The Economist

The survivors who seek their place in paradise p. 19

At Cherating, on the east coast of Malaysia, rolls of barbed wire separate parched and perspiring refugees from the surf which hits the shore only 10 yards from this beachside camp. With the sea off limits -- for alleged security reasons -- inmates spend hours queueing for the two-bucketsful share of tanked water which is meant to meet all of a family's daily needs. Since the army-run smuggling service was shut down a few months ago, and the last bit of open space was occupied by new arrivals, most of the 7,500 refugees have passed most of their time lying about on mats or hammocks in the meagre space they can claim as their own: less than one square yard per person.

But within the confinement of the camp there is also activity. The refugees have set up their own elaborate administration, complete with a disciplinary court headed by a Vietnamese former judge who metes out sentences of a day to a month on the clean-up squad, mostly for violating sanitary regulations.

Volunteers have constructed the 48 latrines which the squad cleans daily and which have kept diarrhoea to a minimum. Individual families have made their own primitive drainage systems out of tinned cans buried in the sand. And from every shed comes the sound of hammering as more tins -- the most widely available raw material -- are fashioned into cooking pots, receptacles and children's toys. A toddler plays with a suitable symbol of the shared experience of Cherating: a tin boat filled with cigarette-butt people, standing room only.

Smugglertown on the sea

Bidong island, an hour by the fastest launch from the same Malaysian coast, has 41,000 people crammed into little more than a square kilometre on the sandy edge of a rocky hill.It lacks even a rudimentary sanitation system like the one at Cherating (a $500,000 sewerage and water supply system is under construction) and has no authorised access to the outside world, though swimming and fishing are permitted. But Pulau Bidong has become a lively and commercially active community with a division of labour along ethnic lines: the Chinese control the retail sector; the Vietnamese are hewers of wood and teachers of English.

The sand paths of Bidong are lined with stalls selling tinned foods, Nescafe, razors, toilet paper and occasionally fresh chickens and vegetables, all smuggled in from Malaysian fishing boats by refugee Chinese traders. Bakeries turn out French bread and Chinese buns; Cafe Tudo, named after a street in Saigon, serves coffee, tea and cola on plastic-covered tables hewn out of logs; barbers, watch-repairers and dressmakers ply their trades in the open (the sewing machines also having been smuggled in), while prostitues ply theirs less visibly.

Work-out

At Shamshuipo camp in Hongkong, the air is rent with howls that recall the site's former use as a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during the second world war. These come from the slaughter-house just over the fence. There is anguished wailing inside the camp too -- from the Vietnamese journalist and others like him who have had no response to the letters and telegrams they have sent to families left behind in Vietnam. Here the housing is more solid, though not much more spacious than at Cherating or Bidong, with iron bunk beds for four or more. But fewer people are lying about in them because 60% of the adults among the 7,000 residents of Shamshuipo are out during the day working in Hongkong factories. By August 1st, when the UN cuts off its food allowance as an incentive to work, most families in the camp will have become self-supporting.

These three camps are not strictly representative of the four dozen enclosures for Indochinese refugees now scattered throughout south-east Asia. Pulau Bidong is a one-off original. Cherating is luxurious compared with the fetid camps for Khmer Rouge followers in Thailand. Hongkong has refugee housing with better facilities -- and more congenial neighbours -- than Shamshuipo. What is typical about Bidong, Cherating and Shamshuipo is the resourcefulness, talent and energy they demonstrate and contain. It is these qualities among the refugees from Vietnam, as much as their numbers, that make the countries of south-east Asia so eager to see them off.

Everywhere, except in the two thriving Chinese cities of Hongkong and Singapore, the refugees from Vietnam, of whom about two thirds are ethnic Chinese, are seen as undesirably dynamic rivals who would threaten to outbid and outperform the local population. Yet Hongkong and Singapore do not want them either, even though Hongkong employers have found the refugees from southern Vietnam more diligent and disciplined than the work-shy ones from either north Vietnam or China. In the past year Hongkong has had to absorb over 200,000 legal and illegal immigrants from China who have already overstretched its housing and social services and set back its hopes of moving from a low-cost manufacturing centre to a high-wage, high technology economy. Still, Hongkong is the one harbour in south-east Asia that has not turned refugees away; its reward for humanitarianism has been 65,000 new boat arrivals this year.

