We’ve been reading about the boatpeople for nearly a year and a half now, those Vietnamese and Cambodians who would rather risk the South China Sea in small fishing craft than stay where they are. You often see their pictures on page four or five of the New York Times: desperate, emaciated people crowded together. For awhile I wondered why they always seemed to be looking up into the camera, thin arms reaching up, until the obvious answer struck me: the photographer happened to be there when they were picked up at sea, and naturally he was looking down at them as they were helped up from their open boats. I’d been looking at those pictures for 18 months before another question slowly nagged its way to the surface of my mind. Can you guess what it is?
The general problem is simple enough: they’re making omelets in Southeast Asia, and those who would rather escape than be broken have no place to go. In the beginning there were only a few hundred a month, then a thousand or more, now as many as 4,500 a month, straining the refugee services of the United Nations, cramming the camps in Thailand, Maylasia, Singapore, Japan and the other countries of Southeast Asia. At present there are at least 100,000, according to the Times stories of Henry Kamm, who won an exceptionally well-deserved Pulitzer Prize this spring for his persistence in reporting their plight.
Nobody wants the refugees, and while the United States has been tentatively arranging to take in 5,000 now, 8,000 later on, 10,000 more down the road, we have been moving slowly from apparent fear we might have to accept them all in the end. The other unwilling hosts have been putting pressure on us by tightening their borders, sometimes even pushing boatloads of refugees back out to sea. The freighters which cross their paths often ignore their distress signats for fear they will never get rid of the refugees once they’re aboard. Filipino and Japanese captains aren’t happy about this brutal necessity, violating the oldest of the laws of seafaring, but shipowners have left them no choice.
The inevitable result is that a lot of the boatpeople don’t make it. They starve, die of exposure, capsize and drown. There’s no way of knowing how many reach safe harbor, but the survivors’ stories have led observers to guess that maybe half of the total simply disappear. That’s 4,500 a month, men, women and children of all ages. Odds are, a lot of boatpeople are scanning the horizon right now, or have given up, after watching so many freighters calmly steam by, while the crewmen lean over the rail until the captain shoos them back to work. It seems a hard fate for people who have suffered so much, and then risked everything for a life where they won’t have to go into the omelet. When you think of them out there, you can’t help wishing somebody would go out and pick them up.
Think back: in all those stories of harrowing voyages and last-minute rescues, do you remember a single boatload of refugees being picked up by the United States Navy? I can’t remember one. It seems strange, doesn’t it? The United States is still the world’s greatest naval power. At any given moment we have literally hundreds of ships steaming about in the Pacific on training maneuvers of one kind or another. Freighters of every registry from Panama to Liberia have either picked up boatpeople, or passed them by, but the U.S. Navy has sighted nary a one. This singular fact can have only one explanation: the Navy has been explicitly ordered to steer well away, and for 18 months the White House, the Pentagon and the Navy have probably been wondering when some journalist was going to start asking questions.
It’s not hard to figure out what must have happened here. The Carter Administration is finding it difficult to get congressional authorization for large numbers of additional refugees, and the boatpeople are only a part of the whole. Thousands of others have crossed into Thailand from Cambodia and Laos. The Thais have been pressured into accepting them by promises from the United States and elsewhere that homes would eventually be found for them. If the U.S. Navy began picking up four or five thousand boatpeople a month the rest would be dumped permanently in Thailand, which would doubtless close its borders unless the U.S. went further and promised to take them as well. On top of that, Cambodia and Vietnam could be expected to make an international fuss if the U.S. Navy were cruising their waters on the lookout for refugees, and a lot of Americans would protest, not just those alarmed by an influx of nonwhites into the United States, but organized labor arguing it’s tough enough for citizens to find jobs as it is, and perhaps people on the left claiming that anyone trying to escape the omelet must be a rightist reactionary and former war profiteer. There’s no question the Navy could pick up the best part of the boatpeople, if it put its heart into the effort, but there’s also very little doubt that such a program would precipitate a bruising political struggle. The only real question in this matter is whether counsels of prudence ought to take precedence over compassion.
