Refugee crises · CHAPTER 9 ·
Vietnamese boat people
Chapter 9 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990: “The Boat People”
Refugees leaving Vietnam in often unseaworthy boats reached neighbouring shores at about 88,000 in 1978 and over 200,000 in 1979. Officials sold departures to ethnic Chinese for gold, and Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and China’s attack on Vietnam added pressure. By mid-1979 some 350,000 people waited in first-asylum camps.
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The map above is the world of Refugees in Southeast Asia, June 1979 — Boats pushed back to sea.
Part of IB History: Refugees in Europe and Indochina →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The flight from Vietnam had become a sea exodus on a scale nobody had planned for by the spring of 1979, and the states where the boats landed began to refuse them because they believed the burden would never be shared. The boat people, refugees who left by sea in small and often unseaworthy fishing boats, reached neighbouring shores at a rate of about 88,000 in 1978 and over 200,000 in 1979, with 54,000 to 59,000 landing in a single month at the peak of May and June. The arrows on the map show the routes south to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and north along the coast to Hong Kong. Three events drove the surge. Vietnamese officials began selling departures to the ethnic Chinese for gold, which turned escape into a trade. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 and China’s attack on northern Vietnam in February 1979 then made the ethnic Chinese suspects in a war with China, so the trade found a minority with every reason to use it.
First asylum, the practice of letting refugees land and stay until another country takes them, much as an emergency ward treats whoever arrives before a specialist hospital takes over, was the system’s weak point, because none of the region’s states had signed the 1951 Convention, the treaty that defines refugees’ rights. In June 1979 Malaysia announced that it would push boats back to sea, the foreign ministers of ASEAN, the regional association of non-communist Southeast Asian states, declared they had “reached the limit of their endurance”, and Thai soldiers forced more than 42,000 Cambodians down an escarpment at Preah Vihear; on the map those states turn grey-tan. At sea, pirates attacked boats in the Gulf of Thailand, and an unknown number of people drowned. Estimates of deaths at sea run from about one in ten departures to a widely repeated figure of 200,000 to 400,000. The crisis showed that protection without shared responsibility breaks down at the shoreline.
The full story
The exodus surged in 1978–79 because departures became organised, profitable and urgent all at once. In the South, officials let ethnic Chinese leave if they paid in gold, and syndicates bought rusting freighters to carry thousands at a time: the Hai Hong anchored off Malaysia in November 1978 with about 2,500 people, and the Huey Fong reached Hong Kong in December with 3,318. Then two wars made the pressure worse. Vietnam invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978 and took Phnom Penh on 7 January, and China, Cambodia’s patron, invaded northern Vietnam on 17 February, seizing Lang Son before withdrawing in March. Northern Hoa, the ethnic Chinese of the North, now treated as enemies, sailed along the coast to Hong Kong, which received 68,748 boat people, refugees arriving by sea, in 1979. By mid-1979 about 350,000 people were waiting in first-asylum camps, the temporary camps of the countries where they had landed, while Western countries were resettling, or permanently admitting, about 9,000 a month, so every month the camps grew fuller.
The camps of first asylum were improvised on the margins of states that had not asked for them. Pulau Bidong, a hilly island of about 260 hectares off Terengganu in Malaysia, received its first 121 people in August 1978 and held about 40,000 by mid-1979, crowded onto a strip of flat ground beside the beach. Refugees built their own huts, shops and schools, queued for water and waited for interviews with resettlement officers from the United States, Canada, Australia and France. Many arrived after being robbed, raped or abducted by pirates, many of them Thai fishermen, in the Gulf of Thailand, and some boats arrived with half their passengers missing. Indonesia in the Anambas islands, Thailand at Songkhla, the Philippines on Palawan and Hong Kong in warehouses and old barracks improvised in the same way, because each host expected the West to take the refugees away quickly. The longer resettlement took, the harder the hosts found it to keep the camps open.
