In December 1978, the rusty Huey Fong commissioned by
the Vietnamese  communist  regime  and piloted by international 
Chinese  criminals  showed  up  in Hong  Kong  with  3,318  refugees.
(Hong Kong Government Information Services)

        The Vietnamese communist government’s active role in trafficking its own ‘unwanted’ citizens began to jeopardize the entire boat people protection and resettlement program commencing with various official protests and then Malaysia’s proposed ‘shoot on sight’ legislation against all arriving refugees on June 16, 1979.[1] During the initial months of the exodus, Malaysia started out with a more humane policy by providing temporary shelters for the boat people. Local villagers also helped the arriving refugees with foods and accommodation. Before Hanoi’s trade in human misery in mid-1978, Kuala Lumpur rarely turned untrustworthy refugee boats away; and those seaworthy crafts, which were occasionally required to depart, received supply of food, fuel and fresh water. In March 1978, Home Affairs Minister Tan Sri Ghazali told Parliament that his government continued to admit the boat people on humanitarian and compassionate grounds although it did not consider them ‘refugees.’ A refugee was anyone who, in accordance with his definition, fled from an ongoing war; and Socialist Vietnam was no longer a theatre of war.  Thanks to Malaysia's liberal policy that allowed refugee crafts to disembark, many boat people were granted temporary asylum pending eventual resettlement.

In late 1978, however, Kuala Lumpur changed its position due to the fear of a Hanoi-sponsored Chinese invasion. The arrival of the Hai Hong’s huge human cargo of Chinese ship people in Malaysian territories in November 1978 caused grave concerns in various political circles; and criticisms of the government’s humanitarian policy grew, especially from the opposition party Partai Islam. In Parliament, the politicians’ express concern was focused on the arrival of Chinese ship people on huge vessels organized by Hanoi and its overseas racketeers, instead of the sporadic arrival of Vietnamese refugees on small boats. 

       The Malaysian authorities eventually decided to prevent all fragile boats to reach shore and, at times, ordered the navy to pull ‘seaworthy’ crafts outward to international waters. The embargo led many asylum-seekers to engage in the very dangerous tactic of scuttling their own boats a few hundred feet from shore in order to sink the crafts and force everyone to swim to the nearby beach.  This desperate act caused the drowning of numerous weak women, young children and men, who did not know how to swim or had become too exhausted to stay afloat. Initially, those beach people who successfully sneaked in pass the patrol vessels and camped on the beach after sabotaging their crafts were allowed temporary asylum. Later on, however, Kuala Lumpur threatened that it would no longer shelter the boat people and would take necessary measures to forcibly evict the existing 76,000 Asylees. On January 15, 1979, Prime Minister Hussein Onn declared that Malaysia effectively closed its doors to all arriving refugees. In the subsequent month, he stated: ‘We have already given notice to the United Nations and other countries on this as we do not have any more space on our island camps… so we will chase them away if they try to land.’[2] Between February and June 1979, more than 5,000 Asylees or 50% of the so-called beach people held at gunpoint were put on vessels and towed out.

A task force, the VII (Vietnamese Illegal Immigrants), was incepted to find ways to prevent the boat people’s arrivals and to resettle those already in refugee camps. Malaysian fishermen were advised to paint a large encircled P on their vessels’ roof to distinguish their crafts from incoming refugee boats. On March 31, 1979, Malaysian patrol ship Rrenchong towed a refugee boat, the MH-3012, out to international waters at high speed and caused it to roll over. More than 115 people died as a result of this inhumane conduct. A UNHCR report later found: ‘The Vietnamese boat (the MH-3012) was in very bad condition, water pump was broken and engine could not be started.  No water was available…  a baby was born on board in the meantime… All the facts were known to the (Malaysian) naval officers who had been on board.’ 

