Homing Pigeons

The 50,000 Vietnamese refugees who fled from the French into Thailand in 1946 made friends easily enough with local Thai villagers, but they quickly wore out their welcome with the government in Bangkok. Clustered along the northeastern frontier, which borders on Laos, in tight little communities of their own, the refugees clung fiercely to their own language, built their houses on the ground instead of on stilts as is the Thai custom, and kept their ears glued to the voice from home--Hanoi radio, with its tireless Communist propaganda. Soon Ho Chi Minh's agents from North Viet Nam organized the refugees by means of a slickly efficient "invisible government," which controlled education among the Vietnamese, operated secret courts and even prescribed military training.

The Vietnamese refugees proved efficient farmers, carpenters and tailors, and won over their Thai neighbors through friendship clubs and by giving to the poor. When the Thai government nervously decided to move against this potential fifth column on its sensitive Laotian frontier, the local Thais themselves protested. Vietnamese women cut off their hair and wailed; children lay down in the highways to stop government trucks trying to haul Vietnamese out of the area.

Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, after he seized full power in Thailand late in 1958, announced bluntly: "They must go, and they must go soon." But who would take the Vietnamese refugees? Laos did not want them. Neither did South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, who feared loss of face if the refugees--mostly northerners, and Communist-indoctrinated--should reject an invitation from him. At this point, North Viet Nam's Communist Boss Ho Chi Minh offered to take in the refugees. And after the usual hard bargaining, an agreement was reached between the Communists and Thailand's Anti-Communist government.

Belatedly alarmed, Ngo Dinh Diem sent "information teams" into northern Thailand to dissuade the refugees from choosing Communism, but few even showed up at Diem's neat little propaganda houses to hear his message. Last week the first 922 Vietnamese refugees boarded a ship in Bangkok for the five-day trip to Haiphong and North Viet Nam.

Hanoi radio gloated over a striking propaganda victory: "Welcome to the fine sons and daughters of the nation, whose hearts yearn for their great leader Ho Chi Minh, who long to return home to join in the socialist construction."

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