"Save Us! Save Us!"

An international effort begins to rescue Indochina's dispossessed "

A poor man's alternative to the gas chambers is the open sea. Today it is the Chinese Vietnamese. The Cambodians have already been added to the list of people who are going to die. Why not Thailand tomorrow, and Malaysia, Singapore and others who stand in the way of Viet Nam's dreams?"

-- Foreign Minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam of Singapore

"Save us! Save us!" shouted a Vietnamese refugee last week as Malaysian naval vessels towed two boats back out to sea. With some 520 people aboard, they had arrived in Malaysian waters the previous day and had desperately tried to unload their passengers. One boat was listing badly; supplies of food and water were exhausted. Since departing from Viet Nam five days earlier, the boats had been raided and robbed three times by Thai pirates. Now, as the Malaysian navy pulled them back to sea, the refugees were in a panic. "We don't know what they intend to do with us," one shouted to a boatload of journalists near by. "We don't know our destination."

Their destination was simply the open sea. As part of its get-tough policy toward the Vietnamese boat people, who have been arriving on its shores in ever growing numbers, Malaysia in the past two weeks has sent nearly 15,000 Vietnamese refugees back to sea. Malaysia has disposed of 55,000 unwelcome guests in that brutal fashion since Jan. 1, but there are still 76,000 Vietnamese exiles in the country's refugee camps.

Malaysia insists, fairly enough, that it simply cannot afford to take care of so many exiles. Beyond that, the Malaysians fear that the refugees from Viet Nam--most of whom are ethnic Chinese--would remain permanently, thereby upsetting a delicate balance between the predominant Malay community and the Chinese and Indians who make up nearly half the population. Even if all that is true, Malaysia has no right to try to solve the problems of the refugees by drowning them.

The Malaysians presumably were also trying to shock the West into belated recognition of a human tragedy that has global dimensions. In Southeast Asia today, there are perhaps 360,000 Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees, and the total could easily double by the end of the year. In the midst of their squabbling over what to do about the energy crisis, leaders of the seven industrial democracies at the Tokyo summit issued a joint pledge to provide more aid to the refugees. President Carter announced that the U.S. would double, to 14,000 a month, the number of Indo-chinese refugees it will admit as permanent immigrants. The United Nations is making plans for an international refugee conference, to be held in Geneva in mid-July. At week's end Secretary of State Cyrus Vance flew to Bali, along with the Foreign Ministers of Japan, Australia and New Zealand, to discuss the refugee problem with representatives of the countries that have had to deal with it firsthand--the ASEAN (for Association of Southeast Asian Nations) states of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines.

Dramatic and horrifying though their plight may be, the boat people represent only a fraction of the world's unwanted exiles. Indeed, the age has been called "a century of refugees," because wars and political upheavals and natural disasters like famine and flood have made so many homeless. At the end of World War II, there were 40 million refugees in Europe alone; perhaps the most pitiable were the Jewish survivors of Hitler's Holocaust. At the time of the partition of British India, in 1947, 15 million were dispossessed. In 1950, 5 million North Koreans fled to the South; a few years later, a similar southward exodus took place in Viet Nam, as hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics and Buddhists fled from Hanoi's harsh rule.

Estimates today of the world's population of permanently unsettled refugees range between 10 million and 13 million. Every continent and virtually every nation has been affected. In the Middle East, there are 2.5 million Palestinians who still mourn for the vanished orange groves of Jaffa, which many have never seen. Throughout Africa there are perhaps 3 million refugees. They include victims of the civil war in Rhodesia, nomads in Algeria displaced by fighting in the western Sahara and countless thousands uprooted by Ethiopia's struggle against insurrection in Eritrea and the Ogaden desert. No war anywhere is without its innocent victims; at least 200,000 have been rendered homeless by the fighting in Nicaragua (see following story).

Yet the refugee tragedy is most pressing in Southeast Asia, partly because the sheer numbers are too great for nearby countries to handle, partly because the largest body of exiles are victims of the cynical, racist policies of the Hanoi government. The Vietnamese refugees, most of them ethnic Chinese, are leaving their homeland at the rate of 65,000 a month--and their departure is enriching the Hanoi government.

