Word: hanoi
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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...
Only the Soviet Union, Viet Nam's principal mentor, came to Hanoi's defense. Pravda announced that the Kremlin supported Viet Nam's "constructive proposals for a solution of the refugee problem," including "arrangements for the lawful, well-organized and safe departure of those who want to leave the country." Besides, it added gratuitously, the refugee problem was rooted in the period when "U.S. imperialism dominated the south of Viet Nam." In point of fact, that is not true; the enmity between the Vietnamese and their Chinese countrymen is an ancient one, and Hanoi's policy...
Though they have problems with fleeing refugees of their own, the Chinese angrily rejected Hanoi's claims that the refugees were mostly people escaping from Viet Nam's "socialist transformation." The People's Daily of Peking pointed out that 95% of the 230,000 or so Sino-Vietnamese whom China has admitted in recent months have come from northern Viet Nam, where the Communists took power in 1954. Asked the paper: "How was the [25-year-old] socialist transformation served by dismissing Chinese from their jobs, forcing them to retire, demoting them and reducing their pay, cutting...