THE VIETNAMESE REFUGEES: INTERVIEW WITH AN EXPERT
Levi, Jeffrey
Because it takes several weeks to "make up" and print Dissent, we had to arrange the interview below for early August, perhaps two months before you will be able to read it. We hope of course that...
...STERNBERG: The Vietnamese decision to authorize Waldheim to inform the Geneva conference that "for a reasonable period of time it will make every effort to stop illegal departures" was undoubtedly brought about by international pressures and the need for Hanoi and the Kremlin to mitigate the opprobrium the refugee problem has generated...
...We hope of course that this interview will become "dated" through an improvement of the refugee situation...
...My Lai, tiger cages, defoliation—terrible (continued on p. 467) THE VIETNAMESE REFUGEES (continued from p. 370) as they were—cannot be invoked to exculpate the rulers of Hanoi...
...And if drowning is a mass fate imposed on people trying to flee, one can speak of a "liquid holocaust...
...Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia—how do you distinguish among these countries...
...participation in the Vietnam war ended in part because the war was brought into American living rooms on the evening news...
...Any unusual obtuseness apart, this is factually incorrect...
...If holocaust stands for genocide, the word is applicable...
...And Vietnam's tight control of Laos and Cambodia also feeds the desire to escape...
...It's been said that U.S...
...STERNBERG: What is needed most at this stage is a huge holding area, if necessary on U.S...
...STERNBERG: Those who favored the Vietcong during the American war in Indochina were fond of picturing Uncle Ho as a benign father figure...
...and other Western democratic nations to help solve the problem...
...The Vietnamese have denounced Pol Pot's genocide and implicated the Chinese...
...The current rate of refugees is now 40,000 a month, though the number of boat people is down...
...And is there the domestic political will to do it...
...territory, where refugees can be taken quickly...
...Most public attention has gone to the boat people—with thousands not surviving their escape...
...STERNBERG: Elsewhere, I have characterized the [Carter] Administration's reaction to the refugee flood from Vietnam as pusillanimous...
...Events have since moved Washington to a more decisive position...
...Ens...
...The international organizations, including the UNHCR, do recognize the boat people as refugees...
...Those who try to prettify the story by describing the refugees as people who seek to leave for economic reasons, or who cannot stand the idea of leaving the cities where there is no productive employment and of going to the new economic zones to learn farming, should be reminded that the very concept of the economic refugee was first applied to Germany's Jews...
...Promises have been made in Geneva, but unless they are kept without interminable negotiations and delays of one sort or another, the situation in Southeast Asia will not markedly improve...
...Bonn must have decided to pass up this opportunity to draw the parallel that German history should have imposed on it...
...While billions were spent each year on waging war in Vietnam, it is now difficult to get approval for measures that would cost millions many millions to be sure—but still only a fraction of what the United States spent during one year of war...
...QUESTION: Hasn't Amnesty International adopted a similar position...
...Those who opposed the war in Vietnam without siding with Hanoi have no reason and do not now try to excuse what is happening in Vietnam...
...QUESTION: What common factors are there in the overall Indochina refugee problem...
...Shortly before the recent crisis, Amnesty International's Executive Committee drew up guidelines in which it maintained that the boat people were not really refugees because they did not individually suffer persecution: they may be unhappy with the change in social and economic circumstances in Vietnam, but that does not make them refugees by the standards of international agencies...
...The Hmong, the hill tribe of Laos, are fleeing because their society has been obliterated...
...In an interview, Charles Sternberg, executive director of the International Rescue Committee, estimated that there are close to I million refugees, if those who went to China are included...
...Common to all the Indochinese refugees is their flight from conditions they experience as being unbearable...
...we fear it will not...
...What's involved, I believe, is deep-seated hatred of the Chinese, as there is deep-seated hatred of the Vietnamese in Cambodia, brought to the surface by the recent war with China...
...Germany announced in Geneva that it will take 10,000 refugees...
...Is it comparable in any way to the "social engineering" practiced by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia when it was in power...