According to refugee accounts, the government is forcing its Chinese to choose between leaving the country or moving to one of the "new economic zones"--that is, rural labor camps. Western intelligence agencies are convinced that Hanoi is determined to get rid of all of its 1 million ethnic Chinese. In a brutal, Catch-22 manner, the government is charging even those people it wants to exile for the privilege of leaving. The price has apparently averaged about $2,000 per person, payable in gold or hard currency.

There is a well-documented pattern of discrimination against the Chinese of Viet Nam. In northern parts of the country, they have been dismissed from government jobs, forbidden to conduct private businesses, told that they can no longer associate with their Vietnamese countrymen. Their schools have been closed, but their children have not been allowed to attend classes with Vietnamese. In the event of another border clash with the People's Republic, the Chinese have been told, they face "liquidation" or imprisonment. In what was formerly South Viet Nam, there are regular announcements by radio and wall poster of how the Chinese can apply to emigrate. Upon leaving the country, the southerners are required to declare that "I am happy to give my property to the Vietnamese government."

Hanoi's calculated effort to get rid of the ethnic Chinese has been denounced throughout the civilized world. "Everybody knows the word that characterizes current Vietnamese policies," editorialized West Germany's prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "That word is holocaust." Said Singapore's Rajaratnam: "The best anti-Communist propaganda now being put forward anywhere in the world emanates from Phnom-Penh and Hanoi. However critical ASEAN countries might be about the many shortcomings within their own societies, they now have even greater cause to be wary of a 'liberation' that causes thousands of people to risk life and limb to seek sanctuary in allegedly reactionary, oppressive ASEAN countries."

Only the Soviet Union, Viet Nam's principal mentor, came to Hanoi's defense. Pravda announced that the Kremlin supported Viet Nam's "constructive proposals for a solution of the refugee problem," including "arrangements for the lawful, well-organized and safe departure of those who want to leave the country." Besides, it added gratuitously, the refugee problem was rooted in the period when "U.S. imperialism dominated the south of Viet Nam." In point of fact, that is not true; the enmity between the Vietnamese and their Chinese countrymen is an ancient one, and Hanoi's policy of expelling the Chinese is not a direct result of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

In the face of worldwide criticism, Viet Nam seemed neither upset nor contrite. Its Ambassador to China, Nguyen Trong Vinh, blandly observed that his country still had a number of "capitalists, landowners" and other undesirables who hated the new system. Said he: "These people want to go elsewhere."

Though they have problems with fleeing refugees of their own, the Chinese angrily rejected Hanoi's claims that the refugees were mostly people escaping from Viet Nam's "socialist transformation." The People's Daily of Peking pointed out that 95% of the 230,000 or so Sino-Vietnamese whom China has admitted in recent months have come from northern Viet Nam, where the Communists took power in 1954. Asked the paper: "How was the [25-year-old] socialist transformation served by dismissing Chinese from their jobs, forcing them to retire, demoting them and reducing their pay, cutting their food rations and even detaining and arresting them?" And finally, it might have added, by sending them to a watery grave?

Writes TIME Hong Kong Correspondent David DeVoss: "There is in Southeast Asia today a floating refugee population of well over 250,000 that has sacrificed its native culture and heritage only to be caught in a bureaucratic netherworld. Violated in a dozen ways every day, people snap under the strain. Repeatedly raped by pirates during a ten-day crossing of the Gulf of Thailand, one Vietnamese teen-ager spent her first days ashore maniacally screaming. More often the break is less dramatic. Once I sat through a painful conversation in which a well-meaning German explained to a Vietnamese peasant family why it simply would not be able to adjust to life in industrial Frankfurt. Previously rejected by the U.S. and Britain, the dazed father sat in silence for several minutes, then asked: 'But where can we go?' "

The sad truth is that for most of the refugees the answer to that question is nowhere. Of the 65,000 a month who are now fleeing Viet Nam, the world in recent months has been providing permanent accommodation for 10,000. The rest of the Vietnamese, along with other refugees from Cambodia and Laos, have been trapped at temporary camps in the region: besides the 76,000 in Malaysia, there are 161,000 in Thailand, 32,000 in Indonesia, 58,000 in Hong Kong. Last month Thailand repatriated 42,000 Cambodians at gunpoint, sending them back across the border to danger and possible death. Thousands are forcibly kept on ships in Hong Kong awaiting permission to go ashore. In Hong Kong, picnickers sail with silent embarrassment past the Skyluck, with its 2,664 Vietnamese survivors and its beseeching banners, HAVE MERCY ON US. In a sense these are the lucky ones, because they have not been lost at sea. At least not yet.

