Boat people

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Somali refugee boat in the Indian Ocean

The term boat people ( English "boat people" for boat people , free boat people ) is meant originally in the wake of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia who fled mostly people of Vietnamese origin. Today it is also used for people in other regions of the world who flee in boats . Such escapes are usually undertaken with unsuitable and overloaded boats. Today, as with any flight, the causes of boat escape range from individual persecution - the one person in the legal sense as a refugeequalified - through general insecurity and armed conflicts to the search for better living conditions (see refugee flow and economic refugee ) .

The term boat people was adopted from American parlance in the 1970s.

Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s

Rescue of Vietnamese boat people by a US Navy ship (1979)
Vietnamese boat refugee girl in Malaysia (1979)

The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975 with the victory of communist North Vietnam and the reunification of Vietnam on July 2, 1976, under the leadership of North Vietnam. People who had previously supported the government of the Republic of Vietnam have been sent to re-education camps or resettled in "New Economic Zones". An estimated 2.5 million people were arrested, mostly for no reason or for working in American companies, but were quickly released, around 165,000 died in re-education camps, and thousands were tortured to death or raped by their guards; around 200,000 South Vietnamese were executed. In addition, there are around 50,000 who perished as a result of forced labor in the “New Economic Zones”. On land, however, Vietnam was surrounded exclusively by states that were hardly suitable as refuge ( Cambodia , Laos , People's Republic of China ). This was very likely the reason why more than 1.6 million Vietnamese tried to go abroad by boat via the South China Sea (Vietnamese: "East Sea"). These people were called boat people . In the original language area one speaks more precisely of Indochinese boat people ( Indochinese boat refugees ), since the theater of war also affected Cambodia.

Most of the boats carried between 150 and 600 people; they were always cluttered and dilapidated. Often the boats overturned in the unpredictable monsoon winds or they were attacked by pirates . Many of these pirates were on the sea off Thailand to ambush the boat people. Because of these risks, the refugees increasingly chose the longer sea route to Malaysia , although the dangers were greater. The refugees often suffered from food shortages, water shortages and disease, or the sun burned their backs. Often these boats did not reach the coast; almost 250,000 boat people were killed in the South China Sea. Families were repeatedly torn apart and they only found themselves in a new home years later, if at all. Those who survived these hardships and were washed up on a coast of Southeast Asia had to struggle with further difficulties. Most of the boat people ended up in closed camps where they could seek asylum in other countries. Often they were sent back to sea with new supplies and water without much fuss, as the surrounding reception camps were hopelessly overcrowded. Only at the end of the 1980s did the flow of refugees ebb because fewer and fewer boat people found acceptance in third countries.

The USA and France accepted by far the largest number of boat people because of their involvement in the Vietnam War. The USA has been urging the German government since 1975 to also accept refugees from Vietnam. However, this remained cautious. It was not until media reports about the overcrowded refugee ship Hai Hong , on which around 2,500 people were stranded, that Christian Democratic politicians in particular, such as Lower Saxony's Prime Minister Ernst Albrecht, advocated admission in November 1978 . He made sure that 1000 boat people were flown into the Federal Republic of Germany. The UN Refugee Commissioner also successfully urged the German government in 1979 to initially accept 10,000 refugees from Southeast Asia as quota refugees. This quota was increased several times until 1981. One reason for this was that rescued persons were taken in by ships with the German flag, another was the public willingness to donate and help.

The German journalist Rupert Neudeck made a significant contribution to the rescue of the boat people . Together with like-minded people he founded the private aid committee A Ship for Vietnam . With the committee they chartered the freighter Cap Anamur and converted it into a hospital ship. At the same time, fundraising campaigns that were supported by the major media started all over the Federal Republic of Germany. With a team of volunteer technicians, logisticians, doctors and nurses on board, the ship reached the South China Sea on August 13, 1979 under its captain Klaus Buck. The media announced early on that Neudeck was not only planning to rescue the refugees, but also wanted to ensure that they were accepted into Germany. This brought him the charge of encouraging even more Vietnamese to flee and ultimately making the situation worse. Conflicts arose with the German authorities, which, however, led to a compromise due to the public interest: The FRG was ready to grant asylum to those refugees who were taken in directly by the Cap Anamur , but not to those who were taken in by other ships Nationality have already been saved and handed over. Over 9,500 boat refugees were rescued in the first three years. In July 1982 the German government decided to freeze admission. The helpers had to temporarily stop their work.

The strong support in the German population, who supported and made this campaign possible with their donations, led to the foundation of the aid organization Komitee Cap Anamur / Deutsche Notärzte e. V. After public protests and the intervention of prominent supporters such as Heinrich Böll , Alfred Biolek and Freimut Duve , the federal government again allowed the refugees to be admitted. The rescue operation continued until 1986, with around 1,000 other people being rescued. Most of these refugees still live in Germany today, and over the years many have been allowed to bring their family members to join them.

From 1979 to 1983 the two aid organizations Malteser Hilfsdienst and Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe were also involved on behalf of the federal government in looking after boat people in Southeast Asia. After arriving or being rescued in Malaysia or Indonesia, the refugees were housed in central camps, where they could a. were looked after and given medical care. Admissions were then organized in different countries through the respective embassies. So were z. For example, several hundred refugees are given passports every month via the German embassy in Jakarta and flown to Germany. A large number of refugees came to German cities through the German section of terre des hommes , where they were sometimes looked after by foster families or by the organization's local working groups.

