All tagged Vietnamese refugees
The journeys of people who have been forced to leave their homes have, over centuries, included travel across water, including rivers, oceans, and seas. This post presents a new approach to researching refugee boat journeys by sea, based on a collaboration between historians and ocean engineers. We have used oral history research with survivors of a particular boat, rescued off Vietnam in June 1982, alongside numerical modelling so that the sea state the boat travelled through and the specific movement of the boat in those conditions could be determined. The scientific analysis explains how the ocean and weather, paradoxically, both created the conditions that were dangerous for this vessel, but also placed it in a position where it was rescued.
In her book Refugees in Twentieth Century Britain, Becky Taylor carefully explores the reception, experiences and significance of refugees in Britain across the twentieth century. Time and time again, she demonstrates how closely bound up the refugees’ lives have been with the British public’s own experiences of changing political and social factors, whether these two groups come face to face or not, and however much of a gulf the media may lead people to believe exists between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Making sense of a huge range and diversity of sources, the book beautifully demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of British society, and the many ways refugees encountered these complexities.
From the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975 through to the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled from what had been Indochina. Their exodus triggered an international response. The Philippines, like other Southeast Asian states and Hong Kong, was a country of first asylum. Refugees were allowed to stay temporarily until resettlement elsewhere. Under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), the Philippine government laid the foundations of the country’s refugee policy: the extension of temporary asylum ‘on humanitarian grounds’. The Philippines at this time was not party to the UN 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.
In American imagination, the iconic image of a helicopter on a Saigon rooftop, with a long line of South Vietnamese desperate to escape, has often served as a visual shorthand for the end of the US war in Vietnam and the ensuing refugee ‘crisis’. But the fixation of Vietnamese refugees in 1975 needs to be revised. Most of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled the country did so after 1975: displacement continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The question of whether they would be granted refugee status became more and more precarious over time, and Vietnamese were subjected to a controversial ‘screening’ process. But in camps and in the diaspora, there were countless examples of Vietnamese activism.
