‘Boat People’: A Tale of Two Seas

As increasing numbers of people in inflatable boats are leaving French shores to get to Britain, some observers in the UK ask why, if these people are refugees, they don’t claim asylum in France, a supposedly ‘safe country’. UNHCR has pointed out out that most do: 123,900 applications last year, against 35,566 in the UK. But that’s not to say that France is an easy country for refugees. In the region of Calais, the authorities have authorised nearly 700 evictions of informal camps already this year, under the ‘no point of settlement’ policy decreed by president Macron. The gulf between the rhetoric of France as a historic land of asylum and the brutal reality of the hostile environment has recently been pushed into sharp focus. In our last post, Becky Taylor looked back to Britain’s hostile reception of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938 to question the idea of a ‘tradition of welcome’ towards refugees. France has a similar self-image as a terre d’acceuil, a land of welcome, and it too is questionable—as the country’s response to a different group of ‘boat people’ shows.

Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, North Vietnamese forces moved into Saigon displacing thousands of people from their homes. Vietnamese refugees boarded small fishing and rowing boats, taking flight across the South China Sea in search of refuge from neighbouring Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. Images of men, women and children in overcrowded wooden boats captured media headlines across the world. Their plight garnered both outrage and sympathy in the West as the British and French governments mobilised to receive 19,000 and 119,000 ‘boat people’ respectively.

In France, the defining moment in public and political opinion occurred in November 1978 when the vessel, Hai Hong, with 2,564 refugees aboard, spent three weeks stranded off the coast of Malaysia. As the Malay government refused the boat to dock in its shores, the passengers aboard, hungry and tired, were left in a state of limbo. In the face of mounting international and domestic pressure, France agreed to resettle 230 passengers. The député Joël Le Tac, was met with a thunderous applause in the national assembly on 15th November when, in reference to the Hai Hong, he spoke of how France, ‘by tradition, has throughout time always been willing to carry the misery of those who believe in [France]’. Such sentiments were echoed on the other side of the assembly; the secretary of state Oliver Stirn asserted that the French government would not fail to ‘respect [the] constitution and the [French] tradition of being a land of asylum’.

Les réfugiés vietnamiens: report from the French news programme Soir 3, 14 Nov 1978, from the Institut national de l’audiovisuel

Such discourse, however, resonated well beyond political circles. In early 1979 Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, launched the campaign un bateau pour le Vietnam to rescue those stranded at sea. The committee involved gathered much media traction as its high profile members from all sides of the political spectrum presented a unified front under the banner of humanitarian action. In April, L’Ile de Lumière, the organisation’s ship, operated as a floating hospital off the Vietnamese coast. With two journalists on board from Antenne 2, France’s major television channel, the vessel acquired significant political and media support and was closely followed throughout its nine-month voyage. What is particularly worth stressing here, is how media outlets, politicians and non-governmental actors rallied behind the cause of the ‘boat people’. In the French media, and across the globe, scenes of wooden boats and the desperation of its human cargo, received a favourable reception as newsreaders and reporters lamented the tragic scenes in the South China Sea. Yet the embrace of the media came at the cost of depicting the ‘boat people’ as helpless victims and was thus deeply problematic in denying their agency and voice. This critique stems not exclusively from the benefit of hindsight, but is rooted in the concerns of Xavier Emmanuelli, then Vice President of MSF, who lambasted Kouchner’s project, asking:

Should these people’s misfortune offer the opportunity to a handful of Parisian intellectuals to make a spectacle of a three-year-long tragedy they had suddenly discovered?

The project soon acquired the nickname ‘Un bateau pour Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, a reference to the wealthy arrondissement in Paris, which had historically been home to religious and intellectual figures. Behind the satire, it exposed the ethical dilemmas of humanitarian intervention.