In a period of three months from March to May 1979, Kuala Lumpur reportedly expelled by force more than 26,000 arriving refugees on 186 boats.[3] In June 1979, Home Minister Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie stated that approximately 40,000 refugees on 267 boats were towed out of Malaysian waters, and Kuala Lumpur had established 100 observation stations and committed more vessels as well as 2,000 soldiers to its campaign to push back the refugee tide.  Fortunately, most ejected boats were allowed to disembark in Indonesia; otherwise, the world would likely witness a new holocaust at sea.

            The local Malays did their part in the eviction of Vietnamese Asylees; for instance, in Kuala Trengganu on November 22, 1978, furious villagers pushed a refugee craft outward and caused it to capsize and the eventual drowning of nearly 200 boat people. Malaysia was not alone in stopping and expelling all arriving Asylees. Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore also maintained naval blockades to prevent the arrivals of Chinese ship people and, in the process, also Vietnamese boat people.

Overladen refugee boats tossed by strong waves
off the Malaysian coast.  (UNHCR: K. Gaugler)

            The anti-Chinese sentiment was more obvious in Indonesia. Between 1975 and 1978, Jakarta’s policy toward Vietnamese refugees was relatively humane. The boat people were offered temporary shelter pending overseas - but not local - resettlement.  In response to Hanoi’s export of ethnic Chinese in exchange for gold, this compassionate position was reversed quickly because Jakarta was extremely sensitive with the ethnic Chinese equation. Indonesian history included a Beijing-encouraged communist coup in 1965 that eventually led to the mass killings of tens of thousands of local Chinese. In 1978, Beijing’s provocative objection to Hanoi’s treatment of ethnic Chinese caused even more concerns for Jakarta, which saw Beijing’s policy as a time bomb for extraterritorial intervention. 

            The Indonesian position in June 1979 was therefore categorically clear; Defence Minister Mohammed Jusuf declared: ‘We are not going to allow any more refugee to land in our country.’ Operation Lightning Bolt was implemented to block the boat people from entering Indonesian waters. Despite the new hard-line policy, however, Jakarta still permitted the disembarkation of refugee boats that were forcibly expelled by neighboring states. Thanks to this compassionate and pragmatic approach, an 'Asian holocaust' at sea was effectively avoided.

            In Thailand, Bangkok initially decided not to accept any refugee in 1975. Political Asylees from Cambodia and Vietnam would be given minimal assistance and then deported. The Operations Centre for Displaced Persons was created in the Ministry of the Interior to monitor the refugee developments in order to formulate strategies aimed at preventing the Asylees' arrival.

            In March 1978, Prime Minister Kriangsak pronounced a new policy that would admit all Indochinese Asylees on humanitarian grounds. But just a few months later, as Hanoi’s ‘freedom for sale’ scheme began to surface, the new policy was quickly suspended. Bangkok started threatening to close its refugee camps and expel all boat people from its soil. 

            To add more fuel to the fire that was burning off compassion for Vietnamese refugees, Deputy Secretary General of the National Security Council Prasong Soonsiri incited fears by suggesting, without a shred of evidence, that at least 10% of the boat people were Hanoi’s spies.[4] In November 1978, Prime Minister Kriangsak confirmed his government’s hard-line policy with a reporter of the Bangkok Post: ‘If any boat needs repairs this will be permitted, but it will have to leave with the refugees as soon as repairs are completed,’ and no Asylees would be allowed to land.[5] The navy was ordered to conduct joint operations with its Malaysian counterpart to keep Hanoi's human cargoes and Vietnamese refugee boats at bay.

            Philippines also changed its past humanitarian policy and adopted a tough position against the arriving Asylees, who would be granted entry only with guaranteed resettlement places.  Foreign Minister Carlos Romulo stated categorically: ‘We don’t want anymore refugees. The situation is getting worse every time.’[6] In April 1979, Manila effectively eliminated its compassionate policy.