No, he explained

Singapore's refusal to provide more than temporary asylum for more than 450 refugees, despite a labour shortage which has required the import of 20,000 "guest workers", is explained away by an unconvincing but deeply felt political argument. Its prime minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, insists that any furhter intake of Chinese into his Chinese island in a Malay sea would inflame existing suspicions and hostilities among his neighbours and be seen as reinforcing the economic competitiveness of his booming industry. His answer is to close his port to boat people and to lead an international crusade for the ostracism of Vietnam.

Mr Lee's rationalisation for his own closed-door policy is based on an intimate understanding of his former countrymen in Malaysia, who expelled Singapore from the Malaysian federation in 1965 because of worries about its thrusting Chinese. Even without Singapore, the Malays' predominance in their own country rests on a narrow racial plurality -- 47% Malays compared with 37% Chinese, 10% Indian and 6% assorted indigenous tribals -- plus a policy of positive discrimination in favour of native Malays in all spheres. The thought of more ethnic Chinese coming in to enlarge the already better-educated, more prosperous Chinese community and the consequent upset in Malaysia's fine racial balance is anathema. Not even the largely Chinese opposition party has dared to criticise the tow-out/throw-out policy which sent more than 47,000 boat people back to the high seas this year.

Thailand has less of a Chinese phobia than any other south-east Asian country, having absorbed countless Chinese over the centuries by intermarriage and under Thai names.But it has a historical antipathy towards Vietnamese, which explains why Thais are more agitated about their relatively tiny population of 9,000 boat people (new arrivals are running around 50% Vietnamese) than about the 180,000 plus from Laos and Cambodia.

One reason why Thailand has so few boat people is the very effective deterrent mounted more than a year ago in the combined depredations of Thai pirates and Thailand's navy and police force. These attacks served to redirect the main flow of escapers from Thailand towards Malaysia.The pirates have pursued them: some 80% of the boats that land in Malaysia have been robbed at least once. Now, as a result of Malaysia's new toughness, the refugee stream is being shifted southward again, towards Indonesia.

Indonesia's Chinese community, the largest in south-east Asia, has long been the object of suspicion and dislike because of the familiar pattern of Chinese commercial dominance. The latest attempt to curb Chinese business was a law passed in March excluding Chinese-owned companies from government procurement contracts.

Until recently, Indonesian distrust of Chinese has not been translated into an active attempt to push off Indochinese refugees, largely because they were so few and concentrated on outer islands whose contact with Jakarta is minimal. But since Malaysia started towing boats southwards (and reportedly providing them with directions to Indonesia's Anambas islands), Indonesia has joined the big-time refugee receivers (43,000) and repellers. Malaysia and Indonesia have agreed to co-ordinate naval patrols: a policy which, if effective, may end up by pushing the coast-hopping refugee flotillas farther south still, towards Australia.

These four frontline first asylum countries -- Thailand, Malaysia, Hongkong and Indonesia -- have undoubtedly been discommoded by the 365,000 refugees they were harbouring at the end of June. But they are not yet suffering serious social and economic strains. Grassroots reaction has been remarkably subdued: a few student demonstrations in Thailand; some stone-throwing incidents along the Malaysian coast; some protests by Thai fishermen about the bodies which keep turning up in their nets. The one horrific exception, so far, the gang rape of refugee women by Malay soldiers on a beach near Cherating two weeks ago, tells more about the macho mentality than about attutides toward refugees.

Shows of hostility have been matched by some spontaneous gestures of sympathy: a Malay crew, having been ordered to tow out a boatload of refugees, is reported to have knelt en masse and prayed for their captain's soul. Thai villagers pressed gifts of rice into the arms of Cambodians on the way to being repatriated. The uniformly negative public comment on the refugees has mainly been orchestrated from above.

