Vietnam refugees still seek better life

Press, 26 August 1986, Page 27

Vietnam refugees still seek better life

By

KEITH STAFFORD

NZPA-Reuter Singapore

Nearly one-third of the thousands of refugees who flee Vietnam each year are disappearing at sea as the world becomes increasingly indifferent to their plight, humanitarian groups say. Eleven years after the end of the Vietnam war refugees are still leaving the country in search of a better life.

But often their boats sink, their women and children are abducted by pirates, or they are simply ignored by tankers and container ships in one of the world’s major shipping lanes. Armed with a few valuable possessions, the refugees cram their families into leaking wooden boats and try to steer through tropical storms and past pirates waiting to rape and rob them a hundred or so miles out from the Mekong Delta. They bribe officials to turn a blind eye as they leave Vietnam at night from shallow creeks and hope to meet passing ships before they are attacked.

“It is a human flow that has not changed in years, although many people are tending to forget,” said Rupert Neudeck, an official of a West German group which pays for the rescue ship Cap Anamur II to ply the Vietnamese coast looking for refugees. The United Nations, w.hich looks after i'^ u g ees

landing on the coasts of Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong, says just over 12,000 people fled Vietnam safely in the first six months of this year. Last year it was 22,250.

Mr Neudeck estimates that for every 10 refugees who manage to escape, four more disappear at sea.

But he thought that anti-pirate patrols working out of Thailand were scoring successes because the Cap Anamur II had seen fewer pirates on its rescue missions this year. According to figures compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.), the internationally funded patrols have reduced the number of attacks on boats and abductions of girls. The figures show pirates attacked about half the boats which reached Thailand in the first half of this year compared with nearly 60 per cent last year and at least 80 per cent in the early 1980 s. "The word is out that pirate attacks have to stop,” one Western diplomat said.

Recently more than 70 men, women and children sat helplessly aboard a boat for five days in the South China Sea and watched 38 commercial ships pass by until the Cap Anamur II appeared. “One Japanese tanker was only about 200 m away from Mr

Neudeck said. “The solution is not for a single ship like ours to be sailing around the South China Sea for a few months but for commercial ships going in big numbers from Singapore to Bangkok or Hong Kong to save people.” Hussein Kahn, a U.N.H.C.R. official in Singapore, told Reuters: “We can only assume they have unjustified worries about the consequences if they do rescue refugees in distress.”

The United Nations has started covering the cost of food and other expenses for ships who change course to take the refugees to ports in the region.

Mr Hussein said more ships had rescued refugees since the compensation scheme started last year.

“But we are trying to encourage more.” There is now a lull in the exodus because monsoons churning along the Vietnamese coast make sea escapes even more dangerous than normal. But diplomats and United Nations officials think the flow will start again in October and November when the weather improves. One Western diplomat in Singapore said he heard earlier this year that Vietnamese authorities planned to force some five million people into the south of the country from the north and believed this could trigger

another wave of escapes. Even if those people are not moved, many Vietnamese will still want to escape religious persecution, a seriously ailing economy and discrimination against people associated with the pre-Com-munist regime, diplomats said.

British members of Parliament who visited Vietnam earlier this year told reporters they found young people impatient with the Vietnamese authorities and resentful of being forced into the Army to fight in neighbouring Kampuchea.*. “You have a picture there of a place that is at a very low ebb,” one M.P. said.

About 35,000 refugees now wait in camps all over South-East Asia for a chance to acquire visas for places like Canada, the United States and Europe. Although the camp population has fallen from 140,500 at the end of 1979 it has hardly changed from last year, indicating that fewer refugees are moving on to a new life. U.N.H.C.R. officials say some countries outside the region are suffering from “compassion fatigue,” forgetting about the refugees and providing fewer visas than they did in the past. “The problem is more manageable than it was five or six years ago but it is dangerous to think it has been solved,” Mr Hussein said. <5.