Word: boatful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dramatic and horrifying though their plight may be, the boat people represent only a fraction of the world's unwanted exiles. Indeed, the age has been called "a century of refugees," because wars and political upheavals and natural disasters like famine and flood have made so many homeless. At the end of World War II, there were 40 million refugees in Europe alone; perhaps the most pitiable were the Jewish survivors of Hitler's Holocaust. At the time of the partition of British India, in 1947, 15 million were dispossessed. In 1950, 5 million North Koreans fled...
...Songkhla boat camp in southern Thailand, where nearly 5,000 Vietnamese live on a section of ant-infested beach, people use the privies when the water is high so that the falling tide will lessen the stench. On the island of Bidong, site of Malaysia's largest camp, conditions were considered critical six months ago when the camp's population was 15,000. Today 45,000 people are crowded into 30 acres. French doctors aboard a privately chartered hospital ship stationed offshore have asked Pope John Paul II to visit Bidong, adding: "On this island today beats...
...moment, the biggest problem is a stopgap one: to rescue the boat people immediately. A recently formed Tokyo-based group called Refugees International is urging the U.S. and other countries to provide emergency facilities, such as abandoned government bases, to be used for housing refugees temporarily until permanent homes can be found. Malaysia is asking the U.S. to supply processing centers. Malaysia hopes that Indonesia will provide the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees with an island capable of receiving as many as 200,000 refugees as a processing center. The ASEAN members will ask Western nations to guarantee that...
...have no constituency, the refugees have sympathizers in many countries. In Paris, Mayor Jacques Chirac proposed that the city charter a ship and a plane to bring 1,500 refugees into France immediately. The motion was finally passed, with abstentions by the Communists, for whom stories of the Vietnamese boat people have become an embarrassment. The people of Iowa have pledged to accept 1,500 refugees for resettlement this year, and are disappointed that transportation for the Vietnamese has not yet been arranged. Says Iowa Refugee Official Richard Whitaker: "We are ready for them and upset that we cannot...
...Vietnamese employment rate in the U.S. is higher than that of the American population as a whole, and the number of Vietnamese refugees on welfare has steadily declined. According to the study, 71% of the families now have incomes of at least $800 a month. But for the boat people, all that lies in the distant future. The most they can expect now is a sort of least common denominator of human life: a stretch of sand on which to beach a leaky boat, and the prospect, however remote, of a new life in an alien land...