1357
Indo-China:
[14 FEBRUARY 1979] Refugee Problem
1358 business sector is easily identified as it is primarily Chinese in origin.
any other part of the forest. They were given spades, and they were told to get on with it. They had to build themselves shelters out of bamboos and leaves. They had to clear the forest, and they had to grow their own food. They had been allowed to take some luggage with them, and therefore they had some wealth. With this they had to purchase their food to sustain them until the crop came to maturity and could be gathered.
It was at the point as she remembered the next thing that the mother of the children began to weep as she told the story. It was 21 kilometres on foot to the nearest place they could buy food, and they had to till the ground as well. Eventually, and it was something of a triumph--even for a farmer it would have been a triumph-the crop matured and they gathered it. For this they were thankful. Then they did the arithmetic and saw that it was not enough to sustain them until the next crop, and the money would not hold out. At that point they began to look for a way out; they found others and they went to the coast and bought a boat. One hundred and twenty of them bought a boat, some 12 ft. longer
and 4 ft. wider than a boat on which I took six children on a rather crowded trip down the Avon River two years ago in the summer. One hundred and twenty of them boarded that vessel in the dark giving the equivalent of £100 per head bribe to the coastguards to let them go, and they went off into the night in con- fusion and haste. The full horror dawned on this poor woman as the dawn rose and she realised that her husband was not on the boat. She is now in a hostel in this country in a state of understandable shock.
What had happened to that family? The truth of the matter is that the Com- munist Government of Vietnam had turned it out deliberately into the wilder- ness to starve. Why? They had com- mitted the two sins of having been capitalists in a very small way in a Com- munist country and, please note, of being Chinese in the country of Vietnam. There is in that country a desperate | shortage of food and a grave economic crisis, and of course it is convenient to a Government to reduce the population | and to focus discontent on a readily defined sector of the population. The
This therefore is in fact a racist decision. Whether somebody had read Mein Kampf I do not know, but the Communist answer is extraordinarily like an answer we saw put into effect in Europe in the 1930s. These people are being sent out of the country, and it is now I believe almost certain that the going rate for a safe conduct on to a ship as opposed to a boat is somewhere around 2,000 dollars US currency, or the equivalent. That is the product of the Communist philosophy in that corner of the world, and by its fruits shall we know it.
Let us not forget the role that Vietnam has in the balance of power in the area. Let us not forget the similarities there are between that and the role of Cuba in Africa. It is a grave and dangerous precedent, the African precedent. If it is followed to the letter and without hin- drance it will go badly indeed with the Free World. It will open the door to draught in Europe. We must not think—-- tyranny so wide that we shall feel the
refugee reaches a camp his problem is to return to the refugees--that once a solved. A camp is a temporary structure with inadequate amenities, dangerous to health, and corrosive to morale. Above all, it is a place one wants to get out of. The burden of refugees on most countries of first asylum is intolerable. The problem therefore is to settle them somewhere else. We have seen that since 1975 142,000 have been settled. Different countries have different standards of admission. I would refer you to the Press releases from Geneva rather than detain you with the differences, because it is taking too long, except to say that I notice that the priority those with least claim to go Swiss, to their eternal credit, accept as a anywhere else.
Those who are left behind are very often the least skilled and the least acceptable to other countries. Therefore, the present unwilling host countries rightly fear that they will be left with the unfit and unadapt- able, and they urge a pool system whereby countries will state their quotas in advance and take whoever is next in the queue regardless of qualifications. There must obviously be limitations. There must be modifications to that as to at least language and relatives already settled, but prefer-
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