Refugees: Seeking Safe Harbor

The 66 refugees had been adrift in the South China Sea for nearly a week. Their fragile little fishing boat was waterlogged. They were without food and water, and their clothes had been shredded by high winds. Ship after ship passed them by, ignoring their S O S's in violation of the most basic code of the sea. Then a Taiwan-bound Israeli freighter sighted the nearly naked passengers. Captain Meir Tadmor of the Yuvali telegraphed Haifa for permission to take them aboard, even though his ship carried only enough life rafts and jackets for his 30-member crew. Still, he had no choice but to pick up the refugees, he told Haifa, because "they are poor in body and morale."

Captain Tadmor's humanitarian gesture called attention last week to the plight of some of the world's most neglected refugees. His 66 sea-weary passengers were Vietnamese--the most recent group of perhaps 300,000 refugees who have fled South Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos since the Communist conquest. About 145,000 South Vietnamese were brought to the U.S. by American sea-and airlift after the regime of Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon collapsed. The 90,000 Laotians who have slipped over the border to Thailand and an estimated 7,000 Cambodians live in wretched refugee camps that are maintained by the United Nations. Since the fall of Saigon, anti-Communist South Vietnamese have had no choice but to make perilous escape attempts by sea. The risks are huge. Many are believed to have drowned in storms or other ocean mishaps. Even those who escape the surveillance of Communist patrol boats run the risk of being ignored by large ships they meet, or being forcibly pushed back to sea by police at supposedly friendly shores.

Characteristically, the Yuvali found no port in Asia that was willing to accept its surplus cargo, which included two dentists, a surgeon, a professor of geography, a former ARVN major, two bankers, two nurses, several fishermen, and 16 children under the age of ten. Captain Tadmor made an unscheduled stop in Hong Kong to get the refugees desperately needed medical attention; authorities in the British crown colony refused to allow them ashore on the ground that the Yuvali was not scheduled to call at Hong Kong.

Equally inhospitable, at first, were authorities in Taiwan: they put a police cordon around the ship to prevent anyone from getting off. Prospects for the refugees were equally poor at the Yuvali's next port of call, Yokohama, Japan has consistently refused to admit escapees from Indochina unless the United Nations or another country agrees to take the refugees off its hands quickly. Most Asian states will accept them--temporarily--only if there is no other way they can survive.

The rebuff awakened some poignant memories in Israel. Many ships carrying Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust vainly sought entry at ports in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Caribbean. "We have learned from the history of the Jewish boats which wandered the seven seas looking for a haven and which were turned away," declared Menachem Begin last week. His first act as Israel's new Premier was to offer asylum and opportunities for resettlement to the 66 Vietnamese. Taiwan then allowed the group to land and go to Sung Shan International Airport for a flight to Israel.

Good Weather. Despite the dismal future facing most refugees, good weather at sea has led to an increasing number of escape attempts in the past two months. Since April, 244 Vietnamese have made the 1,000-mile crossing to Hong Kong; they were accepted when the U.N. guaranteed that it would cover their expenses and speed their departure after three months. About 2,000 have arrived in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines. Most are packed into squalid refugee camps, hoping for resettlement elsewhere.

The majority of these refugees want to find a haven in the U.S. Their chances, however, are slight. The current U.S. program for fugitives from Indochina is confined to people who have fled by boat, and allows for the entry of 300 people a month for the next three months. After that the number will be reduced to 100. But to qualify for entry at all, refugees must have close relatives who are U.S. citizens or be in a "high risk" category of people who held ranking positions in the Saigon regime, or who collaborated closely with U.S. military or Government agencies in Viet Nam.

In Hong Kong last week some of the newest refugees from Viet Nam told TIME Correspondent Richard Bernstein of the long, laborious preparations they had made for their escape. First a boat had to be acquired, then supplies and fuel were hoarded--in small quantities, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the security police. Nguyen Duyen, 39, a former South Vietnamese naval officer, started plotting his escape as soon as the Communist tanks began rumbling toward Saigon in the spring of 1975. He sold everything he owned to buy a fishing boat, but his escape plans were interrupted when he was imprisoned for ten months in a "reeducation" camp. After his release Nguyen tried to make a living as a fisherman, but he was unable to support his wife and six children since he was forced to sell his catch to the government at very low prices.

Small Cache. Three weeks ago, Nguyen, his family and six other people made an audacious getaway from Danang in broad daylight. Pretending to start out on a lazy, late-afternoon pleasure excursion, they headed for the Philippines. They took with them a small cache of weapons accumulated during the war; the refugees intended to fight it out, if necessary, with Communist patrols that capture eight out of every ten escape boats.

When heavy seas and winds drove their small craft toward Hong Kong, they changed course. A fishing boat from Macao gave the refugees water and guided them into Hong Kong, where, by a stroke of luck, they passed unnoticed by harbor police. Once inside Hong Kong last week, the group immediately went to the authorities and turned in their arms. While the U.N. pays their living expenses, Nguyen and his family are hoping to be accepted by the U.S.

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