Life Among the Refugees
ISAAC, JOHN K.
Life Among the Refugees A PHOTO ESSAY BY JOHN K. ISAAC Last July 14, JOHN K. ISAAC, a 36-year-old native of Madras, India, and an award-winning United Nations photographer, packed his four...
...It's only when you sit down and talk to someone that you discover he was an economist, a professor, a doctor in Saigon...
...A major problem in the camp, he found...
...The UN provides these people the basic rations of rice, tinned vegetables and some fish...
...and 44,000 in Indoi :sia...
...And yet they chose to live this way-just for freedom...
...He brought her some candy and after a few hours, he noticed, she nibbled at it and smiled...
...and (2) the land people, Cambodian and Laotian refugees, in Thailand camps...
...Then there are those refugees who have been prevented from coming onto the island by Malaysian and Insdonesian shore patrols...
...Many manage to come ashore anyway...
...Since early 1975, an estimated 1 million refugees and displaced persons have taken to the open sea in their fragile boats, or crossed by land into the border camps, fleeing both from Vietnam and Cambodia (or Kampuchea...
...Some 250,000 of them have been resettled in a dozen countries...
...He suffered from constant diarrhea...
...They wait until nightfall, and, guided by the lights on land, sneak in, deliberately damaging their boats if necessary...
...While drifting, they were attacked by a Thai "pirate boat" (actually Thai fishermen who prey on refugees at sea...
...The people are being kept miles away," Isaac reports, "unless they have a broken boat and could drown...
...was the garbage...
...There he met a 12-year-old girl who had fled Vietnam by boat along with her father and some 200 others...
...I didn't even take her picture," Isaac says...
...Now she sat isolated and dazed, refusing any human contact...
...Yet with 36,000 refugees crowded in a relatively small space, malnutrition and disease are rile...
...Isaac's pictures here tell part of the story of his two months among the refugees...
...Life Among the Refugees A PHOTO ESSAY BY JOHN K. ISAAC Last July 14, JOHN K. ISAAC, a 36-year-old native of Madras, India, and an award-winning United Nations photographer, packed his four cameras and embarked from New York on the first leg of a dramatic odyssey...
...When her father broke free and tried to rescue her, they killed him and threw his body overboard...
...The United States has so far accepted about 114,000, and in July 1979, offered take an additional 14,000 per moi n. Nevertheless he caseload remains critical: As of eptember 30, there were about 35' 000 Indochinese in the refugee carr s. Of those, 170,000 are in Thailar ; 65,000 in Hong Kong...
...His assignment: photograph and share the conditions of (1) the boat people, mostly Vietnamese, now concentrated on five Indonesian islands plus Pulau Bidong Island in Malaysia...
...He is still hopi i n g .-Gertrs Samuels...
...But another part is told by the photographer himself, who still has nightmares about his harrowing assignment...
...That day, I cried for her, for all of them...
...There's no excuse for these outrages...
...Many of the refugees are highly educated, the intellectuals...
...And their numilthough ber is growing: in the penary od between Jan and June of this year 54,000 eparted from the camps, 155,000 arrived to take their place...
...On approaching Pulau Bidong, Isaac-recalls, "You see nothing but a brown mass of human bodies, squeezed together on the shore," wailing for the boats to come with food, medicines, and, above all, the promise of "durable resettlement" to third countries...
...The Unite 1 Nations High Comefugees missioner for (UNHCR) has contributed around $130 million to support the e people...
...When 1 interviewed John R. Kelly, JNHCR's represen- tative at Turtle Bay, early this year ("Journey of th : Boat People," N L , February 12), b : expressed the hope that the camps and processing cenbecome ters would not "islands of abandoned refu...
...50,000 in Malaysia...
...Approxid mately one thi of that sum has come from the Jnited States, the rescore mainder from : of countries, chiefly Western Europe and Japan, But money h< s never been the ulti mate problem...
...Isaac lived briefly with the Pulau Bidong refugees, sleeping with his clothes on, taking his malaria pills, avoiding the water...
...The suffering he witnessed moved him deeply...
...The pirates tied up all the men, raped the women, stole their possessions, and then repeatedly raped this child...
...I didn't want her to feel I was any part of her terrible story, or to remind her...
...It's piled up by the miles...
...There's no sewage system, and the people don't know what to do with it...
...Others are forced to live on their boats-as in the government dockyard area at Kow-loon, Hong Kong—until they can be registered and processed in hopes of eventual resettlement...
...They jumped into dangerous little boats and made their way to the second countries of asylum...
...The most painful incident for Isaac, though, occurred in the Songkhla Camp in southern Thailand...
Vol. 62 • November 1979 • No. 21
