PEOPLE

The Boat Psoplc
reputation as s haven for the persecuted. There are now 4 200 000
foreigners living in France, among them 150 000 registered refugees.
After the United States and Australia, France is the third host
country to refugees, with Britsin close behind in fourth place. The
victim of politiml pcrsrmtion have come to France in wave8 - the
White Russians after the first world war, the Spanish republicans
in 1938, a million French Algerians after Algeria won its independence,
and now the Indo-Chinese.
Since the collapse of the Saigon rCgirnt in 1975, France had been
accepting the immigrants at the rate of 1OOO a month. But the boat
people beg~n arriving at a time when the Frmch welcome was a
shade less bright than it hd been in the past. Faced with high unemployment,
the French government had recently decided it would
reduce its total foreign population by one million before 1985.
Ntvettheless, President Giscard d'Estaing met the new demand for
asylum by finding rmm for an additional 5000 wd it is estimated
that, by the end of the ye=, France will have an Indo-Chinese immigrant
population of 61 000,
The 5000 quota came as a bitter disappointment to those who had
hoped Paris would make a generous gesture that would jolt the conseicnce
of the world. Jean-Paul Sam said it was tantamount to m
out-of-court dismissel of the demand for action. At a demonstration
in the gtreets of Wris in favour of a much larger quota, a young Vietnamese
girl read a line from a poem by her father: 'Open your city
as one opens one's door at dawn'. To many Frenchmen their door
stcmed only just ajar. Pierre Mcndcs-Ffance, who as prime minister
had terminated French rule in Viemam, said:
Five thousand people is nohh~, It even falls well shon of the total offered
by individuals and maym. The least the government could have done was
oEtr the local authorities the number of refugees they had declared themselves
ready to accept. If Valery Giscard d'Esmhg had announced 'France
accepts 50 000 refugees', he would hew giwn our mnv an enormous
mmql advanmge over its allies and, what is most important, might have compelled
them to makc similar effwts.
French diplomatic activity during the worst months of the boat
pplt emergency was governed by the notion that nothing was to
be gained by driving Hanoi into a comer. France urged Hanoi to
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impose a moratorium on the departure of refugees, even to establish
camps where the exodus would be controlled so as not to awamp the
reception facilities of the host countries. 'Thc moratwium is better
than death at sea,' said the French foreign minister, Jean Franwis-
Foncet, in s comment on Hanoi's promise, at the VNHCR meeting at
Geneva in July 1979, to halt the flow of refugees.
This did not go unchallenged, Olivier Todd, of the Paris weekly
magazine L 'Express, described the Geneva all for a moratorium 'a
moral and juridical scandal: He pointed out that it was the fist time
that an international organization had been encouraged to urge one
of its member nations to limit the right of its citizens the freedom
of movement. Todd charged that the United Nations would be
giving the politburo and police of Hanoi the implicit right to say
who should bt allowed to leave the country and when they should
go.
For those who succeed in reaching France, the first stop is one
uf the three transit centres of an organization called France Terrt
d'Asilt. These are crowded but mmfomble hostels where new
arrivals art put through medical examinations and interviews to
assess how much help they will need in making a new start. Considering
what many of them kve gone through, their phpical condition
is surprisingly good. But psychological damage L another
matter, Thme who make the first contacts with the refugees feel they
arc dealing with people who have been stunned, 'One must never
conclude from their $milts that all is well,' says an official of France
Tcm d'Asi1e. 'There are all sorts of anxieties at work underneath!
For the most fortunate, the new life a n start straight away. They
have relatives, friends and accommodation waiting for them, and
their knowledge of the French lenguagc means that acclimetization
is easier. The less fortunate move on to ccntrcs in the prwincm
where they spend up to six months - wmetimes longer in difficult
cases - learning Frmch snd king insmeted in thc customs and formalities
of life in their new country. The French imprint on Vietnam
faded more rhan one might expect: two-thirds of the refugees speak
no Frmch.
Somcwhcrc along the process of rehabilitation many of the exiles
encounter a formidable anxiety bnrricr. During thc deal of the
escape they were sustained by a vague iden of the future as a rescue