II  The Tragic Journey - The Initial Challenges  

'Có lẽ trời muốn trao cho gánh nặng,
Bắt trải qua bách-chiết thiên-ma.'
 ‘God perhaps wants to train us for an important responsibility,
thus makes us endure tragic challenges.’
Famous Vietnamese Statesman Nguyễn Trãi  (A.D. 1418)  

The reality of the Vietnamese boat people’s journey is full of tragic experiences, endless natural calamities and brutal man-made obstacles. (Photo: B. McDougall)

The image of a small boat full of escapees, who risk death to search for liberty, floating somewhere in the boundless blue ocean appears both incredibly courageous and, at times, mysteriously romantic. The reality of the Vietnamese boat people’s journey, however, is full of tragic experiences, endless natural calamities and brutal man-made obstacles.  Without knowing their destiny and the prospects of return, the boat people were determined to escape Socialist Vietnam's oppressive control despite the deadly dangers on high seas. For them who had to choose between liberty and bondage, there was only one way to escape the communist ideological persecution: fleeing Socialist Vietnam to freedom, even at the risk of death.

The freedom of movement of Vietnamese citizens was abolished by Hanoi’s immigration and criminal laws, and therefore they had to undertake enormous risks to find their own means to flee the CPV’s systemic persecution.  On April 30, 1975 as the South Vietnamese government was collapsing, approximately 130,000 refugees managed to escape the communist advance successfully with limited American assistance. Of these first Asylees, except for 25,000 who were flown directly to U.S. territories or safe shelters in neighboring states, many were either ferried or airlifted to awaiting rescue ships before May 1, 1975; and notably 32,000 refugees boarded boats, rafts, floats, and even South Vietnamese Navy ships to flee the approaching northern forces.[1] In the subsequent days, 3,000 Vietnamese went to Singapore by boats, 700 arrived in Pusan on two South Korean Navy ships and 3,743 others were evacuated at sea and carried to Hong Kong by the Clara Maersk, a Danish containership. Another group of 823 refugees were rescued by two Taiwanese vessels, while 30,000 Asylees showed up at Subic Bay in the Philippines on 26 South Vietnamese Navy ships.[2]  The outflow of Vietnamese refugees increased steadily thereafter as the communists heightened their search for retribution and revenge while forcibly establishing an ideological regime in the South.

According statistics kept by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 378 boat persons reached safety between May and December 1975. That number increased to 5,569 in the following year and then to 17,126 in 1977. The number continued to climb to 87,164 in 1978 and reached its peak at 201,189 in 1979. The 12-month period between mid-1978 and July 1979 also witnessed Hanoi’s well-planned but poorly-executed scheme to export ethnic Chinese and prosperous Vietnamese to neighboring states.  Hanoi’s ‘freedom for sale’ scheme was ‘officially’ suspended in July 1979 (just before the first international conference on Indochinese refugees in Geneva) when the outside world voiced strong objections. Thereafter, the boat people’s escapes did not cease but continued at a steady pace despite the high risks of death at sea and of rape and pillage by barbarous pirates.

By the end of the millenium, between 1.6 and 2 million people had tried to flee Socialist Vietnam, and approximately three-quarters of a million boat people or 1% of the Vietnamese population were resettled in countries of final asylum.[3] Let us never forget the conservative estimate that at least 10% to 20% or about 80,000-200,000 of the escaping refugees vanished at sea without a trace.[4]

The Initial Challenges

Long before even setting foot on a boat and sailing off to either freedom or death, Vietnamese asylum-seekers had to establish discreet contacts to organize their flight. Any journey’s organizer had to secretly buy a fishing boat, repaired it, acquired new engines and fishing permits as well as navigational tools such as marine compasses on the black market. Recruiting the professional service of a former South Vietnamese Navy captain for the journey proved challenging because many of them were being detained in re-education prisons, and only a few were able to elude Hanoi’s apprehension. But even if all these criteria were met, the organizer still had to secure safe boarding bases for the escapees. The farther from the coast the Asylees were, the more difficult for them to arrange their departing grounds; to circumvent this problem, they either paid large bribes to coastguard cadres or carefully planed to have small numbers of people picked up at different locations before heading to sea. In the case of Boat no. 27 entering Songkhla Refugee Camp on February 12, 1980, Mr. Nguyễn Tấn Phúc, a former Navy frogman, and his organizing team of two arranged to secretly meet 24 escapees including his family at Phong Mỹ village, Cao Lãnh, on January 25 and then traveled for three days on small canals to Rạch Sõi port from where Mr. Nguyễn used faked documents to pass the coastguard station and sailed to sea.  After many brutal attacks by Thai pirates who destroyed the boat’s engines and raped its female passengers, the 27 desperate Asylees were rescued by an international ship while their craft was floating aimlessly somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand.