The drain on local exchequers from the refugees has been negligible. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees pays all capital and maintenance costs, except for those arrivals who are deliberately denied refugee status in order to justify pushing them back -- as the Thais have done with at least 42,000 Cambodians (see box overleaf) and as all south-east Asia is now doing with boat people. Only Hongkong has a legitimate financial grievance: the UN has fallen so far behind in processing and funding that it is now covering the costs of only a quarter of the colony's refugees, with the rest of the tab -- $10m so far this year -- being picked up by the Hongkong government.

The economies of Malaysia and Thailand are actually benefiting from refugee-related spending by the UN -- over $8m in Thailand and $10m in Malaysia this year -- and by refugees themselves with their hoarded gold and remittances from overseas relatives. UN officials estimate that $100,000 a month pours into the one camp of Nongkhai in north Thailand alone. Local businessmen are reaping big profits; Nongkhai camp supports a restaurant run by a local police chief.

But the governments also have a point in claiming that poorer locals are being hurt. In Nongkhai by wage undercutting: refugees pay bribes of 50ў- $1 for the privilege of getting out of the camp to earn $1-1.50 a day. And in all areas around the camps by rising prices. On the east coast of Malaysia, prices are said to have doubled this year. The Malaysian government is now trying to alleviate this pressure by organising central buying for refugee rations and prosecuting smugglers inside and outside the camps.

The Malaysian and Thai governments have an obvious interest in dramatising their refugee burdens -- Malaysia is claiming unrecompensed expenses of $12m so far this year, and Thailand has prepared a similar accounting -- not least to put pressure on third countries to increase and speed up resettlement. This was clearly one of the motives behind the joint renunciation of the principle of first asylum by the five members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) on Bali two weeks ago. But there was more than gamesmanship in this move and in the proposals which Asean representatives are tabling at the UN-sponsored refugee conference in Geneva on July 20th. All Asean members are convinced that the continuing presence in their countries of refugees from communist Indochina constitutes a threat to their national security. And all are fearful that, however many are resettled in the west, a sizeable residue -- "the garbage of the garbage", as a senior Thai official put it -- will be left behind.

Gripes about gaps

These worries are reinfoced by the growing gap between arrivals and departures -- in Thailand this year the ratio is nearing 10-1 -- and between promised and actual offtake by resettlement countries. The United States was committed to take 4,000 people a month out of Malaysia this year. By June only 13,000 had left.

The other complaint of local governments is that the resettlers are creaming off the healthy and able -- a charge which is only partly true: the United States regularly admits people with tuberculosis and no marketable skills, provided they meet the criteria of having relatives in the United States or some previous association with American agencies. Some refugees, such as a group of Cambodians recently saved from repatriation, are accepted on purely compassionate grounds. Other countries apply similar rules. Switzerland recently admitted somebody certifiably insane and Canada seems to be scooping up refugees suspected by their fellows of being agents for Hanoi.

Malaysia's aggressively articulate home minister, Mr Ghazali Shafie has produced a sheaf of schemes to relieve local anxieties by reducing the exodus at source and by removing a large part of the present camp population from Asean soil. His ideas include a UN-run camp for would-be refugees inside Vietnam from which people would be resettled and to which unauthorised escapers would be repatriated. The Vietnamese would be rewarded for providing this extra-territorial enclave with the rights to confiscate all property of all inmates -- an even bigger take than they are now getting from their trafficking business. Mr Ghazali Shafie defends this bizarre proposal with the argument that anyone who is concerned about property is not a refugee but an immigrant and should be treated accordingly.

Another Ghazali plan would be to set up a number of local UN holding centres on non-Asean territory to which refugees now in Asean camps could be evacuated forthwith: on China's Hainan island; on Japan's Okinawa; on America's Guam; on France's New Caledonia; in a corner of Australia. A fallback position would be to build new large camps -- for 200,000 or so -- on empty Asean islands or even to use existing camps like Pulau Bidong. The precondition for Asean co-operation would be an open-ended commitment that, at the end of the day, every last refugee would be removed from south-east Asia:

The pledge we want is that a refugee who gets on to an island should not spend more than a specific period there -- say, three years -- and that, during that time, he must be found a home.Then the programme can go on almost indefinitely. But we will not be saddled with unwanted people.

