The New Disposessed

On April 30 1975, Saigon fell to advancing North Vietnamese troops. The American ambassador left on the helicopter Lady Ace 09 at 05:00 that morning and the last marines left at 07:53. It was an ignominious end to a brutal and unwarranted war. And they left a mess behind. For starters, there were the hundreds of Vietnamese stranded in the US embassy and thousands more outside.

Many of these were compromised by their association with the Americans and, fearing for their wellbeing when the Vietnamese forces occupied the city, fled south. Thousands took to ramshackle boats, preferring to risk the perils of the sea than stay in Vietnam.
They became known as the boat people. Many of them died when overloaded junks and fishing smacks foundered, too crowded or weak to withstand the rigours of the ocean. Their plight shocked and moved many. A refugee programme was agreed, with quotas assigned to participating countries…
That was a generation ago. But now a new wave of boat people has appeared, this time headed for Europe, and they’re just as desperate and just as willing to take to the coffin ships.
It often doesn’t come off. In all the turmoil of recent weeks you might have missed the news that a boat carrying asylum seekers, mainly from Ethiopia and Eritrea, sank in stormy seas while trying to reach Lampedusa.
It seems they had been journeying for some time. To attempt the crossing to Lampedusa they came through Libya to the port of Zuwarah. But how were they to know they’d be landing into the middle of a brutal civil war?
Well, hair-raising it might have been, but the turmoil made it easier to embark. The Maltese coastguard picked up a distress signal two days later. The boat sprang a leak and there was panic. Nobody is sure how many drowned but the cautious estimate is 250.
They weren’t the first and they won’t be the last. Last week some 7,000 boat people were shipped off the island. And they keep on coming. Media reports claimed that continuing arrivals meant there were almost 1,500 migrants on the island, mostly Tunisians.
This begs so many questions. For example, while the price of bread and gasoline may have triggered the unrest, the point of the so-called Jasmine revolution(s) in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria was to gain more democracy, to get something of the things enjoyed in the west as a matter of course. So how is it that in Tunisia, where a hated leader was ousted and there has been movement towards reform, people’s response has been to leave?
And isn’t there a great paradox, when we compare what happened in Vietnam, or indeed Iran in the 1950s, with what happened in Iraq and may now be happening in Libya? In the former, the Americans intervened and overthrew the democratically elected leaders and installed puppet despots. In Iraq they intervened to overthrow a despot they had long been happy to do business with.
We don’t know where or how the conflict in Libya will end. Maybe Gaddafi will go. He’s another despot and won’t be missed. But it has already triggered a mass evacuation by economic migrants, some Tunisian, others Egyptian and many from further east, from Bangla Desh and Sri Lanka…
Where are they to go? And what happens when the flows from warzones in Arab countries combine with the increasing flows of economic and climate change refugees from equatorial Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and a dozen other stans to boot?
There are already so many that they are threatening the very freedoms they hope to find, freedoms hard won and much cherished in Europe and elsewhere. But the inexorable rise in migration has been mirrored by a rise in racism and anti-immigration sentiment across Europe.
Lampedusa is the frontline. Its beaches are sandy, its waters are clear and warm and the scuba diving is excellent. It was once a heavenly Mediterranean island. But now? Now it’s a kind of hell, both for those who live there and those who try to land.
Such is the growth of the world’s population, this can only go one way. Furthermore, if climate change happens as predicted, more and more regions of the world will become uninhabitable. Some environmentalists, such as Richard Lovelock, coiner of the Gaia theory, have taken a millenial stance: they argue that Ireland and the UK should shut up shop and vastly increase the size of their armies to maintain a fortress against the desperate hordes that will wash over our shores wave after wave after wave…
Hand in hand with that, inevitably, would be a growth in coercive, illiberal government and a convergence between the conditions in countries ruled by despots like Gaddafi and those in so-called liberal democracies. Who would then flee… and where to?
As our own dogs of war start to bark again, we need to remember a number of things. Freedom was hard won. The kind of independence we have treasured in the past may no longer be viable. We are in an era of interdependence. We will all sink and swim together, the Irish, the British, the French, the Italians…
And let us never forget that we too were once boat people. After the Great Famine, millions of Irish took to coffin ships driven by the need to get away from where they were, to get to somewhere that might offer them hope.
We survived and moved on. So too the Vietnamese boat people. It was panic that sank the boat off Lampedusa. If we keep our heads we’ll all stay afloat. If we don’t…