UNDERSTANDING THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN REFUGEE CRISIS

by  PHI-VÂN NGUYEN

December 2019

In the 1970s, Southeast Asia was in complete turmoil. Millions of displaced persons had to rebuild their lives within Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Hundreds of thousands of others crossed borders to seek refuge. But neighboring countries, such as Thailand and Malaysia, were reluctant to welcome them. So they pushed them back. As they did, the international community began to accept them and called on governments and international organizations to protect them. This was what people had already begun to call the boat people crisis. Eventually, states found a solution. Refugees went through transit camps in Southeast Asia before resettling in third countries. Why did states put together this complex system of asylum? We often turn to legal standards to understand refugee protection. But this research project uses a larger analytical framework. It approaches the crisis through three lines of inquiry: the politics of refugee protection, the role of representations, and the impact of armed conflicts.

The Three Dimensions of Refugee Protection

Immigration policies and legal standards first come to our minds when we try to understand refugee protection. Their definition of a refugee provides answers to many questions. Who are refugees? Why are they vulnerable people deserving protection? In what kind of situation do they find themselves? And in which circumstances do states grant asylum? The 1951 Convention related to the status of refugees has become an important international standard. Article one defined a refugee as a “person who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality and membership of a particular social group.”1 

Three Dimensions of Refugee Protection

LEGAL DIMENSIONS include international conventions, immigration law, or jurisprudence. 

POLITICAL DIMENSIONS relate to international politics, governmental policies, budgets, and programmes.

CULTURAL DIMENSIONS refer to public perceptions and the mobilization of non-state actors.

This, however, tells us nothing about the effectiveness of refugee protection. In fact, political and cultural contexts also play an important part. The political context has a major impact on the effectiveness of refugee protection. Members of the parliament, for example, can create and amend existing immigration policies. Governments set priorities, determine asylum quotas, and establish resettlement programs. States decide the budget, resources, and personnel dedicated to a specific humanitarian crisis. Money makes protection effective and politics control the public purse.

Cultural dimensions are no less important. Refugees may meet all legal criteria and yet become a political concern in the eyes of the government or even the local population. Others can contest the idea that refugees are vulnerable persons deserving protection. Media representations, religious institutions, charities and other associations shape these representations too. They can lobby the government for more refugee protection. But they can also inspire forms of stigmatization and discrimination. In that case, refugees may have escaped one danger in their home country, but now face new threats in their new one.

How do these three dimensions interact with one another? How, when and why do they reinforce or undermine each other? This research project uses these three dimensions to understand the Southeast Asian refugee crisis between 1975 and 1995.

Choosing the Right Words: Refugees, Migrants or Boat People?

All three dimensions of refugee protection underscore the importance of perceptions and the words we choose to categorize them. To recognize that a person is a refugee requires one to agree to specific understanding of a given situation. The words we use to describe a humanitarian crisis are therefore crucial.

A “refugee” is a person fleeing a dangerous situation.2 Referring to the same person as a “migrant” shifts the focus away from the question of danger as the main motivation. Considering that person as an “immigrant” goes even further by shifting the emphasis to that which attracts the individual in the host society.3
Using the word “boat people” is also problematic. It presupposes that these two concepts “boat people” and “refugee” can be used inter-changeably. But the two words have, in fact, a different meaning. A “refugee” refers to a person fleeing a dangerous situation. “Boat people” or “land people” does not express the reason for departure but focuses on the means of transport. It first emerged in the 1950s to refer to the unregistered population living on boats in Hong Kong. It was only in 1976, that people started to use the words “boat people” to talk about Vietnamese fleeing their country and reaching coasts across the region. Immigration officers used it to distinguish between “land cases” and “boat cases.”4 For news reporters, this concept allowed them to describe the agony of people drifting at sea.5 Or, as international law specialist Martin Tsamenyi pointed out, the term was also a convenient way for states to refer to those people without having to recognize their refugee status.6

The Political Use of Refugee Protection

Even the term “refugee” can be ambiguous. It refers to vulnerable aliens seeking protection from a well-founded fear of persecution in their place of origin. Identifying such a situation requires to see a victim and a source of persecution. This is why we must take into consideration the politics of refugee protection. States drafted the 1951 Convention with several purposes in mind.7 It applied to persons displaced by events in Europe before 1951, to limit the number of possible cases to the Western world. Unlike other conventions, it gave a discretionary power to states—not a universal right to individuals. It served as an instrument for the state’s own political agenda.8 Since a refugee had to be outside of their country, its protection implied one important point. That the authorities might be the source of persecution, or that at least they have failed to protect its own citizen.