Variants on the Ghazali holding-camp proposals have been floating about since he first launched the small-scale scheme which is now being implemented, at a cost of $13m, on Indonesia's Galang island. The holding-centre plan gained new support at the Bali meeting when the Americans joined the discussions, though American officials rejected a proposed site on Guam as impossibly expensive. The main virtue in shifting a sizeable number of refugees sideways would be to lessen the hardships of the first-asylum countries, and thus persuade them to reopen their beaches and their camps to more boats. The main snag is that no collection of elected politicians can possibly meet Mr Ghazali's demand for an open-ended resettlement commitment when the future total of refugees yet to come from the three countries of Indochina might-- might-- be as high as 3m.

Assuming that this demand were negotiable, the holding centre idea could be a practical palliative. But, to be effective and humane, it should incorporate the lessons to be drawn from existing camps such as Shamshuipo and Bidong.

The best deal for refugees is plainly that offered by Hongkong: to encourage them to become self-supporting within a labour-short economy. The trouble is that, apart from Singapore, there are no other obvious candidates for a Hong-kong-style solution. This is why Mr Ghazali's suggestion about camps in western-owned territories should not be dismissed, despite higher local costs, unless impartial studies of labour markets prove them impractical.

The next least bad solution would be an adaptation of the Bidong model. The inhabitants of this inhospitable outpost have shown what ingenuity can accomplish with virtually no resources. If an uninhabited or sparsely inhabited island could be found with a fresh-water supply and perhaps some arable land, and goods could be sold through authorised channels, the refugees would build a community. If outside entrepreneurs were permitted to bring in raw materials and piecework, as they already do to some camps in north Thailand as well as in Hongkong, the island could take off.

Fears that the refugees would prove a new source of competition for local labour could be limited by agreements on rates of pay and forms of work and counter-balanced by the promise that the infrastructure created by refugee energies and international finance would be turned over to the landlord country within a given period. Indonesia, for example, with its multitude of islands, could incorporate such a site into its long-term plan to resettle its own people out of overcrowded Java.

What makes Bidong a more tolerable living place than Cherating is not only the availability of contraband goods. It is the work the black market generates that contrasts so sharply with the dispiriting idleness at Cherating. Like long-term prisoners, long-stay refugees in several camps are already showing signs of mental disturbance: they generally become tense, less co-operative and more demanding. The holding centres, where refugees might end up spending three to five years, could turn into asylums of another sort unless they were allowed to become economically productive.

But the key to refugees psychology will remain the prospect of resettlement. And this in turn will depend on the dimensions of the problem. The world is still trying to guess how many people are going to come out of Indochina; but refugee testimony, and the recent pattern of outflow, suggest that the right estimates are those at the high end of the spectrum.

Countdown

Any calculation of the ultimate total of refugees from Indochina must start with the assumption that Vietnam intends to oust its entire ethnic Chinese community. So first make an estimate of how many Chinese are still left in the two parts of Vietnam -- say something over 1m; then subtract the proportion destined to die at sea, plus the inevitable core who will be deterred by the risk.That leaves a basic minimum of about 600,000.

Proceed to a second assumption -- subject to more variables but supported by refugee reports -- that non-Chinese Vietnamese will keep leaving their country at the same rate as they are today -- roughly two Vietnamese for every three Chinese. This brings the projected total from Vietnam alone to 1m.

Laos and Cambodia present many more imponderables. It seems fair to assume that all those Hmong or Meo mountain tribesmen who have survived the bombing and strafing of their traditional homeland by Vietnamese forces will try to follow the freedom trail from Laos into Thailand; some 64,000 are sitting in Thai camps, along with 74,000 lowland Lao, and 5,000 more from both groups are coming out of Laos every month. Given the worsening economic conditions in Laos, the creeping collectivisation of agriculture, and increasing resentment at increasing Vietnamese influence, there is no end in sight. Pessimists put the potential total at another million. And Cambodia could simply empty out. Famine, continued Vietnamese occupation and civil war and the deliberate deportation of ethnic Chinese may eventually produce the Lebensraum in this former rice-surplus kingdom which may have been Hanoi's original intention. Unless present pipedreams of negotiating a Sihanoukist third-force solution for Cambodia come to pass, a third cohort of 1m refugees could be an underestimate.