...It's the Thai authorities who insist on calling them "displaced persons," and the Malaysians who treat them as "illegal immigrants," precisely in order to deny them the protection to which, if called refugees, they are entitled under international covenants...
...If those who care enough keep the issue alive, there may be...
...It is as if the Office of Management and Budget were running the Indochinese refugee operation...
...Japan remains obdurate...
...STERNBERG: The Chinese have called Hanoi's policy genocide and implicated the Russians...
...France has been the only European country with a solid program for the Vietnamese refugees...
...it became an immediate, horrible presence...
...Those who do so are apologists for inhumanity...
...In any case, the information here provided is urgent...
...It is the ChineseCambodian world they wish to defend or the Russian-Vietnamese...
...STERNBERG: Oddly enough, it has...
...We are still trying to forget the Vietnam experience, and the plight of the refugees is too grim a reminder...
...Those leaving by land face frightening hazards as well...
...QUESTION: One magazine has referred to this tragedy as a "liquid holocaust"—can this be compared to what happened in Germany...
...QUESTION: At the U.N...
...They were called Wirt schaft sem igran ten...
...His successors turned out to be as unconcerned about human life as any tyrannical government has ever been...
...A good percentage of the Chinese refugees who managed to get out came from North Vietnam...
...The Cambodians are driven by their experience in Pol Pot's charnel house...
...Is there a domestic will to do it...
...As for the Pol Pot regime, it was so monstrous that, with one or two exceptions, no comparison comes to mind...
...467...
...Polls show the American people opposing the minimal step of doubling the U.S...
...STERNBERG: The evidence of an overt anti-Chinese policy in Vietnam is inescapable...
...Still, every step in the direction of massive help has been impeded by budgetary considerations...
...QUESTION: Is the ousting of the "ethnic" Chinese from Vietnam a political decision by the Vietnamese Communists to "liquidate" an element— middle-class professionals and the business community—considered socially undesirable and unassimilable in the type of society the Vietnamese are trying to construct...
...Don't let them drown" has proved to be a powerful plea —especially when addressed to a White House that has elevated the concern for human rights to a level of official policy...
...STERNBERG: Common to all three Indochinese countries is a pervasive system of oppression, economic ruin, and widespread starvation...
...But France, too, in announcing that it would take another 5,000 refugees, has hedged on its promise...
...Lost sight of in this development is that what is being hailed as a success is tantamount to an expectation that the Vietnamese hereafter will guard their ports more rigorously and arrest would-be refugees before they can get to sea...
...It is, however, not related to Hanoi's desire to get rid of middle-class professionals or the business community...
...The alternative in Vietnam is the removal to "new economic zones," or "reeducation camps," a contemporary version of the Gulag Archipelago...
...Yet it, too, has had its defenders in the United States...
...And once they have successfully escaped, the refugees have hardly been welcomed, either by the countries of first asylum or any other potential havens...
...They never were professionals or businessmen or, if they were, 369 stopped being that long ago...
...This creates problems for those who are wont to speak of the development model of the "socialist world...
...What do you think brought this about...
...QUESTION: What is your evaluation of the efforts made by the U.S...
...conference in Geneva, Secretary-General Waldheim announced that Hanoi had agreed to stop the flow of refugees for a time...
...Sternberg says, "no exodus has ever had this accumulation of horror...
...QUESTION: What is your response to those on the American left who say we have no moral or other right to criticize the Vietnamese for their actions because of what we, the U.S., did in Vietnam during the war...
...Yet, despite regular and shocking reports on the plight of the Indochina refugees, there is still little public outcry in the United States...
...QUESTION: What should these countries, especially the U.S., be doing...
...At the end of July, according to Sternberg, there were 385,000 persons in refugee camps-220,000 boat people, and 165,000 who had escaped on land...
...The Scandinavians, Austria, Switzerland—the rest are engaged in face-saving tokenism, I'm afraid...
...England has also offered to take 10,000, but that will not decongest Hong Kong, which, after all, is still British territory...
...quota of refugees admitted each month...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
