PEOPLE

I
The Boat f3Zaple
cngineer agrecd to sign a confcsuion, He, the assistant cook and onc
sailor were then summoned to appear in court on 22 June. The captain
attended on behalf of rhc owner. The four accuscd were fined
a total of $10 000 and, in addition, the captain was ordered to p y
$300 court costs and $1500 for police expenses. He informed the
court that neither he nur the crew had the money to pay the fines.
On 23 June, although the fines remained unpaid, he was told he
could sail.
The accounts in this chapter of how the refugee trafic was organized
prnvide only a glimpse of what actually happencd. It is, however,
a revealing glimpse. It shows, as might he expected, that when the
needs of' large numbers of people become desperate, there will be
some who profit from their plight. The price the market will beat
becomes in these circumstances heavy in hum~n terms, as wdl as
high in terms of money. Were it nor for the fact that the Vietnamese
refugees believed themselves to be escaping from persecution (or the
threat of it) or to a new freedom (or thc promise of it), the way in
which they were herded into ships, the appalling conditions they
suffered, and the way money was made out of them, would be reminiscent
of the infamous slave trade.
The arrounts show that the export of people from southern Vietnam
on seagoing freighters was organized largely hy ethnic Chinese
inside and outside Vietnam. 'lhose inside wanted to leave; those outside
were prepared to help - for a profit. The outsiders were among
the more than 26 million Chinese living in the various countries of
non-communist South-East Asia - Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan,
Thc refugee trade war organized through the tightly knit webs of
curnmercial clan, through penonal contacts established betwecn
Chincsc in southern Vietnam and Chinese in other regional
countries long before the communists captured Saigon in 1975. It
was this network that the Viemamere governmcnt chose to exploit.
How deeply and at what Icvd it became involvcd may be open to
argument but the witness of thousands of rcfugces to the fact of its
involvement and the evidence of the big ships is too strong to be
denied. However shadowy the connections between the traffickers
and the Vietnamesc may be - and at times they appear clear and
precise - it is hard to believe that Hanoi could not have stopped the
human traffic had it wished to do so. How much money Hanoi madc
from the mffic is a matter of controversy: the estimates vary enormously
and run into hundreds of millions of dullars. But it ir perhaps
not so important to work our by how much Hanoi profited as to note
that it did, while denying to the world that it had.
Thc issues are admittedly complcx and dificult to raise in a manner
that is acceptable or cvcn understandable by all the individuals,
groups and nations aught up in the refugee crisis. The endless list
of questions can he endlessly refined. Was the trafficking legal?
(According to whose laws?) Was it moraI? (Morality is difficult to
apply in the market place.) Was it humane? (Certainly not, hut the
free-market forces that came into operation once it was known that
a lot of people had to leave Vietnam created a buyer's market.)
Should Hanoi have profited from this human predicament? (A government
is entitled to impose an exit tax.) But art these the right
questions and answers? Before a judgement can be made, the hackground
needs to be expanded. The crisis did not occur in a vacuum
of national prejudices and human passions; to undentand its
complexities mom fully, it is also necessary to examine closely the
political and stratcgic factors that influenced the many parties concerned.