Not all these people will want to be resettled outside south-east Asia. Some 15% of the Lao and 25% of Cambodians in Thailand are refusing interviews with resettlement agencies in the hope that they will somehow, someday, be able to return to their own countries. About 30,000 Lao have already integrated themselves among their ethnic cousins in northern Thailand. But Cambodians could not assimilate so easily, nor would the Thais allow them to. So, on worstcase projections, assuming no political change in Hanoi, from where all Indochina's disasters stem, up to 3m more refugees may be throwing themselves on the world's mercies over the next few years.

How the pips squeak in Vietnam

The picture of what is happening in Indochina today to produce this mass migration is probably clearest in Vietnam -- because of the huge sample provided by 240,000 refugees over the past year and the systematic interviewing that has been done by the UN, by resettlement and immigration officers and, in our own fly-by-night way, by itinerant journalists like myself. The evidence upholds some widely held generalisations and modifies others.

Take the three-quarter truth that Vietnam is victimising its ethnic Chinese. In north Vietnam the pattern of deliberate discrimination is undeniable. Ordinary labourers, farmers and fishermen who had been willing to live under north Vietnam's communist system for decades, and had even inter-married with Vietnamese, suddenly have found themselves thrown out of jobs, ostracised by their friends and presented with a stark choice between exile to a New Economic Zone or deportation at a price -- only because they were of Chinese origin. Although a few ethnic Vietnamese have straggled out of north Vietnam in the new wave of boats that began to hit Hongkong last November, the specific new pressures that produced the flight -- including the midnight knock by public security forces -- have been applied solely to Chinese. And, refugees claim, to every Chinese. Chinese are the only northerners who are being sent to New Economic Zones which, like those in the south, tend to be barren areas or jungle, incapable of supporting life.

That these Chinese from north Vietnam are not a lot of sophisticated fat cats is confirmed by Hongkong camp directors, who report some difficulties in accommodating the northeners because many of them have never used a door knob, much less a flush toilet. It is also evident in the lower price of passage in the north, carefully adjusted to what the traffic will bear. The fixed northern price is said to be four taels of gold for an adult (at 1 1/3 ounces, a tael is now worth about $360) compared with an average of 10 taels in the south; but both fees are subject to wide variation and seem to be coming down, because most of the richer refugees have already left.

The northern boats are poorer too -- only 10% of them motorised compared with 100% of the southern boats. A coast-hopping trip by sailing junk from Haiphong takes at least six weeks and more often two months because of stops to buy provisions from Chinese fishermen, with watches as the preferred currency. Conditions are squalid, but in good weather chances of survival are 90%: much higher than for the three-day journey from southern ports across open sea to Thailand or Malaysia. As in the south, a small proportion of northern refugees are freelancers who evade government extortion by buying or commandeering a fishing boat.

The lower prices and higher survival rates in the north are luring more and more southern Vietnamese to go there as their jumping-off point for escape. The usual fee for a permit to travel north is two taels. Four taels can buy a first-class package trip by aeroplane to Hanoi and onward by car or bus to Haiphong.

Apart from a travel permit and official receipt for payment, what every wouldbe refugee, except the intrepid freelancer, needs is a Chinese identity card. Without exception, every ethnic Vietnamese refugee in my own limited sample in Hongkong, Thailand and Malaysia testified that he had had to buy counterfeit papers identifying him as a Chinese. The key question is whether this practice, which seems as systematised as the rest of Vietnam's export trade in people, is officially sanctioned from above or simply an expression of low-level corruption.

