BY SARAH STEPHEN
As the imperialist powers escalate their war on Afghanistan, refugees continue to flee in their tens of thousands, joining millions in Pakistan and Iran. The scale of the humanitarian crisis is immense, with several million Afghan civilians facing death from starvation as winter sets in.
The Afghan refugee crisis has many superficial similarities with the large numbers who fled Vietnam in the late 1970s. But in contrast to Australia's willingness to offer asylum to large numbers of Vietnamese refugees, today the Australia's rulers are resolutely hostile to taking in all but a trickle of those fleeing Afghanistan.
On April 26, 1976, the first boat carrying Vietnamese refugees arrived in Darwin harbour. Along with his brother and three friends, 25-year-old Lam Binh made the journey to Australia in a decrepit wooden fishing boat. The four asylum seekers were housed in a government hostel while being assessed, and promptly given permanent residence.
In the next six years, 56 boats carrying some 2000 Vietnamese followed in Lam Binh's wake. An estimated two million people fled Vietnam and Laos following the defeat of the US-backed capitalist regimes in those countries in 1975. One million were from Vietnam and almost half of those are estimated to have fled by boat. This exodus by sea reached its peak in 1979, with 160,000 people leaving Vietnam's shores.
Why they left
People fled for many reasons — some because of US propaganda about an impending bloodbath following the Communist victory (which never happened); some because their businesses were nationalised by the new revolutionary government in south Vietnam; some, because they were living off graft in the cities, left to avoid being resettled in the countryside; and some because they had lost hope of a future after the complete devastation of their country during the war.
Most of those who fled Vietnam were far wealthier than the Afghans reaching Australia at the moment. Most of the present wave of Afghan refugees have had to sell all their possessions, just to raise a few thousand dollars to get one member of their family to safety.
Those who fled Vietnam were mostly middle-class professionals, landowners, small business owners or former officers and officials in the US-created Saigon puppet government.
Many paid smugglers for passage on ships, or took their wealth with them as gold and jewellery and escaped in their own boats. Yet this was not considered an issue by Western governments. As they are fully aware, the possession of money does not dictate whether or not you are a refugee.
Most Vietnamese refugees ended up in camps in south-east Asia and Hong Kong. Only a tiny proportion made it all the way to Australia by boat.
An estimated 10-15% of Vietnamese who fled in boats perished at sea. Some were killed by pirates, drowned or starved to death, but at least 500 were victims of Malaysia's policy of forcing boats back to sea.
Australia never forced a boat back to sea because the government acknowledged that to do so was in violation of the international refugee convention.
The US accused the Vietnamese government of encouraging people to flee by boat, but in fact it was the US which favoured people leaving by boat for propaganda purposes — it made the new Vietnamese government look unpopular.
In May 1979 the Vietnamese government offered to organise an airlift of as many as 10,000 refugees a month to countries such as the US. Washington rejected this offer of safe and orderly migration.
Australia participated equally in the propaganda war against the Vietnamese government, cutting off humanitarian aid in January 1979. This contributed to the harsh economic conditions in Vietnam resulting from the war and the post-war economic embargo imposed by the US. After decades of war, what Vietnam needed was massive, unconditional aid to rebuild.
There were few concerns within the Australian government or the immigration department about the bona fides of Vietnamese boat people. They were housed in "loose detention" in an open part of Westbridge migrant centre in Sydney (now Villawood detention centre) and processed for permanent residence immediately upon arrival.
Only a few years after the formal dismantling of the White Australia policy, there was still a substantial hostility to Asian migration, fuelled by a predictable level of scare-mongering by the establishment media. In response to refugees arriving by boat, the November 29, 1977, Courier Mail, for example, ran the following headline: "It's the yellow peril again."
