Word: ethnicity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...refugee tragedy is most pressing in Southeast Asia, partly because the sheer numbers are too great for nearby countries to handle, partly because the largest body of exiles are victims of the cynical, racist policies of the Hanoi government. The Vietnamese refugees, most of them ethnic Chinese, are leaving their homeland at the rate of 65,000 a month-and their departure is enriching the Hanoi government...
Hanoi's calculated effort to get rid of the ethnic Chinese has been denounced throughout the civilized world. "Everybody knows the word that characterizes current Vietnamese policies," editorialized West Germany's prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "That word is holocaust." Said Singapore's Rajaratnam: "The best anti-Communist propaganda now being put forward anywhere in the world emanates from Phnom-Penh and Hanoi. However critical ASEAN countries might be about the many shortcomings within their own societies, they now have even greater cause to be wary of a 'liberation' that causes thousands of people to risk...
According to refugee accounts, the government is forcing its Chinese to choose between leaving the country or moving to one of the "new economic zones"-that is, rural labor camps. Western intelligence agencies are convinced that Hanoi is determined to get rid of all of its 1 million ethnic Chinese. In a brutal, Catch-22 manner, the government is charging even those people it wants to exile for the privilege of leaving. The price has apparently averaged about $2,000 per person, payable in gold or hard currency...
Scattered throughout Southeast Asia, the refugee camps have taken on personalities of their own. The Laotian camps in northern Thailand are probably the most satisfactory, in part because the Lao are ethnic cousins of the Thais. The sprawling camp at Nong Khai, with 46,000 people, is larger than the provincial Thai capital. Its inhabitants were able to bring some valuables with them into exile; the camp has a nightclub, several silver shops, a produce market, a makeshift gym and an arts and crafts center. Farther south, camps for Cambodians are little more than barbed-wire enclosures. The Vietnamese camps...
...under pressure from the U.S., is now willing to let in as many as 500. China has taken 230,000 refugees so far, but is reluctant to take more. The U.S. had hoped to encourage the Soviet Union to lean on the Vietnamese to ease up on their ethnic Chinese minority. President Carter broached the subject to Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev at Vienna two weeks ago, but got nowhere...