At the same time, several journalists took this framing of the boat people as victims to greater heights. Patrice Franceschi, witness to the exodus, warned ‘a new Holocaust... is looming, foretold and obvious to the whole world’. While Jean-Pierre Allali, a French Jewish activist, wrote ‘each Boat Man who drowns is one more gas chamber victim at Auschwitz’. Such parallels were deliberately emotive. Although such a narrative of victimisation is of course controversial and entrenches the division in the relationship between providers and recipients of humanitarian assistance, it nonetheless proved effective in the context of the French government, who in the 1970s, was in the process of opening itself up to examining the scars of its Vichy syndrome. Such re-examination was particularly spearheaded by Jacques Chirac, who later became the first president to publicly apologise for French collaboration with Nazi Germany, while also becoming the first president to adopt a refugee into the presidential family.

Yet behind this rose-tinted lens and somewhat romanticised notion of drawing lessons from the past, lies an uncomfortable historical reality. The ‘boat people’ had an important political currency in post-colonial Cold War France. Receiving refugees from a former colony allowed France to attempt to win back the moral high ground. It simultaneously provided the occasion to implement General de Gaulle’s legacy of challenging the bipolar nature of the Cold War by welcoming both Chilean refugees fleeing Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship and Vietnamese refugees seeking refuge from the communist invasion of South Vietnam. On an individual level, Anh-Dao Traxel, Chirac’s adopted daughter, accused him in her recent book, Chirac: une famille pas ordinaire, of exploiting the opportunity for electoral gain among the French-Asian community. As such, adopting a humanitarian refrain concealed political motives, and serves as an important reminder of the need to think critically about France’s post-war myth of the terre d’accueil.

While there exists an unavoidable and stark contrast between the seemingly sympathetic reporting of the plight of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ and the voyeuristic and dehumanising coverage of the desperate bid of displaced people to cross the Channel in inflatable boats, it is worth remembering that looking to history to find solace in France’s supposed historic tradition of being a land of welcome is fraught with complications. Histories of migration and displacement can rarely be reduced to narratives of linear regression (or progression) from past to present. Nonetheless, we can discern a seismic shift in the language used to talk about refugees, and although the apparently apolitical humanitarian discourse emanating from the French media and state was in fact politically charged, it does reflect a marked change with the deeply politicised language of ‘illegality’ and ‘clandestine threat’ that plagues today’s notion of sanctuary. If we are to draw one lesson from the past, then perhaps it ought to be that placing electoral concerns before humanitarian action, will only serve to bring true Hannah Arendt’s fears that refugees are ‘rightless’.

As people continue to risk their lives fleeing the terre d’accueil, we must be willing to accept that when holding up a mirror to the past, we may not like what stares back.

Further reading/listening

The English Channel:

Human Rights Observers, 2019 annual report on the situation in Calais and region (in French): http://www.laubergedesmigrants.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/HRO-fr-rap2019.pdf

Trilling. D, ‘Don't be fooled by the myth of a 'migrant invasion'’, The Guardian, 11 August 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/11/myth-migrant-invasion-government-asylum-seekers-britain

France and the Vietnamese ‘boat people’:

Emmanuelli. X, ‘Un bateau pour Saint Germain des prés’, Le Quotidien du Médecin, 4 Dec 1978, quoted in: http://associativehistory.msf.org/sites/default/files/Histoire_Asso_MSF_VF.pdf

France Inter, ‘Un bateau pour le Vietnam: quand la France découvrait les boat-peoples’ (radio programme, in French), 24 Sept 2015: https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/affaires-sensibles/affaires-sensibles-24-septembre-2015

Franceschi. P, L’exode vietnamien: les réfugiés de Pulau Bidong (Paris: Arthaud, 1979)

Taylor. B, ‘‘Don’t just look for a new pet’: the Vietnamese airlift, child refugees and the dangers of toxic humanitarianism’, in Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no.2-3, (2018), 195-209

Traxel. A. D, Chirac une famille pas ordinaire (Paris: Editions Hugo et Compagnie, 2014)

Header image: A 35 foot fishing boat approaches the amphibious command ship USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC 19). The BLUE RIDGE rescued 35 refugeees 350 miles northeast of Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, after they had spend eight days at sea in the boat. Source: Wikimedia Commons