Welcoming attitude
Yet there was broad public support for the welcoming of Vietnamese refugees. A 1975 Gallup poll found that 54% believed Vietnamese refugees should be allowed to settle in Australia, while only 33% did not. Of those in favour, 61% were Coalition supporters. This was undoubtedly a result of the fact that Malcolm Fraser's Coalition government argued that Australia had a moral responsibility to take refugees because of its involvement in the Vietnam War. The RSL pressed for more liberal entry criteria and criticised media attacks on those arriving by boat.
The eventual consensus within the ruling class in favour of taking in the Vietnamese refugees was not driven by liberal humanitarian concerns. The Fraser government's welcoming stance toward Vietnamese refugees was politically motivated. The Australian capitalists rulers wanted people to flee Vietnam because this helped bolster their Cold War ideological campaign against the "evils of communism".
Initially, the Fraser government avoided making a major commitment to the resettlement of refugees. In 1975, it was only prepared to accept the temporary entry of wives and children of Vietnamese students in Australia, or of Australian citizens.
Between 1976 and 1978, 1750 refugees arrived by boat. This caused an increasing furore within the media and among Â鶹´«Ã½ of the population who feared an "Asian invasion". Nevertheless, all boat arrivals were given permanent residence.
In 1977, only 1500 people were selected from Malaysian refugee camps and resettled in Australia, while almost 900 arrived by boat. In November of that year, boats were arriving in Darwin almost daily, including, on November 21, six on the same day. It was clear to many that the tiny number who were allowed to come through official migration channels contributed to the high number of people arriving by boat.
In 1978, the number of refugees resettled rose to 7500; in 1979 it was 12,500 and remained at this level until 1982, when the intake dropped to 8000. Boat arrivals peaked in 1978 and declined to 300 in 1979 and 30 in 1981.
An Age poll conducted in June 1979, at the height of the exodus from Vietnam and the arrival of boats in Australia, indicated how sentiment had swung against the government. It found that 23% agreed with the current intake of refugees, 30% thought fewer should be taken in, 37% thought no more should be taken in and only 7% agreed with taking in more.
In 1980, the Fraser government offered an amnesty for illegal immigrants in Australia, which allowed those Vietnamese who had failed to meet the refugee definition but had remained in Australia to legalise their status. It also allowed those who had arrived with out of date, invalid or even without documentation to register based on a declaration of personal information.
In 1982 the first major policy shift took place. Vietnamese fleeing their country were no longer automatically considered refugees, but were assessed on a case-by-case basis. Australia also developed a bilateral agreement with the Vietnamese government, the Vietnamese Family Migration Program. The weight of Vietnamese migration shifted from refugee resettlement to family reunion.
More than 150,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled in Australia, making it one of the five largest non-English speaking migrant communities in the country. Fifty-five thousand of them came as refugees between 1975 and 1982 while the 95,000 came through family reunion.
Imperialism and refugees
The response of the US, Canada, France, Britain and Australia to the exodus of refugees from Vietnam demonstrated the capacity for humanitarian solutions, when it politically suits them.
Over the space of two decades, there has been an backlash against migration in general, and refugees in particular, throughout all wealthy countries. Significantly, this backlash has coincided with a long depressive wave in the world capitalist economy and an increasing economic squeeze on the Third World.
A combination of crippling debt, unequal trade relations and a series of wars against countries unwilling to toe the imperialist line has led to a dramatic increase in the flow of people out of the Third World.
The Australian government is enthusiastically participating in the war against Afghanistan, just as it sent troops to fight in Vietnam. But the predominant message this time around is that rich countries are not morally responsible for the plight of people in poor countries, even when they are victims of the brutal wars being waged against them by the rich countries.
Both the Coalition and the ALP are consciously seeking to destroy the sense of sympathy that many ordinary people feel toward those fleeing Afghanistan in order to undermine opposition to their support for the US-led war on the Afghan people.
Their refugee policy toward Afghan refugees is driven today — just as it was in the case of the Vietnamese refugees — by the need to shore up domestic political support for Australia's imperialist policy toward the Third World.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 14, 2001.
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