Why did displacement differ in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos?

The short answer

• Thirty years of war. Indochina had been at war almost continuously since 1945, first against French rule and then in a conflict between the communist North and the American-backed South that spread into Laos and Cambodia. American bombing and ground fighting had already driven millions from the countryside into the cities, so Phnom Penh and Saigon were swollen with internal refugees. The end of the war therefore found populations uprooted, impoverished and divided by loyalties that the victors would punish.
• American withdrawal. The South fell faster than anyone had planned because its patron had withdrawn. The Paris agreements of January 1973 withdrew American troops, and in 1974–75 Congress cut aid to Saigon and Phnom Penh. When the North launched its offensive in March 1975, the southern army collapsed faster than anyone had planned for, and Cambodia’s government fell on 17 April. The speed of defeat explains why evacuation was improvised and why so many people at risk were left behind.
• Revolutionary programmes. Each victorious party had a programme for remaking society. Hanoi aimed at reunification and the socialist transformation of the South, the Khmer Rouge at a classless peasant nation built from Year Zero, and the Pathet Lao at a socialist state aligned with Vietnam. Programmes that defined whole classes and groups as enemies turned political victory into displacement, which is the central link between 1975 in Indochina and 1945 in Europe.
• Alliances with the losing side. Hundreds of thousands of people had worked with the Americans or the old regimes: soldiers, officials, interpreters and the Hmong fighters of the CIA’s army in Laos. Victory turned them into suspects, and many fled first because they had most to fear. Their alliance with a foreign power also gave them a claim on that power, which is why the United States took them in.

What it changed

Those left behind. Hundreds of thousands of former officers and officials who stayed in Vietnam were sent to re-education camps, and city dwellers were pushed toward New Economic Zones in the countryside. The next chapter shows how these policies, and the attack on private trade in 1978, turned a political defeat into a mass flight. The people who could not leave in 1975 became the boat people of 1978 and 1979.

Year Zero. The emptying of the cities was the first step of Democratic Kampuchea’s attempt to build a society without money, markets, religion or families as people had known them. Over the next four years forced labour, starvation and execution killed 1.5 to 2.2 million people, a catastrophe the next chapter records with memorial markers and sober ranges of figures. Its survivors would reach the Thai border only in 1979, after the regime fell.

Thailand on the front line. Thailand became the front-line state of the crisis. From 1975 it received Lao, Hmong and later Cambodian refugees across long land borders, while it feared Vietnamese power and communist insurgency at home. Its shifting policy, open in some years and harsh in others, explains why its colour changes repeatedly on this map in chapters 9 to 11. Like Austria in 1956, it was a small state asked to carry a burden created by a larger conflict.

A resettlement commitment. The reception of 1975 created a constituency of Vietnamese Americans and a precedent of federal responsibility, both of which pressed Washington to act when the boat people appeared in 1978–79. Chapter 10 follows how the United States turned that precedent into law with the Refugee Act of 1980. Communities formed by the first wave also sponsored relatives, so each arrival made the next easier.