On April 29, 1975, as North Vietnamese Communist troops approached the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, the United States ordered the immediate evacuation of American personnel and several thousand South Vietnamese military and diplomatic officials. TV news cameras broadcast poignant footage of the chaotic airlift, including crowds of desperate South Vietnamese citizens swarming the gates of the US Embassy in Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the conquering Communists .
The rapid fall of Saigon in 1975 marked the end of America’s failed military intervention in Southeast Asia, but it only marked the beginning of what would become one of the world’s most important refugee crises. largest and longest in history.
Over the next two decades, from 1975 to 1995, more than three million people fled Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Countless thousands of people have died at sea, victims of pirates or overcrowded makeshift boats. The lucky ones made it to refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia or the Philippines, and more than 2.5 million refugees were eventually resettled around the world, including more than one million in the United States.
Those who remained there were subjected to torture and “re-education”
South Vietnamese citizens try to climb the walls of the American embassy in an attempt to flee Saigon and advance the North Vietnamese troops. The next day, April 30, 1975, Saigon fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese.
Nik Wheeler / Corbis / Getty Images
In the months following the fall of Saigon, US President Gerald Ford and Congress authorized the evacuation and resettlement to the United States of approximately 140,000 refugees from South Vietnam and Cambodia. But there were several hundred thousand more, including former members of the South Vietnamese army and their families, who were tortured and punished by the ruling North Vietnamese.
“At the end of the war, it was common to see South Vietnamese soldiers burning their uniforms, making sure they had no affiliation with the military,” said Phuong Tran Nguyen, professor of history at the California State University, Monterey Bay, and author. of Becoming an American Refugee: The Policy of Rescue in Little Saigon.
South Vietnamese intellectuals and other potential enemies of the revolution were rounded up and sent to “re-education” camps, which were in reality forced labor camps designed to break the will of the South Vietnamese and indoctrinate them with communist ideologies. . Many residents of Saigon, the former South Vietnamese capital, were forced to move to the countryside to work on collective farms. In neighboring Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge seized power and began a brutal campaign of imprisonment and mass executions of their enemies.
Hostile reception of “Boat People”
“Boat people” leaving Vietnam via the South China Sea were rescued by Médecins du Monde, Médecins du Monde, in 1982.
Michel Setboum / Getty Images
As the political and economic situation deteriorated in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the steady stream of refugees fleeing the region became a torrent. Desperate families packed their belongings in one suitcase and fled their homes “by any means available,” says Long Bui, professor of international studies at the University of California at Irvine and author of Returns from war: South Vietnam and the price of refugee memory.
“Some of them made their way through the forest through Laos and Thailand, but most fled by ocean to places like Singapore and Hong Kong,” Bui explains. “They were often attacked by Malaysian and Thai pirates who raped the women and stole the gold or silver they owned. That’s why it was so painful.
These “boat people”, as the refugees have become known, have not been welcomed or even recognized as refugees by most countries in the region. None of the Southeast Asian countries had signed the UN Refugee Convention, for example, and some were openly hostile to the tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians who threatened to overwhelm their limited resources. In 1979, as more than 50,000 refugees arrived by boat each month, countries like Malaysia and Singapore began to physically push boats full of refugees back to sea.
“It is estimated that between 25,000 and 50,000 boat people perished at sea,” Nguyen explains. “They had been out for days with almost no food or water, and many women and children could not swim.”
Life in a refugee camp
Some Vietnamese refugees, including this family shown in a Hong Kong refugee camp, returned to Vietnam as part of the voluntary repatriation program organized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Jacques Langevin / Sygma via Getty Images
After a United Nations emergency conference in 1979 to address the refugee crisis, agreements were made to safely house refugees in places like Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and protocols were made. been implemented to expedite the resettlement of refugees in countries such as the United States, Australia, France and Canada. . From July 1979 to July 1982, more than 620,000 refugees were permanently resettled in more than 20 countries, but families often spent years waiting in refugee camps.
The Pulau Bidong refugee camp in Malaysia was typical of the conditions faced by many refugees. Measuring just 1 square kilometer in area, the camp was designed to house 4,500 people, but grew to 40,000 in June 1979, making it the most populous place in the world. Charities and NGOs organized collections of clothes and toys for the refugees, but overcrowded conditions and poor sanitation were constant challenges.
Most refugees could expect to stay in camps for months, if not years, before being resettled. As the day of departure for their new life approached, they were taking English lessons and familiarizing themselves with some of the customs of their new homes. Some of these camps were operational to serve a continuous flow of refugees throughout the 1980s and into the mid-1990s.
“Some camps in the Philippines did not close until the early 2000s,” says Bui, “which means that several generations were born in the refugee camps.
It was not until 2005, for example, that the last of the 250,000 documented “boat people” who arrived in Malaysia from Vietnam were finally resettled some 30 years after the fall of Saigon.
Welcoming refugees to the United States
The Luong family go through immigration at Tan Son Nhat International Airport as they leave Vietnam for the United States.
Peter Charlesworth / LightRocket / Getty Images
Refugees from Southeast Asia have been resettled in the United States in waves. The first wave came in 1975 as part of President Ford’s initial 140,000 evacuees. These refugees, most of whom were educated and spoke some English, received a warm welcome from an American public eager to absolve some of their guilt over the sudden exit of the military from South Vietnam.
The second wave of refugees, which began arriving in the United States in 1978, received a colder reception. These were the “boat people”, generally poorer and less educated, with a large contingent of single men. Due to the trauma they endured fleeing a war-torn homeland and surviving sea crossings and refugee camps, many of these second wave refugees found it more difficult to adjust to life in America. To make matters worse, American public support for refugees had waned in 1978 as the economy slipped into a recession.
“The majority of Americans didn’t want Vietnamese here,” Bui says. “The refugees were a stark reminder of a lost war and were seen as an economic burden. It was not a very welcoming atmosphere.
From 1979 to 1999, an additional 500,000 refugees arrived under the United Nations Orderly Departure Program, which allowed refugees to migrate directly from Vietnam to the United States. Many of these refugees had spent years as political prisoners and in re-education camps, traumatic experiences they tried to put behind them as they began their lives anew in a sometimes hostile country.
“I was born in the United States, but my parents’ refugee experience has always shaped my life,” says Bui. “I went to 16 different schools from kindergarten to grade 12. We never really settled down. We have always carried the economic problems and the poverty that we had from the war. My story is a second generation story, but it stems from the story of the refugees.
The long shadow of war
The world was not prepared for the large-scale refugee crisis that followed the brutal end of the Vietnam War. The crisis has forced the United Nations and member countries like the United States to clearly define who is considered a refugee and to develop policies and procedures to grant asylum to people fleeing violence and oppression. But for historians like Nguyen, it seems the real lessons of Vietnam have never been fully learned.
“The United States does not sufficiently take into account how migration and refugee displacement is part of all of our foreign policy interventions,” says Nguyen. “Any kind of war will lead to this. We must be prepared to deal with the humanitarian crisis that inevitably follows the military component. ”
