Refugee crises · CHAPTER 10 ·
1979 Geneva conference on refugees
Chapter 10 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “Geneva and the US Response”
At the UN’s call, 65 governments met in Geneva on 20–21 July 1979 and raised resettlement pledges from about 125,000 to 260,000 places. Southeast Asian states agreed to let boats land, Vietnam promised to curb illegal departures, and the Orderly Departure Program flew about 620,000 approved emigrants out of Vietnam by 1997.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Southeast Asia, October 1979 — Thailand admits Cambodians.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Geneva meeting of July 1979 ended the crisis of the closed shores by making an explicit bargain: Western states would take the refugees off Southeast Asia’s hands, and in return the region would let the boats land, giving first asylum, a temporary refuge in the first country refugees reach. At the call of the UN Secretary-General, 65 governments met on 20 and 21 July, raised their pledges of resettlement places, permanent homes in third countries, from about 125,000 to 260,000 and promised about $160 million. Indonesia and the Philippines offered sites for processing centres, camps where refugees already accepted by a resettlement country were prepared for the journey, much as a transit hub sorts passengers for onward flights. Vietnam promised to curb illegal departures and to expand the Orderly Departure Program, agreed in May with UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, which let approved emigrants fly out legally. Arrivals fell from more than 50,000 a month in May and June to about 9,000 in August, so the bargain worked within weeks, partly because Vietnam’s police now stopped boats from leaving.
The United States became the main destination and wrote the bargain into its own law. President Carter doubled admissions to 14,000 a month in June 1979, and the Refugee Act of March 1980 adopted the UN definition of a refugee, a person outside their country with a well-founded fear of persecution, and created a permanent system for admitting and resettling them. Between 1975 and 1995 the United States took about 823,000 Indochinese from first-asylum camps, and hundreds of thousands more through orderly departure. On the map the blue arrows leave the region for North America, Australia and Europe, and the coastlines turn tan again, meaning that boats could land once more. At the Thai border a new exodus of starving Cambodians was admitted from October 1979 to camps such as Khao-I-Dang. Generosity had been bought with a threat, and it would last only as long as Western publics kept paying.
The full story
The Geneva meeting of July 1979, a UN conference, worked because each side got something it needed. The states where boats first landed received a promise that refugees would not stay, the West an end to images of boats towed out to sea, and Vietnam received relief from international condemnation in return for promising to “make every effort to halt illegal departures”. Monthly resettlement, the permanent admission of refugees to third countries, rose from about 9,000 before the meeting to about 25,000 after it, while arrivals fell sharply as Vietnamese police stopped boats leaving. The Orderly Departure Program, set up by a memorandum between Vietnam and UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, on 30 May 1979, offered a legal alternative: approved emigrants, often relatives of earlier refugees, were flown out from Tan Son Nhat airport near Saigon. It moved about 620,000 people by 1997, most to the United States. Critics noted the price of the bargain, since curbing departures meant that a state was preventing its own citizens from fleeing.
The United States carried the largest share because it saw the refugees as allies it had left behind, and the crisis changed American law. Before 1980 American law defined refugees mainly as people fleeing communist countries or the Middle East, and Indochinese were admitted case by case through emergency powers to admit people outside the normal quotas. The Refugee Act signed on 17 March 1980 replaced that system with the 1951 Convention’s definition of a refugee as a person with a well-founded fear of persecution, a normal ceiling of 50,000 admissions a year and an Office of Refugee Resettlement to fund resettlement. Refugees bound for the United States passed through processing centres, camps where accepted refugees prepared to travel, such as Galang in Indonesia and the Philippine Refugee Processing Center at Bataan, which taught English and American work habits to more than 400,000 people. Canada, where groups of citizens could sponsor refugees, took about 60,000 in 1979–80, and Australia and France about 138,000 and 96,000 by 1995. Spreading refugees across many countries made burden-sharing real.