The first-asylum states closed their shores in June 1979 because they decided that the unwritten bargain behind first asylum, temporary refuge in the region in return for quick resettlement in the West, was not being kept. Malaysia’s politics rested on a balance between the Malay majority and a large Chinese minority, so the arrival of tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese looked to its leaders like a threat to the state itself. On 15 June Deputy Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was reported as threatening to shoot boat people on sight, a statement withdrawn within days, and the government said it would expel more than 70,000 people while its navy began towing boats back out to sea. At the end of June the foreign ministers of ASEAN, the regional association of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, declared they would accept no new arrivals, and Singapore admitted only people already guaranteed resettlement within 90 days. In the same month Thai soldiers forced more than 42,000 Cambodians back across the border at Preah Vihear. Asylum had become hostage to a dispute about who would pay for it.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
How many died at sea?
No authority counted the people who drowned, starved or were killed after leaving Vietnam, because a boat that sank usually left no witnesses, and so every estimate is an inference. The journalist Barry Wain, in The Refused (1981), suggested that around 10 percent of boat people were lost and put the dead at about 30,000 by that time, and UNHCR’s official history of 2000 cited his estimate. Nghia Vo’s The Vietnamese Boat People (2006) used a rate of 10 to 15 percent of all departures and reached about 200,000 to 220,000. A figure of 200,000 to 400,000 is very widely repeated, often attributed to UNHCR, but it cannot be found in the agency’s published reports and is best described as a commonly cited estimate. The gap matters because the rate of loss varied over time, rising with piracy in 1979–81 and with the use of larger, overloaded ships, and because survivors’ testimony records boats that vanished. Historians therefore give a range and explain it, and diaspora memorials name the dead as “those who did not reach the shore”.
Piracy in the Gulf of Thailand
The boats that crossed the Gulf of Thailand were attacked so often that piracy became part of the refugee experience. UNHCR’s figures for 1981 show that 452 boats carrying 15,479 people reached Thailand; 349 of them had been attacked, on average three times each, 578 women had been raped, 228 abducted and 881 people were dead or missing. Most attackers were fishermen who robbed boats they knew carried gold and raped the women aboard; some held captives on the island of Ko Kra for weeks. Thailand was slow to act, partly because many in its government wanted to deter arrivals. In June 1982 twelve countries funded an anti-piracy programme of patrols and police work costing $3.6 million, which ran until 1991; attacks fell for a time, then rose again with the new departures of 1988–89, when more than 500 and then more than 750 deaths were recorded. Historians treat the piracy as a crime against civilians at sea and a failure of protection by every state that could have patrolled the Gulf earlier.
Why first asylum broke down
W. Courtland Robinson’s Terms of Refuge (1998), the standard history of the international response, explains the crisis of June 1979 as the breakdown of an unwritten bargain: neighbouring states would give temporary asylum if Western states resettled the refugees quickly. By mid-1979 arrivals were running at six times the rate of departures for resettlement, and the first-asylum states saw themselves becoming the permanent hosts of Vietnam’s unwanted minority. Their governments also believed that Hanoi was deliberately exporting its ethnic Chinese to destabilise them and to profit, which turned refugee policy into foreign policy. None of them had signed the Convention, so their obligation not to return refugees rested on custom and diplomacy alone. Preah Vihear showed how far the breakdown could go; UNHCR later described its own silence there as one of the low points of its protection history. The comparison with Austria in 1956 is telling: Austria never pushed anyone back because 37 countries had taken the refugees off its hands within months, while in 1979 resettlement lagged far behind arrivals.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Departures sold for gold. Departure became a business that the state itself ran. From 1978 Vietnamese officials allowed ethnic Chinese to leave in return for payments in gold, and organisers bought freighters and fishing boats to carry them. The state earned millions of dollars while publicly denying that it was expelling anyone. Making departure a business multiplied its scale and convinced neighbouring states that Hanoi was exporting a problem on purpose. The boats that sailed in these months were therefore larger, fuller and more often ethnically Chinese than before.
The wars of 1978–1979. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 and China’s punitive invasion of northern Vietnam in February 1979 turned tension into war. In the North the Hoa were now suspected as enemies of the state, and most of them left by sea for Hong Kong. War also strained Vietnam’s economy further, pushing ethnic Vietnamese to leave as well. In 1979 the wars of Indochina and the refugee crisis became one problem.
