The Republic of Vietnam ended on the 30th of April 1975, and the story of its people did not. Over the twenty years that followed, something like 800,000 Vietnamese left the country by sea in small boats, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that between 200,000 and 400,000 of them died — of drowning, thirst, storms and piracy in the Gulf of Thailand.
It is the largest maritime exodus of the twentieth century, and it is the direct sequel to everything in this volume. Its scale is also the most difficult single fact for accounts of 1975 that treat the outcome as a straightforward liberation.
Re-education
The new government's first instrument was the camp. Officers, officials, teachers, judges, policemen, chaplains and anyone else associated with the Republic were instructed to report for what was described as a short period of political study — ten days for junior ranks, thirty for senior.
The estimates of how many went are between one and two and a half million. The periods were not short: senior officers commonly served five to ten years, some seventeen. The camps combined political instruction with hard labour, frequently clearing land or minefields, on rations that produced widespread malnutrition. Tens of thousands died in them.
Families of camp inmates were classified as politically unreliable, which barred their children from university and most employment. The classification followed people for a generation.
The new economic zones
The second instrument was resettlement. Urban populations judged surplus, particularly in Saigon, were moved to New Economic Zones — cleared land in the highlands and along the Cambodian border, often without water, tools, housing or malaria prophylaxis. Around a million people were relocated between 1975 and 1980.
Many simply walked back to the cities, where they had no residence permits and therefore no ration entitlement, and lived outside the system.
Then in March 1978 the government abolished private trade in the South at a stroke. Businesses were nationalised overnight and the currency was replaced with limits on how much any household could convert. The measure was aimed at the commercial class, and it fell most heavily on the ethnic Chinese, the Hoa, who ran much of the South's trade. Combined with the deteriorating relationship with Beijing, it produced an exodus of perhaps 450,000 Hoa within two years, many of them permitted to leave by boat on payment of gold in what amounted to an official trade in exit permits.
The sea
The boats were fishing craft, wooden, ten to twenty metres, carrying anything from thirty to four hundred people, aiming for Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong or the Philippines — five hundred to a thousand kilometres of open water in vessels never intended to leave the coast.
The engines failed. The water ran out. Storms in the South China Sea broke boats up. And from 1979 the Gulf of Thailand became a hunting ground: Thai fishing crews boarded refugee boats for gold, and the accounts collected afterwards by the UNHCR describe systematic rape, abduction and murder on a scale that took years to acknowledge. One survey of arrivals in 1981 found that more than three-quarters of the boats reaching Thailand had been attacked, most of them repeatedly.
Countries of first asylum began pushing boats back out to sea in 1979 — Malaysia towed some fifty thousand people back into the water — and the resulting international emergency produced the Geneva conference of July 1979, at which resettlement quotas were agreed and Hanoi consented to an Orderly Departure Programme that eventually moved several hundred thousand people out by air.
Afterwards
The exodus continued at a lower level into the 1990s. The Comprehensive Plan of Action of 1989 ended automatic refugee status, introduced individual screening, and repatriated those found to be economic migrants — a process that produced riots in the Hong Kong camps and closed the last of them in 2000.
Around 1.6 million Vietnamese were resettled abroad in all: roughly 800,000 in the United States, and communities in Australia, Canada, France and Germany. The Vietnamese-American population is now over two million, and remains politically distinct from almost every other Asian-American group for reasons that are entirely traceable to this chapter.
In Vietnam, the exodus is not commemorated. Memorials erected in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2005 were removed within months after diplomatic pressure from Hanoi. The largest memorials are in California, Australia and Canada, which is to say among the people who left.
The country the Republic became is now prosperous, young and comfortable with Americans. That is a real ending, and it is not the same thing as the story having been resolved.
The camps and the settlement
The camps that received the boats were not brief. Pulau Bidong off Malaysia held 40,000 people on an island of less than a square kilometre. Galang in Indonesia processed a quarter of a million. Hong Kong's camps, closed detention from 1982, held people for years while their claims were screened.
Resettlement depended on quotas negotiated country by country, and on which government happened to be in office when a family reached the front of the queue. The United States took around 800,000, Australia 185,000, Canada 160,000, France 130,000, Germany 40,000, Britain around 24,000. Vietnamese communities in each of those countries date almost entirely from this movement.
The Orderly Departure Programme, agreed with Hanoi in 1979, eventually moved more people out by air than left by sea, and the Humanitarian Operation of 1989 brought out some 70,000 former re-education camp inmates and their families. Both were negotiated arrangements: Hanoi permitted the departures, and was paid in normalised relations for doing so.
The last camps closed in 2000. Around 2,500 people who could not be resettled and would not go back were eventually given status in the Philippines.
End of Chapter X