Indochina refugee crisis

. In spring 1975, the armies of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong advanced rapidly southward and by early April the defeat and occupation of South Vietnam by the north was nearly certain. During the Vietnam War, nearly one million Vietnamese had been employed by the U.S. government or were family members of former employees and were believed to be in danger of persecution or execution by the conquering North Vietnamese. Fearing that rumors of evacuation would cause panic in the South Vietnamese population, extensive planning began only on April 18, 1975, when U.S. President Gerald Ford created an inter-agency task force headed by Julia Taft to "coordinate...evacuation of U.S. citizens, Vietnamese citizens, and third-country nationals from Vietnam." By that time the military forces of North Vietnam were nearly in the outskirts of Saigon and the population of the city was swelled by hundreds of thousands of people displaced from areas already overrun by the communist armies. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese evacuated themselves, primarily by taking boats out to sea and demanding to be picked up by the navy. Early on the morning of April 30, the last Americans, 11 marines, were evacuated by helicopter from the Embassy roof. Many Vietnamese and third-country nationals awaiting or hoping for evacuation were left behind. A few months after the fall of Saigon, American officials realized that more refugees were crossing borders to escape Vietnam. The United States established a refugee office in Bangkok, Thailand, headed by Lionel Rosenblatt, to process additional refugees for entry into the United States. ==Hmong refugees==

The Hmong and other highland peoples of Laos were U.S. allies in the Vietnam War, fending off for more than a decade the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese army. By May 1975, however, the communist armies were advancing on the last Hmong stronghold at Long Tieng. Fearing that the communists would carry out their threat to exterminate the Hmong, CIA agent Jerry Daniels organized an evacuation of close associates and Hmong military officers, including General Vang Pao, the Hmong commander. Using civilian aircraft and pilots, about 2,000 Hmong were evacuated by air to Thailand from May 10 to 14, 1975. Unanticipated was that many Hmong would follow their leaders to Thailand, traveling on foot through high mountains, eluding soldiers, and crossing the Mekong River. Thousands died during the difficult journey. About 40,000 Hmong fled to Thailand in 1975 and more followed in the next few years. Most Hmong and other highlanders were housed at the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. The U.S. did not initially contemplate resettlement of Hmong, believing that they would be incapable of adapting to life in the U.S. Lobbying by Americans who had worked with the Hmong caused a change in policy. 140,200 Hmong and other highland peoples were resettled worldwide from 1975 until 1997, the great majority in the United States. The Hmong resettlement program continued until 2005. The U.S. took in 9,201 Hmong in 2004 who were living at Wat Tham Krabok in Thailand. A few thousand Hmong were resettled in France and about 1,000 were resettled in the French overseas department of French Guiana, where they became prosperous by growing vegetables for the local market. ==Lowland Lao refugees==

Along with the Hmong and other highland peoples a large number of lowland, ethnic Lao, crossed the Mekong River into Thailand. Between 1975 and 1995, the number of Laotians refugees, including both Hmong and lowland Lao, totalled 360,000. Most of the lowland Lao fleeing their country were urbanized and educated; many were former employees of the U.S. government. They were housed mostly at Nong Khai Refugee Camp just across the river from Laos. Between 1975 and 1997, 183,907 ethnic Lao were resettled worldwide. ==Hoa==

The Hoa are ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam, especially in the Cholon area of Saigon. In 1975, an estimated one to two million Hoa lived in Vietnam, and they owned or controlled most of the commerce of South Vietnam. After South and North Vietnam were united under a single communist government in 1976, the new government began to transform the economy from capitalist to socialist. The people most affected were the Hoa. The Hoa people were threatened by the Vietnamese who sent them as agricultural workers in the New Economic Zones (state farms) set up by the Government; with 1.5 million relocated. Hoa businesses in Saigon were confiscated. In the years following the Vietnam War, ethnic Chinese were purged from Vietnam. Beginning in April 1978 about 450,000 Hoa would go overland to China or by boat to Hong Kong during the next few years. 265,000 Hoa, mainly land arrivals, would be resettled in China. Between 1975 and 1999, 143,700 Vietnamese refugees, mostly Hoa arriving by sea in Hong Kong, were resettled in other countries. More than 67,000 were repatriated to Vietnam. Relations between China and Vietnam deteriorated, partly because of the repression of the Hoa. Although vast majority of the "Boat People" were ethnic Vietnamese (see below), those who sailed for refuge to China were largely Hoa people. In February 1979, following Vietnam's ousting of the China-backed genocidal Khmer Rouge and Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia, China launched an offensive against Vietnam, briefly occupied parts of its north and then withdrew from Vietnam. This conflict became known as the Sino-Vietnamese War. The Vietnamese government initiated a policy of encouraging the Hoa to leave the country and charging them a fee of several thousand dollars to do so. Because of the outflow, the Hoa population of Vietnam declined during the 1980s. Ethnic Chinese refugees from the three Indochinese countries have established organizations for mutual support in their new settlements; several of these join the World Federation of Chinese Organizations from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (). ==Boat people==