Resettlement lagging behind arrivals. Western countries had promised to resettle the refugees, but in early 1979 they were taking about 9,000 a month while more than 50,000 arrived. The gap meant that camps in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand grew by tens of thousands each month. First-asylum states concluded that the West was content to leave the refugees with them, so they turned to deterrence. The lag reflected Western budgets and politics, since every resettled family needed a sponsor, housing and a visa.
Fragile host societies. Malaysia’s political order rested on a delicate balance between Malays and Chinese, and Thailand faced a communist insurgency and a powerful Vietnamese army on its border. Leaders in both feared that permanent refugee populations would upset their own societies. Those fears were real to them, and they explain why governments that had sheltered refugees since 1975 turned against them in 1979. Asylum looked different to a small, divided state than to a distant donor.
THE TURNING POINT
Pulau Bidong and the closing of the shore, June 1979. Malaysia’s announcement in mid-June 1979 that it would push new boats back to sea, made while about 40,000 people crowded onto Pulau Bidong, is the hinge of this chapter because it ended the assumption that first asylum would always be given. Within two weeks the other ASEAN states had joined Malaysia, and Thailand had forced Cambodians back across a minefield. The threat forced the outside world to choose between watching boats sink and paying for a solution. The choice it made, at Geneva a month later, was to trade guaranteed resettlement for the reopening of the shore.
What it changed
The Geneva meeting. The push-backs and the ASEAN declaration led the UN Secretary-General to call a conference in Geneva for 20–21 July 1979. Western states doubled their resettlement pledges, and Vietnam agreed to curb illegal departures. The shore reopened, and the map turns tan again in chapter 10, but the bargain had been struck under the threat of death at sea. The refugees themselves had no seat at the table.
Rescue at sea. Public horror at the drownings and piracy in Western Europe produced private rescue missions. A West German freighter, the Cap Anamur, and a French hospital ship, the Île de Lumière, patrolled the South China Sea, and merchant ships were urged to pick up boats. About 67,000 people were rescued at sea between 1975 and 1990, a story chapter 10 continues. Civil society joined governments as an actor in the crisis.
Cambodians at the Thai border. The fall of the Khmer Rouge in January 1979 sent hundreds of thousands of starving Cambodians toward Thailand. After Preah Vihear, international pressure and a famine relief effort led Thailand to open its border in October, creating the camps that the dashed red zone marks. Chapter 10 follows that opening and its limits, since Thailand let Cambodians in as “illegal immigrants” awaiting return, never as refugees.
A legacy of deterrence. The first-asylum states learned in 1979 that the threat of refusal could extract concessions from the West. They used it again in the 1980s, as Thailand’s policy of humane deterrence and Hong Kong’s closed camps show, and the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action was built on the same bargain of asylum in exchange for resettlement and return. Deterrence became a permanent tool of refugee policy in the region.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Who bears the greatest responsibility for the boat-people crisis of 1979: Vietnam, its neighbours or the countries of resettlement?
Vietnam created the outflow through re-education, the attack on private trade and the treatment of the Hoa, and its officials profited by selling departures, so the case against Hanoi is strong. The first-asylum states then put lives at risk by towing boats back to sea and, in Thailand’s case, by forcing Cambodians across a minefield at Preah Vihear, acts for which no burden can be an excuse. Yet the resettlement countries had let arrivals outrun departures by about six to one and left the region to carry a problem created in part by their own lost war. A good answer distinguishes kinds of responsibility: Vietnam for causing flight, its neighbours for denying asylum, and the West for failing to share the burden until the crisis became a spectacle. The insight that connects the cases in this atlas is that refugee protection depends on all three links holding, a state that does not drive people out, a neighbour that lets them in and distant states that take them on.
An interesting fact
The first boat people to reach Australia sailed the whole way. On 26 April 1976 a small fishing boat, the Kien Giang, entered Darwin harbour carrying Lam Binh and four companions, and between 1976 and 1981 about 2,060 Vietnamese arrived there in some 60 boats. One of them, the Tu Do, brought more than 30 people in November 1977, its owner navigating with a map torn from a school atlas; the boat itself is now in the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. These small numbers set off a lasting Australian argument about people who arrive by sea.
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