Scattered throughout Southeast Asia, the refugee camps have taken on personalities of their own. The Laotian camps in northern Thailand are probably the most satisfactory, in part because the Lao are ethnic cousins of the Thais. The sprawling camp at Nong Khai, with 46,000 people, is larger than the provincial Thai capital. Its inhabitants were able to bring some valuables with them into exile; the camp has a nightclub, several silver shops, a produce market, a makeshift gym and an arts and crafts center. Farther south, camps for Cambodians are little more than barbed-wire enclosures. The Vietnamese camps are the worst of all because of their makeshift locations and because, in the ancient racism of the region, the refugees from Viet Nam are hated wherever they go.

At the Songkhla boat camp in southern Thailand, where nearly 5,000 Vietnamese live on a section of ant-infested beach, people use the privies when the water is high so that the falling tide will lessen the stench. On the island of Bidong, site of Malaysia's largest camp, conditions were considered critical six months ago when the camp's population was 15,000. Today 45,000 people are crowded into 30 acres. French doctors aboard a privately chartered hospital ship stationed offshore have asked Pope John Paul II to visit Bidong, adding: "On this island today beats the heart of our sick world."

What can be done? Obviously the countries that already accept significant numbers of Vietnamese refugees--the U.S., France, Australia and Canada--should increase their quotas, and other nations must quickly be added to that unnecessarily exclusive circle. Japan, for example, has admitted exactly three Vietnamese as permanent residents and, under pressure from the U.S., is now willing to let in as many as 500. China has taken 230,000 refugees so far, but is reluctant to take more. The U.S. had hoped to encourage the Soviet Union to lean on the Vietnamese to ease up on their ethnic Chinese minority. President Carter broached the subject to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev at Vienna two weeks ago, but got nowhere.

For the moment, the biggest problem is a stopgap one: to rescue the boat people immediately. A recently formed Tokyo-based group called Refugees International is urging the U.S. and other countries to provide emergency facilities, such as abandoned government bases, to be used for housing refugees temporarily until permanent homes can be found. Malaysia is asking the U.S. to supply processing centers. Malaysia hopes that Indonesia will provide the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees with an island capable of receiving as many as 200,000 refugees as a processing center. The ASEAN members will ask Western nations to guarantee that any refugee placed on the island would be accepted for resettlement within three to five years.

Though they have no constituency, the refugees have sympathizers in many countries. In Paris, Mayor Jacques Chirac proposed that the city charter a ship and a plane to bring 1,500 refugees into France immediately. The motion was finally passed, with abstentions by the Communists, for whom stories of the Vietnamese boat people have become an embarrassment. The people of Iowa have pledged to accept 1,500 refugees for resettlement this year, and are disappointed that transportation for the Vietnamese has not yet been arranged. Says Iowa Refugee Official Richard Whitaker: "We are ready for them and upset that we cannot get them now."

The refugees have one important thing going for them: their predecessors, who fled Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, have adjusted well to life in Western Europe and the U.S. Though there have been traces of resentment against them, as there have been against immigrants of the past, the Vietnamese as a group have shown themselves to be hard-working and proudly self-sufficient. According to a new study by the University of Maryland, the Vietnamese employment rate in the U.S. is higher than that of the American population as a whole, and the number of Vietnamese refugees on welfare has steadily declined. According to the study, 71% of the families now have incomes of at least $800 a month. But for the boat people, all that lies in the distant future. The most they can expect now is a sort of least common denominator of human life: a stretch of sand on which to beach a leaky boat, and the prospect, however remote, of a new life in an alien land.

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