ON THIS DAY ·
Khao-I-Dang refugee camp
21 Nov 1979 — A month after Thailand opens its border to Cambodians, UNHCR opens a camp at the foot of a hill near Aranyaprathet. Within four months it holds about 140,000 people, for a time one of the largest Cambodian settlements in the world.
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The moment in context
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.
From 1979 Geneva conference on refugees, chapter 10 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1979).
The place: Khao-I-Dang refugee camp — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- 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…
- The turn — 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…
- 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…
Then ask the room: How far did the Geneva meeting of July 1979 solve the boat-people crisis? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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