Cambodia’s emergency of 1979 tested the region’s generosity in a different way. When Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot’s communist regime, hundreds of thousands of survivors, many starving after failed harvests, moved toward Thailand, along with Khmer Rouge troops and the civilians they controlled. After Thai soldiers forced more than 42,000 Cambodians back across a mined escarpment at Preah Vihear in June, an international outcry followed. Thailand’s prime minister Kriangsak Chomanan then announced an open door on 19 October 1979, and UNHCR opened Khao-I-Dang on 21 November; by March 1980 it held about 140,000 to 160,000 people. Thailand closed the camp to new arrivals in January 1980, and the hundreds of thousands who remained along the border, the dashed red zone on the map, were fed through a “land bridge” of rice and seed at Nong Chan. Thailand, China and the West also let the camps shelter resistance armies fighting the new Vietnamese-backed government. Relief reached the Cambodians, but resettlement mostly did not, so the border became a holding zone that lasted for a decade.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
The Geneva bargain and its critics
W. Courtland Robinson’s Terms of Refuge (1998) calls the Geneva arrangement a bargain of first asylum in exchange for resettlement, and the figures show how quickly it took effect. United States intelligence counted 24,315 arrivals in July 1979, 8,792 in August and 8,988 in September, compared with 59,412 in May, and credited Hanoi’s new controls on departures as much as the Geneva pledges. The arrangement raised an awkward question for UNHCR, whose mandate was to protect people who flee: by welcoming Vietnam’s promise to stop “illegal departures”, the agency appeared to endorse restrictions on the right to leave one’s country, which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects. Supporters replied that orderly departure saved lives by replacing the sea with an aeroplane. Historians also note what the bargain left out. It did nothing for the Cambodians at the Thai border, and it said nothing about how long resettlement countries would keep taking people. When arrivals rose again in the late 1980s, the region and the West had to negotiate a new and harsher deal, the Comprehensive Plan of Action of 1989, because the first bargain had depended on a sense of crisis that had faded.
The Refugee Act of 1980
Gil Loescher and John Scanlan’s Calculated Kindness (1986) showed that American refugee policy from 1945 to 1980 was shaped by foreign policy: the law of 1965 reserved its small refugee category for people fleeing communist countries or the Middle East, and larger groups, from Hungarians in 1956 to Cubans and Indochinese, were admitted case by case through the attorney general’s “parole” power, an emergency authority to admit people outside the normal quotas. The Indochinese crisis exposed the weakness of that method, since each new wave needed a fresh emergency decision. The Refugee Act of 1980 adopted the Convention’s neutral definition, set a routine annual ceiling with a procedure for emergencies and created a federal office to fund resettlement through states and voluntary agencies. Carl Bon Tempo’s Americans at the Gate (2008) argues that the Act was a genuine reform on paper but that Cold War preferences survived in practice, as the contrasting treatment of Cubans and Haitians arriving by sea in the same year soon showed. The Act nonetheless gave the United States the legal machinery that carried the Indochinese programme, including the Orderly Departure and Amerasian programmes, through the 1980s.
Canada and the sponsors
Canada’s response to the boat people introduced a model that later governments copied around the world. Its Immigration Act of 1976, in force from 1978, allowed groups of five or more citizens, churches and associations to sponsor refugees, taking responsibility for their housing, income and settlement for a year. In July 1979 the government promised to match every privately sponsored refugee with one sponsored by the state, and Canadians responded so quickly that the target rose to 60,000 for 1979–80, of whom about 34,000 were privately sponsored. In 1986 UNHCR gave its Nansen Refugee Award to “the people of Canada”, the only time it has honoured an entire nation. Australia relied mainly on government programmes, and France, the former colonial power, took many Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians with French education or family ties. Comparing these models shows that resettlement could rest on the state, on civil society or on both, and that public involvement made programmes more durable because citizens felt ownership of them. The same insight applied in Europe in 1956, when Austrians and other Europeans welcomed Hungarians into their homes.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The threat at the shoreline. The push-backs of June 1979 and the ASEAN declaration that no new arrivals would be accepted made the cost of inaction visible: boats would sink with people the West had promised to help. First-asylum states had used their one source of leverage, the power to refuse, and Western governments could no longer delay. The Geneva meeting was called within weeks because the alternative was mass death at sea.
Debts of a lost war. For the United States, and to a lesser extent France and Australia, the refugees were former allies, employees and their families. American leaders spoke of a moral obligation, and the large Vietnamese community created after 1975 lobbied for relatives. Cold War politics added a further motive, since people fleeing a communist state confirmed the West’s judgement of it. Duty and interest pointed the same way.
