected for most DPs after 1945, became UNHCR’s preferred solution in the 1990s, from Cambodia to Mozambique and Afghanistan. The CPA was an early test of returning people to the state they had fled under international monitoring, and its record remains contested between those who stress lives protected and those who stress choices denied. The line between voluntary and forced return proved hard to draw.
A diaspora formed. A worldwide diaspora was the lasting result of the crisis. By 1995 about 2.5 million people from Indochina had found new homes abroad, more than a million of them in the United States, with large communities in Canada, Australia and France. The Amerasian and Humanitarian Operation programmes added about 90,000 and 167,000 people respectively. Their memory of 30 April 1975, kept as “Black April” in California and as Journey to Freedom Day in Canada, is part of the epilogue.
Cambodia comes home. Peace in Cambodia finally emptied the border camps. The Paris agreements of 1991 and the UN transitional authority allowed the return of more than 360,000 Cambodians from the border in 1992–93, and Site 2 and Khao-I-Dang closed. The return completed the Cambodian part of the crisis fourteen years after it began, and the epilogue weighs it against Europe’s speedier settlement. Return, for Cambodians, was the end that most of them had wanted.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the Comprehensive Plan of Action a humanitarian solution to the boat-people crisis or a retreat from the principle of asylum?
The plan achieved what its authors wanted: departures fell, the camps emptied by 1996, recognised refugees were resettled and returnees were monitored by UNHCR, with few documented cases of punishment. It also gave every arrival first asylum and an individual hearing, which the push-backs of 1979 had denied. Yet the plan was designed to reduce the number of refugees, and critics documented flawed interviews, recognition rates as low as 19 percent in Hong Kong, years of detention and the forced return of December 1989. A judgement that holds both truths is that the CPA protected the principle of asylum in form while shrinking it in practice, because it accepted the host states’ view that most later arrivals were migrants. The transferable insight is that every refugee regime eventually confronts the question of who is not a refugee, and the answer reveals how much protection states are really willing to give.
An interesting fact
The Amerasian Homecoming Act began with a photograph. In 1985 the Newsday photographer Audrey Tiernan photographed Le Van Minh, a boy with polio fathered by an American serviceman, living on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Four students at Huntington High School on Long Island saw the picture and collected 27,000 signatures asking that he be brought to the United States. Their congressman, Robert Mrazek, flew to Vietnam in 1987 and brought Minh home, then wrote the law that let about 23,000 Amerasians and some 67,000 relatives emigrate after it took effect in March 1988.
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