Vietnamese refugees

Press, 12 July 1979, Page 16

Vietnamese refugees

Sir, — The Rev. Brian Turner’s defence of the Vietnamese Government (July 9) seems to be highly hysterical itself in comparison with your editorial (July 6). For a churchman to naively suggest that people “choose to leave in small leaky boats" and that that is all“right as the occupants of those boats are “out of place, in socialist Vietnam” makes one wonder where Christian love figures in the National Council of Churches. His concern that Vietnam might become dependent on Russia also makes me wonder at the role of the N.C.C. As a Christian, I am more concerned about justice to individuals than power politics. — Yours, etc., E. MARTIN, July 9, 1979. Sir, — Your reply to Brian Turner (July 9) was weak. The haphazard actions of a war-racked nation such as Vietnam, still in a fairly primitive state of development, in putting pressure on its Chinese population to emigrate cannot be compared with Nazi Germany’s treatment of Europe’s helpless Jews, using all the technological efficiency of a modern Western industrial nation to exterminate millions of civilians by scientifically selected gas, scientifically constructed gas chambers and ovens, methodical sorting of the victims into two categories — the children, the sick and the old marked for instant execution in one; in the other, those fit enough to warrant being kept alive temporarily as slave labour. Scientific medical experiments on selected prisoners (such as identical twins) were made in gi-

gantic state-controlled operation — and all this before computers. Let’s keep our perspective right — or is this comparison a way of salving our Western consciences? — Yours, etc., V. F. WILKINSON. July 9, 1979.

Sir, — As La Rochefoucauld truly said, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. One cannot recall a more unseemly exhibition of unctuous hypocrisy than the condemnation of Vietnam by the members of the A.N.Z.U.S. alliance (“The Press,” July 6), the nations who in the 60s and 70s waged war against Vietnam in a vain attempt to thwart the establishment of socialism there. They gave false hope to thousands of middle-class Vietnamese of a future South Vietnam under United States aegis, whose prototype is South Korea’s fascist dictatorship. France, the United States and China , bear full responsibility for the Vietnam refugees. China, because it incited Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese to resist Vietnam’s socialisation, to realise which the Vietnamese people defeated three imperialist attempts to conquer them. France, the United States, its A.N.Z.U.S. allies and China, whose actions created Vietnam’s refugee problem should open their countries to these people without self-congratu-lation on their virtue. — Yours, etc., M. CREEL.

July 7, 1979.