Public pressure in the West. Television pictures of overcrowded boats and reports of piracy moved Western publics. In France, intellectuals of left and right joined the campaign “A Boat for Vietnam”, and in West Germany a citizens’ committee chartered the Cap Anamur to rescue people at sea. Public sympathy gave governments the political room to raise their quotas, much as it had for Hungarians in 1956.
Hanoi’s interest in a deal. Vietnam was isolated after its invasion of Cambodia and its war with China, and its economy depended on aid. Condemnation at Geneva threatened what little support it had, while orderly departure let it control who left and keep the remittances that relatives abroad would send. Agreeing to curb departures cost Hanoi little and earned it a place inside the international arrangement.
THE TURNING POINT
Geneva, 20–21 July 1979, and the camp at Galang. The Geneva meeting is the hinge of this chapter, and Galang shows it on the map. Before Geneva, refugees landing in Indonesia waited in makeshift camps with no guarantee of moving on; after it, Indonesia gave an island south of Singapore to a processing centre where people were registered, interviewed by resettlement officers and prepared for new countries. The camp embodied the bargain: asylum in the region was temporary, and the West had promised to make it so. It reopened the shores within weeks, and it also made first asylum conditional on resettlement, a condition that would be tested once Western generosity ran out.
What it changed
Leaving by aeroplane. Orderly departure turned part of the exodus into regulated emigration. The programme grew from a trickle in 1980 to its peak of about 86,000 departures in 1991, carrying relatives of earlier refugees, former re-education prisoners and Amerasian children. It showed that a refugee crisis could be partly turned into regulated emigration, a lesson the 1989 plan of action repeated, as chapter 11 shows. For families it often meant years of paperwork, interviews and bribes before the flight.
A refugee law for the United States. The Refugee Act of 1980 remains the basis of American refugee admissions. Its adoption of the Convention definition linked the United States to the international regime it had refused to sign in 1951, a link that the epilogue uses to compare how the two crises changed refugee law. Europe’s crisis had produced the Convention; Indochina’s brought its largest resettlement country under it.
Processing centres become a system. Galang, Bataan and Phanat Nikhom became long-term institutions, with schools, clinics and courses in the languages of the resettlement countries. They also became places where people waited for years when their cases were refused, a problem that grew in the 1980s and that the screening of chapter 11 tried to solve. A camp built for transit became, for the refused, a place of indefinite detention.
The border camps endure. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians stayed in camps along the Thai border, governed partly by resistance factions and supplied by the United Nations Border Relief Operation from 1982. Their decade of waiting, and their return home in 1992–93, is part of chapter 11’s story of camps without exits. Their fate depended on a peace settlement for Cambodia, which took twelve years to arrive.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — How far did the Geneva meeting of July 1979 solve the boat-people crisis?
In the short term it succeeded on its own terms: the shores reopened, resettlement rose to about 25,000 a month, arrivals fell from over 50,000 a month to under 10,000, and the Orderly Departure Program began to offer a safe alternative to the sea. Yet much of the fall came from Vietnam’s police stopping boats, which protected lives at sea by restricting the right to flee, and the deal did nothing for the Cambodians at the Thai border. It also rested on a promise that resettlement countries would keep taking everyone who arrived, a promise that weakened as the 1980s went on and as later arrivals were seen as economic migrants. A fair judgement is that Geneva managed the emergency without settling the problem, buying a decade of order at the cost of making asylum conditional. The insight for the comparison with Europe is that burden-sharing works when the burden looks finite, as Hungary’s did in 1956, and falters when it seems endless.
An interesting fact
The boat people brought two old enemies together. Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron, friends as students at the École normale supérieure in the 1920s, had been bitter political opponents for three decades when they appeared side by side at a Paris press conference on 20 June 1979 to support the campaign “A Boat for Vietnam”, which chartered the hospital ship Île de Lumière. Photographers captured them shaking hands, and on 26 June the two went to the Élysée Palace together to ask President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to admit more refugees. A quarrel inside Médecins Sans Frontières over the ship led Bernard Kouchner to leave and found Médecins du Monde in 1980.
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