The problem is not a small one. If word ever got back to Vietnam that the U.S. Navy would pick up refugees at sea there would probably be a run for the boats. In the end a policy of rescue and open admission might mean the acceptance of three or four hundred thousand Indochinese refugees, in addition to the estimated 175,000 already in the United States, most of whom escaped in 1975 when the American-backed governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam finally collapsed. That’s a lot of people, but not more than the half million Cubans admitted as refugees since 1959, and it would be hard to argue that the United States owes less to the Indochinese than it did to the Cubans.
Moral Responsibility
Few debts have been so well-documented. The United States supported the reassertion of French sovereignty over Indochina in 1945, at a time when Ho Chi Minh was in almost complete control of the country. The United States insisted on a “temporary” division of the country when the French negotiated their departure at Geneva in 1954, and Saigon’s governments were heavily—in the end completely—dependent on American support during the following 21 years. The Communists had no inalienable right to rule Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, but when we supported their opponents for so long, propping them up after they would have collapsed on their own, we acquired a certain moral responsibility for their fate, and an obligation to do for the losers what we might.
But that is general and abstract. The refugees are particular people, and a great many of them literally worked for the Americans, or are wives, children and parents of those who did. Frank Snepp’s book about the confused evacuation in April, 1975, Decent Interval, documents in detail the inadequacy of American efforts to save those who had trusted us. Just before the last American helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy, American military officers had promised thousands of Vietnamese in the Embassy compound they would not be forgotten. They were still standing in patient queues, luggage in their hands, when the Marines ran for the Embassy, bolted the doors behind them, and raced up the stairs for the final flight out of the country.
This is not an argument that the wrong side won the war, only that moral obligations incurred during the war did not end with the fighting. Hanoi, in fact, seems more sensitive to this point than we. The collapse of South Vietnam’s economy and the imposition of North Vietnamese control inevitably meant hardship, and while thousands of military officers and government officials are still in “reeducation” camps three years after the end of the war, separated from their families and sometimes press-ganged into dangerous work like mine-cleating, the aftermath has been far gentler than the bloodbath predicted by Ford and Kissinger. Other revolutions have been consolidated more cruelly, most notably in Cambodia.
But the process has been harsh enough in Vietnam all the same, and those who want to leave, and risk their lives to do so, deserve something better from us than the observation that life is hard. China has negotiated for the orderly departure of thousands of Chinese who used to be the backbone of South Vietnamese commercial life, while we have largely abandoned those who still choose us to the luck of the open sea. There is no good reason why the Carter administration cannot change its approach even at this late date. An airlift was arranged with Castro to handle the departure of Cuban refugees, and Carter might propose the same to Hanoi. Hanoi might not like it, but they would probably like it better, in the end, than having the U.S. Navy picking up refugees with all the publicity which would inevitably follow. The only motive lacking for such a shift in policy seems to be the absence of broad public feeling.
Oddly enough, it is the daily press which seems to be paying most attention to this situation. The magazines of opinion all seem to be thinking of other things. The New York Times and the Washington Post, to a lesser extent, probably because it does not have so many fulltime correspondents in the Far East, have regularly published stories on the subject. Their only failure has been a tendency to focus on the plight of the refugees themselves, while ignoring the reasons at home for Washington’s sluggish response. Some determined questions about the American failure to do anything whatever for the refugees in the worst situation—those actually at sea in flimsy boats, ignored by freighters unhappy enough to spot them—might stir the administration to action. I suspect the story would balloon quickly. There must be government officials and Navy officers restive with the orders to steer clear of the problem, and once reporters nosed them out, and it became clear how much we could do, inactivity would be hard to explain away. It’s a pretty cold-blooded policy, when you think of it.
But so far it’s been the old story where America and Vietnam are concerned. When the cause was all but hopeless, and Vietnam should have been left to itself, we were all meddlesome eagerness to stave off the near-inevitable. Money and blood were not too much to wager on a long shot whose odds we were too headlong even to calculate. And now, when a small effort might have a large result, we are tired, pre-occupied and indifferent. We know they’re out there. I suppose it’s a sign of our spiritual exhaustion that we haven’t even thought to ask why we can’t be bothered to pick them up.
