Indochina refugee crisis
[4] Fearing that rumors of evacuation would cause panic in the South Vietnamese population, extensive planning began only on April 18, 1975, when U.S. President Gerald Ford created an inter-agency task force headed by Julia Taft to "coordinate...evacuation of U.S. citizens, Vietnamese citizens, and third-country nationals from Vietnam."
By that time the military forces of North Vietnam were nearly in the outskirts of Saigon and the population of the city was swelled by hundreds of thousands of people displaced from areas already overrun by the communist armies.
[4] The large-scale evacuation of Vietnamese by American military transport aircraft began on April 23 from Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon.
North Vietnamese rockets were fired at Tan Son Nhut on April 29, killing two American marines, and the airport was closed later that day.
All that afternoon and night, military helicopters landed on the roof of the Embassy and carried evacuees to U.S. navy ships waiting off shore.
[5] Tens of thousands of Vietnamese evacuated themselves, primarily by taking boats out to sea and demanding to be picked up by the navy.
Most of them were taken by navy ships to Guam for processing to enter the United States, and from there they were flown to one of four military bases: Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
[6] A few months after the fall of Saigon, American officials realized that more refugees were crossing borders to escape Vietnam.
[8] Unanticipated was that many Hmong would follow their leaders to Thailand, traveling on foot through high mountains, eluding soldiers, and crossing the Mekong River.
[10] Along with the Hmong and other highland peoples a large number of lowland, ethnic Lao, crossed the Mekong River into Thailand.
[12] The Hoa people were threatened by the Vietnamese who sent them as agricultural workers in the New Economic Zones (state farms) set up by the Government; with 1.5 million relocated.
The Vietnamese government initiated a policy of encouraging the Hoa to leave the country and charging them a fee of several thousand dollars to do so.
[17] After the North Vietnamese takeover in April 1975, one million or more people were sent to "re-education" camps, often for several years, and the government attempted to destroy private enterprise, especially businesses owned by the Hoa.
That was the beginning of a flood of refugees arriving monthly by boat in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and other countries.
They encountered storms, shortages of water and food, and, most seriously, pirates in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand.
[19] Thai and Malay pirates attacked many of the small boats, raping and kidnapping women and stealing the possessions of the passengers.
[21] In only four years, 1979 and 1982, during the height of the humanitarian crisis, twenty Western countries, led by the United States, Canada, Australia, and France, accepted 623,800 Indochinese refugees for resettlement, most of them boat people.
The Thai refused to recognize the Cambodians as refugees but housed some of them in camps inside Thailand at Sa Kaeo and Khao-I-Dang.
Early arrivals at Sa Kaeo, mostly Khmer Rouge and their families fleeing the Vietnamese army, were in the last extremity of starvation.
By January 1981, when the program ended, more than 700,000 Cambodians had received food, seeds, and farm implements and the threat of famine within Cambodia had abated.
Humanitarian workers, the UNHCR, and former Green Berets took up their cause and, shortly, they were resettled in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Source: Robinson, W. Courtland Terms of Refuge United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, London: Zed Books, 1998 p. 270, 276, Appendix 2; Far Eastern Economic Review, June 23, 1978, p. 20 Indochinese repatriated, voluntarily or involuntarily, to their home countries with assistance from UNHCR totalled 525,000 between 1975 and 1997.
[31] The Vietnamese refugee crisis is depicted in the movies The Story of Woo Viet, Boat People, Turtle Beach, Green Dragon, The Beautiful Country, Journey from the Fall, Ride the Thunder (2015), and Ru.
