Some boat people still searching for a future

In a world heaving with more than 20 million refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless individuals uprooted by raging conflicts (based on a count by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) by the end of last year, it is easy to forget people like Hung Dung Pham.

Pham is one of the so-called boat people, who braved the perilous waters of the South China Sea in leaky, crammed crafts in search of a new home during the years following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Although almost a million Vietnamese boat people eventually found their way to countries like the United States and Canada as refugees to build new lives, fate hasn't been kind to Pham, who left Vietnam 17 years ago.

Pham and 139 other Vietnamese boat people””as well as 28 children, some of whom have a Filipino parent””have been stranded in the Philippines. More than a decade after the United Nations closed all refugee camps for Indochinese boat people in Southeast Asia, this group has remained stuck without refugee or legal status. They are not allowed to work legally or own property, and their children are denied access to public programs such as education.

“He's now 55 years old; he has been divorced from his wife and he lives alone,”  Stella Nhung Davis, a Vietnamese-Canadian Vancouver-based immigration consultant, told the Georgia Straight. Davis said she met Pham in the Philippines, where she volunteered for a month two years ago to help administer funds raised by the Vietnamese-Canadian community for the remaining boat people.

When Davis sat with the Straight, she went through a recent e-mail sent to her by Pham asking if there was any hope that his voyage was about to come to an end. “I told him that I and other members of the Vietnamese community are willing to sponsor him once the Canadian government allows it,”  she said.

Until 2004, there were about 2,000 Vietnamese boat people left in the Philippines. The U.S., Australia, the United Kingdom, and Norway resettled a majority of those, and””following intense lobbying by the Vietnamese-Canadian community””the Liberal government agreed to take as many as 200 more under an expanded family sponsorship program.

However, only 23 individuals from seven families qualified to come to Canada under the program, according to Burnaby Douglas MP Bill Siksay, NDP critic for immigration and citizenship.

Siksay said that although Canada has a remarkable record of having resettled more than 100,000 Vietnamese boat people at the end of the Vietnam War, the government has made a “very limited response”  to help end the plight of the remaining Vietnamese in the Philippines.

“The situation is intolerable,”  Siksay told the Straight. “These people must be helped so they could live full lives like ours. They must be able to dream dreams just like the rest of us.” 

Acting on a motion by Siksay, the Commons committee on citizenship and immigration voted last September 28 to ask the Conservative government to allow the resettlement in Canada of the remaining 140 Vietnamese who are now in the Philippines on humanitarian and compassionate grounds or through some other mechanism.

Siksay said that one option is for members of the Vietnamese-Canadian community to act as sponsors, exactly the same mechanism that Davis has in mind for Pham and the others.

“We'll pay for everything; we can provide jobs. We are willing to help,”  Davis said.

Davis wouldn't say whether or not the end of the saga for the remaining boat people would be a step toward healing the wounds that have scarred the Vietnamese diaspora.

“These people have suffered too long. We just need to close that chapter [on the boat people] so we can move on,”  Davis said.

Davis had only been in Canada two weeks as a student at the University of Montreal when forces under Communist leader Ho Chi Minh captured the then–Vietnamese capital of Saigon in April 1975. She was allowed to stay in Canada, and her family from Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, came over a few years later.

Davis noted that her mother, now in her 80s, regularly sends money to relatives in Vietnam but had pledged never to set foot again in her native land. “The Vietnamese community [in Vancouver] is divided on how to treat Vietnam. A lot of people have lost so much because of the war,”  Davis said.

Hoi Trinh is a Vietnamese-Australian lawyer at the forefront of a worldwide lobbying effort for the remaining boat people. The Straight was unable to reach Trinh by phone prior to deadline, but he stated in an e-mail message to the Straight that when Saigon fell, some 1.7 million Vietnamese fled by boat or foot to neighbouring countries.

“The exact number can never be confirmed because the UNHCR estimated up to 30 percent of all departures never made it and perished on the high sea,”  he wrote.

“It is a group of 140 stateless Vietnamese refugees still remaining in the Philippines that we ask Canada to accept so that we can close the last chapter on the boat people,”  added Trinh, who left Vietnam as a 15-year-old refugee.

The Vietnamese Canadian Federation noted that in 1975 there were barely 1,000 Vietnamese in Canada. “Today, community members number approximately 175,000, many of whom, if not most, were boat people or are [their] children and grandchildren,”  the federation said in a media statement last December when the community celebrated 30 years in Canada.

Raymond Liens, a Vancouver-based human-rights advocate of Vietnamese origin, pointed out that a number of these former refugees have achieved economic success in Canada and some have started coming to terms with Vietnam's recent tumultuous history.

Amid efforts to bring over the last of the remaining boat people from the Philippines, Liens told the Straight that some new-generation Vietnamese-Canadians who have less or none of the “political baggage and trauma their parents had”  are going to Vietnam to set up businesses, in the process dealing with a social system their forebears held in dread.

“With economic contentment comes some measure of political forgiveness for what had happened in the past,”  Liens said.