Vietnamese who have made it to a refugee camp seem convinced that they have done so in defiance of official orders and at high risk.A former Catholic seminarian from Danang who escaped on a freelance boat was sure that he would have got six years in jail if he had been caught, because of his religious connections, compared with three years for an ordinary Vietnamese escaper. Nobody could cite a Chinese who had been arrested while attempting to escape -- but this is at least partly because Chinese invariably pay their dues through official channels; evading the profitable extortion network is a crime in itself.

Many Chinese from southern Vietnam tell the same tale as their northern cousins: dismissal from work (often immediately after "liberation" in 1975, whereas northerners did not start being fired until the dispute with China flared up last year), followed by years or months living on savings or illegal trading; and then the midnight knock and the ultimatum: departure for a New Economic Zone or facilitated passage on a government-organised boat.

Everyone is a victim

But the pattern is not universal, as it seems to be in the north. Some southern Chinese have retained their jobs, though they find it progressively harder to survive on their earnings. But in this they are no worse off than the ordinary Vietnamese, whose food ration is down to nine kilos a month, of which only one or two is rice and the rest tapioca and potatoes. Prices on what remains of the black market are said to have gone up 300% between March and April this year. The large number of young men among the refugees points to another common reason for flight: evading the draft.

One group in south Vietnam which can correctly claim to have been victimised is businessmen and traders whose shops and factories were nationalised in early 1978. These happen to be largely ethnic Chinese, who have controlled the commercial sector in south Vietnam for generations. But Vietnamese businessmen were treated no differently: they were compensated with the same receipt for banked but untouchable capital on the back of which was the same order: to proceed to a New Economic Zone.

One of the few refugees who actually chose this option, a man identifiable even in his undershorts as a middle-class Chinese, was asked to describe the NEZ. "Like this", he answered, pointing to the bare sand and jungle surrounding Cherating camp. He and his fellow exiles duly cleared a patch of jungle and planted seeds. But when nothing grew, and their meagre food supply had been exhausted, they bribed their way out of the zone and either camped out with relatives or slept in the streets until they had secured their place on a boat.

Another slice of south Vietnamese society which has borne the brunt of the northern conquest is as disproportionately Vietnamese as the traders are the Chinese. This broad category includes those connected, however tenuously, with the former regime, all those who were educated abroad or studying foreign languages, Catholic priests (300 are in Vietnamese jails and three are conducting daily church services on Bidong) and assorted intellectuals.

Many of these people have already served terms in "re-education camps", which refugees make clear are no different from hard labour prisons. One former inmate claimed that at his camp political lectures were offered only once every three or four months. On release from these camps, the former prisoners are offered one option only: transportation to a New Economic Zone. The standard response is to gather up the family savings which have traditionally been kept in gold, look for a vendor of Chinese identity papers, and enter the pipeline for passage abroad.

Chinese refugees from south Vietnam tend to look genuinely bewildered when questioned about discrimination against Chinese. The invariable answer is that life in south Vietnam has become unendurable for just about everyone and that just about everyone would leave if he could. If anything, the Chinese can be considered privileged, for it is they who are being ushered, by way of Chinese middlemen, on to government-provided boats.

One outspoken Vietnamese, a former factory owner, claimed that Chinese motives for leaving Vietnam were 90% economic, whereas Vietnamese motives were 90% political. Allowing for 90% prejudice, Mr Tuan had a point. A higher proportion of Vietnamese refugees than Chinese have suffered overt political persecution, though only a small proportion of each group can be said to have left for purely economic reasons.

Still, the lure of the prosperous world outside Vietnam is a powerful one. Chinese and Vietnamese alike have been primed with pictures of large cars and sumptuous houses, sent by relatives who escaped in earlier waves, and seen in Saigon during its American period. Refugees give one near-unanimous answer to the question of where they would like to settle: mei, the word for beautiful in Chinese and Vietnamese which also means Meiquo, the beautiful country, America.

The paradise concept makes the refugees' willingness to risk their lives at sea more understandable. The death rate is well known, from a highly efficient bush telegraph and from avidly listened-to broadcasts by the BBC and Voice of America. But the calculation a refugee makes is not simply his chances of surviving the journey to a less threatened environment. The gamble appears worthwhile because the stakes are so high: a passport to paradise.