            Singapore previously granted residency to 200 Asylees from Vietnam in 1975 but subsequently undertook a firm anti-refugee position once faced with the boat people exodus. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew coldly expressed: ‘You’ve got to grow callouses on your heart or you just bleed to death.’ Therefore, no refugee was allowed to enter Singapore unless he (she) was rescued by a foreign ship whose country guaranteed his (her) quick resettlement and the UNHCR would agree to pay his (her) living expenses. In early October 1979, Singapore prescribed new conditions requiring that the number of boat people in Singapore at any one time could not exceed 1,000 and the refugees had to be resettled within 90 days, failure of which would subject the guaranteeing countries to a system of penalties.[7] This policy drew protests from the UNHCR and severe criticisms from other governments. 

            International law has long recognized the duty to help victims in distress at sea,[8] and this duty is closely related to the non-refoulement principle prescribed by the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees: 

‘No Contracting State shall expel or return (refouler) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.’  (Art. 33)

            Singapore’s anti-refugee policy therefore penalized ship captains, who had to weight between the time-honored code of chivalry at sea (to assist boaters in distress) and the huge cost of such heroic acts. Unfortunately, the huge cost factor often caused marine masters to ignore calls for help from the refugees at sea; according to reliable shipping sources in Singapore in mid-1979, certain owners reportedly instructed their captains to avoid assisting desperate Asylees in danger at sea.[9] Singaporean Navy also ruthlessly blocked all refugee crafts from reaching its shore. In February 1979, the interception of the Vietnamese boat SB-001 by two Singaporean patrol vessels caused the death of two refugees; eventually, the SB-001 was forced to leave for Malaysia.

            On February 17, 1979, Singapore’s Foreign Minister Sinnathamby Rajaratnam articulated his country’s position on the boat people tragedy in a speech as follows:

‘The flow of boat people poses the non-communist world, including the ASEAN countries, with a moral dilemma. We could respond on humanitarian and moral grounds by accepting and resettling these desperate people. But by doing so we would not only be encouraging those responsible to force even more refugees to flee but also unwittingly demonstrate that a policy of inhumanity does pay dividends. Not only that, but those countries which give way to their humanitarian instincts would saddle themselves with unmanageable political, social and economic problems that the sudden absorption of hundreds of thousands of alien peoples must inevitably bring in its wake.’

 

            Due to Hanoi’s collaboration with international racketeers to ‘traffic in human misery,’ the boat people were treated with unfounded animosity. Neighboring states that previously offered temporary shelters began to treat Vietnamese asylum-seekers with indifference and, at times, deadly hostility.  The brutalities faced by the boat people at sea and on land led the UNHCR - under severe pressures from the U.S. and ASEAN nations at the time - to call for the ‘Consultative Meeting with Interested Governments on Refugees and Displaced Persons in Southeast Asia’ on December 11 and 12, 1978. Representatives from 38 nations attended this ‘Consultative Meeting’ in Geneva but failed to find a durable solution to the refugee crisis.

            The UNHCR Deputy High Commissioner Dale DeHaan concluded: 'there can be no humane or durable solutions unless governments grant at least temporary asylum in accordance with internationally accepted humanitarian principles..  (and) temporary asylum depended on commitments for resettlement in third countries and the avoidance of residual problems in the area.'[10] Despite this insight, no substantial advancement was made to resolve the Indochinese refugee crisis. While Hanoi's representative Võ Văn Sung continued to deny the Vietnamese Communist Party's role in the trafficking of human cargoes, other countries offered $12 million to the UNHCR humanitarian operations and only 5,000 additional resettlement places or 'a drop in the ocean' according to the Malaysian delegation.

            Thereafter, as the boat people tragedy deteriorated further with the implementation of hard-line policies by various Southeast Asian states, the United Nations called the first international conference on Indochinese refugees in July 1979 in an attempt to resolve this growing humanitarian crisis. U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim urged all nations, except Laos and Cambodia,[11] to attend the 2-day ministerial meeting in Geneva by expressing in his invitation that: ‘Although there are very many serious refugee problems in other parts of the world, the alarming proportions of the crisis in Southeast Asia require immediate and special attention.’