In light of the difficulties associated with organizing escapes, it is easy to see why many Asylees were arrested and imprisoned when their escape plan was exposed by Hanoi’s security cadres. Others lost all their life savings to unscrupulous thugs and communist officials, who quickly took the gold and hard currencies paid by the asylum-seekers for safe boarding bases and then arrested them for ‘reactionary activities.’ In May 1987, the joint French-German Ile de Lumière II - Cap Anamur III dispatched by Komitee Cap Anamur and Médecins du Monde intercepted an attack by a Vietnamese patrol vessel, which was shooting at a fleeing refugee boat. One Asylee was killed by the firing; the remaining 170 people were rescued by the Ile de Lumière II - Cap Anamur III and subsequently taken to Palawan Refugee Camp in the Philippines.

In another case, Mr. Phan Văn Thiệu’s boat leaving Cà Mau port in darkness on April 17, 1979 and was fired upon three times by Hanoi’s security cadres; fortunately, no one was injured.  The refugees managed to reach Kora Bahru in Malaysia on April 22, 1979 after surviving several attacks by Thai pirates. In one tragic incident in 1983, almost all escapees on a boat were murdered by the security force of Ward 14 in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 5. On May 7, the unfortunate victims boarded a small craft near the well-known Y bridge after paying protection grafts to the Ward 13 security office. Unknown to them, the bribes were not shared, and thus their boat was fired at indiscriminately by the Ward 14 cadres as soon as it left Ward 13 territory. After the fatal shooting, more than 100 people including many women and young children died. This mass murder was not an isolated incident.  There were many reports of systematic killings of Vietnamese escapees by Hanoi’s cadres in Cát Lái, Cà Mau, Cần Thơ, Bà Rịa, Bến Tre, Long Xuyên, etc.  In Cát Lái alone, on July 22, 1978, nearly 400 lives on the Thành Xương were exterminated by the communist security force; one survivor, Mr. Vương Vũ Văn currently living in New Jersey, estimated that Hanoi got almost U.S. $1 million from the Thành Xương passengers before massacring them.  In another case in June 1979, Hanoi’s forces stationing on one of the Spratly Islands shot and killed 23 refugees on board a boat from Nha Trang; 62 others drowned while trying to swim to safety, and only eight people survived to report this brutal attack.

            Those escapees, who were unable or unwilling to pay for safe routes and subsequently apprehended, would face lengthy prison terms at the pleasure of the local cadres because Hanoi, which aimed at expelling or confining all people with liberal attitudes and beliefs, did not have a uniform policy toward the captured Asylees. Jail sentences for failed escapees ranged from several months to life imprisonment depending on the amount of bribery that their families could come up.

            Radio Hanoi occasionally announced the names of the apprehended Asylees. On October 28, 1981, it reported that Nguyễn Toại Chí was sentenced to life imprisonment while his assistants received jail terms ranging from 18 months to 25 years for trying to flee Socialist Vietnam.  Earlier on September 9, 1981, the court of Long An province sent Võ Văn Lung, Võ Văn Mậu and Châu Tá Nhành to the penitentiary for up to 25 years after their planned escape was uncovered by security cadres, who apparently did not receive a fair share of the bribe. 

The most severe penalty for the detainees was capital punishment. At times, Hanoi would hand down death sentences to captive Asylees in a desperate attempt to conceal its expulsion policy. A clear example is the execution of Mr. Trần Minh Châu on August 6, 1979 after the communist delegation to the first international conference on Indochinese refugees in July 1979 promised to discontinue the CPV's ‘freedom for sale’ project. The less serious sentence for the incarcerated escapees often involved the immediate confiscation of their residence and properties.  As soon as the local public security office suspected that a family had left home to take part in an escape known in Vietnamese as vượt biên, even before the victims were apprehended, their house would be niêm-phong or placed under seizure and confiscated thereafter.

For those escapees who successfully got on board a boat and sailed to the open sea, there was still no guarantee that they would not be forced to return by Hanoi’s patrol ships. In one reported incident, the Mary Kingstown rescued a boat in international waters in May 1988 just minutes before it was about to be apprehended by a Vietnamese security vessel. After 81 refugees boarded the Mary Kingstown, communist cadres on the C.A.ñ.K.V.T.C.ñ.[5] patrol craft immediately jumped over the abandoned boat to gain control and steer it back toward Vietnam. In many cases, the escapees were able to bribe the patrol cadres; but there were also instances where the cadres still arrested them after accepting the grafts. In other incidents, Soviet vessels operating in the South China Sea stopped and apprehended fleeing Vietnamese boats; the detainees would be taken back to Vietnam and subsequently turned over to Hanoi’s security force.