That the fear must be well-founded also suggests that there must be a consensus about what constitutes a threat and what does not. In the past, the determination of a threat was derived, in part, from an active campaign to represent the source of a threat in dehumanizing terms. Perceptions of threats, as a consequence, were the results of propaganda. The portrayal of thousands of refugees fleeing German troops during the First World War was a powerful way of underlining what was driving them away: German atrocities in Belgium.9 Belligerent states were not the only ones representing the exodus in these ways. Cultural activists, journalists, novelists and artists also shaped popular perceptions of refugees, and how they constituted the living proof of the threat the enemy represented.
 

Conflicting Understandings of Displacement

Researchers have studied how refugee definition can adjust to meet policy requirements,10 governmental, social and cultural categories,11 or that much jurisprudence has debated the notion of a “well-founded fear.”12 Studies have also underscored how the representations of displaced population changed, just like discourse, depending on the specific context.13 Yet how and why do these multiple representations of displaced populations work with each other? Do they conflict with one another, or do they reinforce each other?

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References

  1. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, https://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10
  2. The Merriam Webster defines a refugee as “one who flees” especially, “a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refugee. The Cambridge dictionary refers to “a person who has escaped from their own country for political, religious, or economic reasons or because of a war,” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/refugee. As Susanne Lachenicht has noted, the first use of this word in English refers to French protestants seeking refuge from persecution. We find earlier cases of refugee movements in the use of the words “exiled” or “refuged” in English or “se réfugier” (to seek asylum), which appeared in French in the early fifteen century. Lachenicht, Susanne. “Refugees and Refugee Protection in the Early Modern Period.” Journal of Refugee Studies 30, no. 2 (2016), footnote 1, p. 277.
  3. A good example of how refugees can be confused as immigrants can be found here, https://boatpeoplehistory.com/rp/media-repr/gm/
  4. Mike Molloy conducted interviews with Tove Bording, a former Canadian immigration officer in Singapore between 1975 and 1977, who claimed to have coined the term in order to distinguish between land and boat people. The date of the report in which this distinction was made, remains however unknown. Molloy, M. J., Duchinsky, P., Jensen, K. F., & Shalka, R. (2017). Running on Empty, Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975–1980. Montreal: McGill University Press, p. 189. See also Molloy, M. J. (2014). Obituary. The Canadian Immigration Historical Society Bulletin, 71, 11.
  5. A quick search in digitized newspaper archives shows that it appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 13 June 1976 referring to the refugees in Thailand and Vietnam.
  6. Tsamenyi, M. (1983), ‘The “Boat People”: Are They Refugees?’, Human Rights Quarterly, 5 348–73.
  7. Goodwin-Gill, Guy. “The Politics of Refugee Protection.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2008): 8–23.
  8. See the discussion in Zolberg, A., A. Suhrke, and S. Aguayo (1989), Escape From Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World, New York: Oxford University Press, Soguk, N. (1999), States and Strangers, Refugees and Displacement of Statecraft, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haddad, E. (2008), The Refugee in International Society, Between Sovereigns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Madokoro, L. (2016), Elusive Refuge, Chinese Migrants in the Cold War, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Akoka, Karen. “Crise Des Réfugiés, Ou Des Politiques D’asile ?” La Vie des idées (2016): Accessed 20 août 2020, https://laviedesidees.fr/Crise-des-refugies-ou-des-politiques-d-asile.html
  9. See Horne, John, and Alan Kramer. German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, and Puseigle, Pierre. “”A Wave on to Our Shores”: The Exiles and Resettlement of Refugees form the Western Front, 1914–1918.” European Journal of East Asian Studies 16, no. 4 (2007): 427–44.
  10. Bakewell, Oliver. “Research Beyond the Categories: The Importance of Policy Irrelevant Research into Forced Migration.” Journal of Refugee Studies 21, no. 4 (2008): 432–53.
  11. Zetter, Roger. “Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity.” Journal of Refugee Studies 4, no. 1 (1991): 39–62, Zetter, Roger. “More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization.” Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 2 (2007): 172–92.
  12. Hyndman, Patricia. “The 1951 Convention Definition of Refugee: An Appraisal With Particular Reference to the Case of Sri Lankan Tamil Applicants.” Human Rights Quarterly 9 (1987): 49–73.
  13. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena. “Representing Sahrawi Refugees’ “Educational Displacement” to Cuba: Self-Sufficient Agents or Manipulated Victims in Conflict?” Journal of Refugee Studies 22, no. 3 (2009): 323–50.