Chain of Hearts Research- Vietnamese Boat People and White Australia Policy

VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE

• The Vietnamese boat people are refugees who fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the late 1970’s and 1980’s of the Vietnam War.
• In Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old government in the South to "re-education camps", and others to "new economic zones."
• An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.
• According to published academic studies in the United States and Europe, 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps. Thousands were abused, tortured, and executed.
• These factors, coupled with poverty and the total destruction of the country that happened during the Vietnam war, caused hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee the country.
• In 1979, Vietnam was at war with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Many ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, who felt that the government's policies directly targeted them, also became "boat people."
• On the open seas, the boat people had to confront forces of nature, and elude pirates.

• There were many different ways people used to leave the country: most were secret and transpired at night; some involved the bribing of officials, some people bought places in large boats that held 400 passengers; others organized smaller groups or went on makeshift rafts.
• Some forged identity documents, traveling 1,100 km to Danang by road. On arrival, they would take refuge for up to two days in safe houses while waiting for fishing junks and trawlers to take small groups into international waters
• Camps were set up in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.
• According to stories told by the Vietnamese refugees, the conditions at the camps were poor.
• The women and children were raped and beaten.
• Very little of the aid money donated primarily by the United States actually got to the refugees.
• Refugees at Thai camps were maltreated and many were brutally bullied by the Thai guards.
• Some 77% of refugee boats leaving in 1981 were attacked by Thais.
• 863 Vietnamese were known to be raped, 763 people physically attacked and killed, and 489 people abducted.

THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY
• The White Australia policy was a system of both official and unofficial discrimination in Australian history, during which immigration policy and citizenship requirements were heavily biased to favour white European migrants, and more specifically Anglo-Saxon migrants over other races.
• Although in the present day Australia generally prides itself on being one of the most multicultural of the "western-style" democracies, its past contains a long period of government-endorsed racism that, among modern Western democracies, was matched by few and possibly exceeded only by the apartheid regime of South Africa.