This is why young men will spend four nights and three days lashed to the outside of a 24-metre boat carrying 668 passengers. This is why older men will take their wives and daughters through pirate-infested waters, where they are liable to be raped as well as robbed. And this is why some refugees will bide their time on Bidong, on the off-chance of a place in the American quota, rather than join their families in France. Next to the hut on Bidong where representatives of the city of Paris were interviewing prospective settlers, a former employee of Saigon's rice institute explained that Australia, Canada and even England and Ireland were preferred to France as a destination because France was believed to have a lower standard of living.

The logic of the lure

Extending the logic of the paradise concept a senior Singapore diplomat argues that America's relative generosity in resettling refugees is not so much solving the problem as enlarging it. Every additional place which is publicly added to the quota, he insists, induces several more refugees to try their luck on the high sea. Clearly he is right that the flow of information and the flow of people are not unconnected.Foreign broadcasts not only provide the latest figures on casualties and resettlement, they also report the most favourable currents and the most sympathetic ports. One reason why Asean countries are publicising their own inhumanity is to get the message back to prospective travellers in Vietnam.

But there is no way that western countries can stop generosity breeding new objects for further generosity without attacking the problem at source. Such a policy means getting Vietnam and its client countries in Indochina to stop the worst of the policies that make their people want to leave. This does not imply simply bribing the Vietnamese government, with public aid or private investment, to close its exit doors to the refugees so that they will rot in New Economic Zones or prisons, or starve without ration cards.

That the free movement of people -- a principle enshrined in the Helsinki declaration -- should be impeded on the urging of democratic governments is quite unacceptable. But western countries do accept occasional exceptions to this rule. Britain is just now congratulating itself on having persuaded China -- by diplomatic representations and the beefing up of border forces -- to tighten controls over legal and illegal emigration to Hongkong.

The point is that the relative nastiness of a government is only one factor in the size of its refugee outflow. Cambodia under Pol Pot was undoubtedly a more murderous place than Vietnam is today but precious few people left it because they were physically stopped from doing so. What would happen if Russia and China lifted their border controls does not bear thinking about. The chief difference between Vietnam and these other governments is that it is actively exploiting its own unpopularity by literally selling its people down the river.

The selling has to stop. Unless it does, up to 1/2m more people will be condemning themselves to die at sea, and the survivors could face a world even less willing to accommodate them than it is today. These are two reasons why Vietnam should be kept to its promise to the UN to facilitate the orderly departure of people who have been guaranteed resettlement places (which must mean everybody in this fortunate category, and not just the people Vietnam is eager to expel). The UN might also have a go at the Asean proposal for a holding centre inside Vietnam, provided the UN and not the Vietnamese government controls admissions and provided Mr Ghazali's incentive scheme, authorising Vietnam to fleece its victims first, is retracted.

It would be convenient to conclude that Vietnam's connivance in the refugee traffic, and the fact that some of the refugees are simply seeking a better life, makes their plight less compelling. It does not. The 370,000 people who are squatting in the camps of south-east Asia need resettling. The thousands who are landing on beaches or foundering at sea every day need rescuing.But what of the millions who may try to follow them?

All the outflows from Indochina are a direct or indirect result of the Vietnamese government's actions. And almost all could be reduced by some policy changes in Hanoi.Sweet talking will not bring this about. Nor, in the first instance, will conditional offers of aid. Vietnam first has to be shown that the world means business: by a cut-off of all aid from democratic countries and a cold-shouldering by its one-time admirers in the third world. It may be necessary for Vietnam to learn on the battlefield that it cannot conquer Cambodia. And the Soviet Union, Vietnam's ally and protector, will have to be made to realise that it too will pay a price for its vicarious role in one of the horrors of the century.

All this may not work: the governments in Hanoi and Moscow are obdurate, and not easily deflected from policies which serve their several interests. At best it will take time, during which more refugees will stagger across borders, crash on to beaches and drown at sea. Other governments, including those in south-east Asia, should spend this time proving that paradise can be any place with a higher respect for human values than Vietnam.

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The Khmers who couldn't look back p.21

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