After the North Vietnamese takeover in April 1975, one million or more people were sent to "re-education" camps, often for several years, and the government attempted to destroy private enterprise, especially businesses owned by the Hoa. In September 1978, 1,220 "boat people" left Vietnam on an old ship and landed in Indonesia. That was the beginning of a flood of refugees arriving monthly by boat in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and other countries. The number of boat people arriving monthly on foreign shores peaked at 56,000 in June 1979. Most of the boat people left Vietnam in decrepit, leaky, overcrowded boats. They encountered storms, shortages of water and food, and, most seriously, pirates in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. In only four years, 1979 and 1982, during the height of the humanitarian crisis, twenty Western countries, led by the United States, Canada, Australia, and France, accepted 623,800 Indochinese refugees for resettlement, most of them boat people. Resettlement continued until the 1990s. Under the Orderly Departure Program and Comprehensive Plan of Action more than 600,000 additional Vietnamese were resettled abroad between 1980 and 1997. According to author Nghia M. Vo and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), between 200,000 and 250,000 boat people died at sea. File:PRPC02.jpg|The Philippine Refugee Processing Center became the temporary home of many Indochinese refugees en route to resettlement countries in the 1980s. File:Galang Refugee Camp - Camp's Inhabitants Data.jpg|Stacks of refugee identification cards on Galang Refugee Camp in Indonesia. There were approximately 250.000 Vietnamese refuges recorded on the island. ==Vietnamese land refugees==

About 40,000 Vietnamese made their way to Thailand by land through Cambodia in the 1980s. Most of them were housed in Thai border camps until resettled abroad. ==Cambodians==

The conquest of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975 caused an outflow of more than 300,000 ethnic Chinese, ethnic Vietnamese, and Cambodians to Vietnam despite the unsettled political conditions there. However, only a few thousand Cambodians escaped the Khmer Rouge to Thailand as the border was guarded and seeded with minefields. On December 25, 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge government. The Khmer Rouge and other resistance groups fled into the mountains and the border areas, but the people of the ravaged country—one to three million of whom had been killed by the Khmer Rouge—faced starvation and hundreds of thousands of them arrived at the border of Thailand seeking food and safety. The Thai refused to recognize the Cambodians as refugees but housed some of them in camps inside Thailand at Sa Kaeo and Khao-I-Dang. Most Cambodians were stopped at the border and took up residence in chaotic camps straddling the border between Cambodia and Thailand. Early arrivals at Sa Kaeo, mostly Khmer Rouge and their families fleeing the Vietnamese army, were in the last extremity of starvation. By the end of 1979, about 750,000 Cambodians were believed to be in Thailand, in the border camps, or near the border attempting to cross into Thailand. The Thai "pushed back" many of the Cambodians attempting to cross, most notably at Preah Vihear where thousands of Cambodians died in a mine field. In Thailand and in border camps, however, were hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. 260,000 of them were resettled abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. 390,000 were repatriated to Cambodia, mostly from 1991 to 1993, as the result of a peace agreement, the disarmament of contending factions, and the withdrawal of the Vietnamese army from Cambodia. ==Montagnards==

About one million highland peoples, called Montagnards, lived in Vietnam in 1975. Although the Montagnards were firm allies of the United States, especially the Green Berets, very few of them were among the 1975 evacuees from Saigon. Their guerilla war against the Vietnamese communists continued for the next 15 years, and a few Montagnards fled across the border to remote, jungle areas of Cambodia sandwiched between the hostile Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese. The Montagnards were largely forgotten but in 1986, 212 escaped to Thailand and were resettled in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1992, the UNHCR discovered another group of 400 living in Cambodia. Humanitarian workers, the UNHCR, and former Green Berets took up their cause and, shortly, they were resettled in Greensboro, North Carolina. ==Indochinese resettled and repatriated==

The following table lists the number of Indochinese resettled in the leading countries and the world from 1975 to 1997. A few thousand have also been resettled since 1997, mostly in the United States. Source: Robinson, W. Courtland Terms of Refuge United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, London: Zed Books, 1998 p. 270, 276, Appendix 2; Far Eastern Economic Review, June 23, 1978, p. 20 Indochinese repatriated, voluntarily or involuntarily, to their home countries with assistance from UNHCR totalled 525,000 between 1975 and 1997. These included 390,000 Cambodians, 127,000 Vietnamese, and 27,000 Laotians. Many more thousands returned of their own accord or remained surreptitiously in their country of refuge. ==In popular culture==

The Vietnamese refugee crisis is depicted in the movies The Story of Woo Viet, Boat People, Turtle Beach, Green Dragon, The Beautiful Country, Journey from the Fall, Ride the Thunder (2015), and Ru. The Cambodian refugees crisis is depicted in the movies The Killing Fields, The Gate, and First They Killed My Father. The Laotian refugees crisis is depicted in the movie Love is Forever (1983) and The Betrayal – Nerakhoon (2008). In the 2004 Science Fiction TV Anime series Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, the aftermath of a fictional 4th World War, also known as the 2nd Vietnam War for the seat of its main theatre, gives rise to a second wave of Indochina Refugees arrive in large numbers in Japan, as well as in diaspora to other parts of Asia such as China and Taiwan. Their developing and evolving society, and the crisis it generates, serve as the major plot these of this Anime series. ==See also==