Refugee crises · 1989
Was the CPA humane or a retreat from the right to asylum?
The seminar question: “Was the Comprehensive Plan of Action a humanitarian solution to the boat-people crisis or a retreat from the principle of asylum?”
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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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.
The short answer
- 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.
The full answer, argued
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.
This is the study layer of Comprehensive Plan of Action, chapter 11 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990; the full index of the atlas is here.
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