PEOPLE

The Boat hple
believable, hundreds of ships bypassed bo~t people in distress
sea.
* * *
Singapm was the first of Vietnam's non-communist neighbours
start fending off boat people. It regularly rurned awmy small cr
from southern Vietnam after rerupplying and refuelling chcm.
late 1977 Thai security authorities wcre regularly rejecting b
ptoplc, in some cases putting them on different craft
had sunk, been scuttlcd or had engines damaged kyon
lot of these 'push-off casts ended up in Malaysia. As the
from southem Viaam intensified and boets converg
north-east wart of pcniasular Malaysia, cenml and local
started bloeking ~aworthy craft and giving them supp
tinue their onward journey.
In late 1978 the policy of turning 'seaworthy' boats away
intensified. In early 1979, aftcr a special task force und
mand d an army general was created to conml the
the coastal cordon was tightend, Western refugee officials esti
that in February about 25 per cent of those who tri
aysia were 'shooed off; in April, 50 pcr cent; and b
prr cent, Even so, morc than 17500 slipped ashore
the government in Kuala Lumpur announced a h
icy towards what it called 'illegal immigimts' from Vietnam,
more would be permitted to land. Naval surveillance of the eool
was intensified, Warships . kept - refugee boats away from the offsh
oil rigs.
Since the communist takeover of South View in April 197
117 778 Indo-Chinese had arrived in Malaysia by sea. By ~une 19
a total of only 42 248 had been menled, The home affairs minist
Tan Sri Ghazali Shhe, said that, in he firsr six month5 of' 197
Malaysia had fiuccessfuily towed out to sea 267 boars carrying mo
than 40 000 Indo-Chinese.
'The 'CPS~PWPY'@icy mated a rpecirl class of Indo-Chi
refugcw, the so-called 'kach people'. While many boats
blocked from landing in the first half of 1979, n large number
aped to dudge ,Ma\aysian patrols and beach, xuttlc or dock
boats, or sahtagt engines;. Thew hlockadc runners were allow
ashore. Some were mnsferred to campsunder UNH~R protection, but
more and more were put into makcahift centres under armed guard,
on or close to the beaches where they landed, and kept under
Malaysian conml. UN and western refugce officials were denied
access to them, as were journalists. They were literally living in
limbo, not knowing whethcr they would be transferred to UNHCR
camps for ettlement, or sent back to sea.
From mid-February to June, more than 5000 of the beach people
were put onto boats and towed back to international waters. By
mid-1979, refugee oficials estimated that, of the 75 000 Indo-
Chinese in Malaysia, only about 65 000 were in UNHCR camps and
transit centres. The rest - about 10 Oo men, womm and children
- were in the limbo camps under imminent threat of expulsion. They
wcre being loaded onto repaired refugee boats, and in some cases
cven onto requisitioned Malaysian fishing craft,
At a squalid bcach camp at Jambu Bangkok, on a desolate stretch
of coast south of Kuala Trengganu, visited by journalists without
permission on 25 June 1979, refugees complained they werc short
of food and that Malaysian guards charged them the equivalent of
$30 for five-kilogram bags of rice (nine times the price on the lmal
market) and $1.00 per item for posting urgent letters abroad.
On 3 July 1979 they were put onto four Malaysian fishing boan
and rowed out to sem for twenty-four hours by a navy pad boat.
The refugees said later they were cut adrift and left with little fuel
or drinking water. The night after the four wooden craft were abandoned,
thty drifted aparr. Miss Lieu Minh Tran, a Vietnamese high-
Rho01 teacher who was in one of the boats, said she believed the
other boats had sunk. 'As far as wt know thty had no more fuel than
us. They couldn't have got far with their engines. Then they would
have been blown about by the strong winds and knocked by the
waves 8s we werc. We werc lucky. A passing ship saw us and
stopped!
The ship was a 1524-tonne freighter, the Seaweep, owned and
Operated for refugee relief by a Christian aid organization, World
Vision International, with headquarters in California. The captain
of the refugee boat found by the Ssrasweep was Hua Hien Minh, a
31-year-old mechanical engineer, who said they had been givcn
about twenty litres of fuel - enough for about eleven hours - by