Boat refugees today

Southeast Asia Today

In 2015 there was again great media attention for boat people in Southeast Asia, especially Rohingya from Burma and migrants from Bangladesh. Pressure on Burma’s neighboring states arises above all in view of the more than one million Rohingya who are not recognized as citizens by the government in Naypyidaw and who live in camps in western parts of Burma. Although the Asean countries do not have a common refugee policy, Indonesia and Malaysia decided in spring 2015 to temporarily accept refugees.

In June 2016, Indonesian police fired warning shots in Aceh province to prevent Tamils from leaving their unseaworthy refugee boat and going ashore. The Indonesian authorities equipped the vehicle with food and fuel and began towing it out to sea. The 40 refugees were instructed not to go to Australia, their declared destination, but to go home.

Mediterranean Sea

Boat refugees in the Mediterranean near Lampedusa

The cases of evacuation with unsuitable boats are not limited to Southeast Asia. It is believed that more than 10,000 boat refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean since 1992 . These are mainly people from Africa, but also from Asia and the Middle East who want to get to Europe because of persecution, armed conflict or hunger. They usually start from North Africa to reach Spain , Malta or Italy or from the Turkish coast to the nearby East Aegean islands of Greece. Another route within the Mediterranean also leads from Albania to Italy. The European Union is trying to stop this illegal migration. The consequence of this was that African boat refugees are increasingly taking the longer journey from West Africa to the Canary Islands .

Report Mainz reported in October 2009 that the EU border agency Frontex , in which Germany is also involved and which is supposed to monitor the EU's external borders, reportedly refused to allow refugee boats in the Mediterranean to continue their journey under threat of violence.

In the course of the revolution in Tunisia in 2010/2011 , the number of boat refugees landing on Lampedusa and Sicily increased sharply . During the civil war in Libya (February to October 2011), many Libyans also crossed there. According to information from aid organizations, more than 6,200 boat refugees were killed trying to get to Europe from North Africa between 2004 and 2013.

One of the worst accidents occurred on October 3, 2013, when, when a ship sank off the coast of Lampedusa, a 20-meter-long cutter loaded with around 545 refugees from Somalia and Eritrea sank from the Libyan port city of Misrata . After an engine failure , according to witness statements, the captain set fire to a blanket as an emergency signal because of distress at sea . The fire got out of hand. The ship overturned due to the panic of the tightly packed passengers who were unable to move . The Italian coast guard and local fishermen were only able to save 155 survivors. An estimated 400 people drowned. The Tunisian captain was arrested for multiple willful manslaughter and average . The Italian public prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into illegal immigration against the survivors . However, this standard procedure is controversial in Italian politics.

From mid-October 2013 to the end of October 2014, the Italian Operation Mare Nostrum was active in rescuing refugees until Operation Triton started under the leadership of FRONTEX.

The accident of a refugee boat in September 2014 , with presumably more than 480 deaths, was the largest shipping accident on the Mediterranean in 50 years.

In April 2015, there was violence on a refugee boat, in which boat occupants reported that Muslim refugees threw twelve Christian refugees overboard. According to Frontex and the International Organization for Migration, no such case was known to date, but violence on board was a major problem as people of different nationalities, religions and ethnic groups were crammed together, some of whom were enemies or who were at war with one another.

On April 12, 2015, a refugee boat with around 550 people on board sank off the Libyan coast; 144 people were rescued by the Italian coast guard. Possibly the ship capsized when the passengers moved to one side at the same time as they noticed the approaching coast guard.

On the night of 18./19. In April 2015 , a refugee boat with more than 700 people on board capsized between the Libyan coast and Lampedusa ; only 28 people could be saved. The numbers are not yet certain, however. If they are confirmed, this shipping disaster would be, according to UNHCR spokeswoman Carlotta Sami, "the worst mass extinction that has ever been observed in the Mediterranean." Italy called for a special EU summit. (See also: Criticism of the EU's asylum and refugee policy .)

Australia

Poster campaign against boat people by the government of Tony Abbott

Even Australia is, with varying frequency, target of boat people. Australia has had a rigid migration policy since 1992, under which boat people are held in internment camps after their arrival in immigration custody. One of the largest ship accidents occurred in 2001 when 353 people drowned when asylum seekers, mainly from Iraq, who set out for Australia from Indonesia and their ship, the SIEV-X , sank in a storm. In August 2001 a diplomatic conflict developed between Australia and Norway in the so-called Tampa affair . The then Australian coalition government of the Liberal Party and National Party under Prime Minister John Howard refused to accept 438 boat people who had been taken on board by the Norwegian freighter Tampa from a no longer seaworthy wooden boat from Indonesia within international waters not far from the Australian sea borders. The incident led Australia to introduce strict immigration detention for boat people, which continues to this day.

According to the government, around 50,000 asylum seekers reached the country between 2007 and 2013. The national liberal government under Tony Abbott of the Liberal Party , which came to power in 2013, further tightened restrictive immigration policies and had boats of potential refugees arrested far off the coast and either sent back to Indonesia or to the internment camp at Manus Regional Processing Center on Papua- Immigrate New Guinea and Nauru Regional Processing Center on Nauru . Even recognized refugees are legally not allowed to move from these islands to mainland Australia. According to its own information, the government returned 20 boats with 633 passengers between 2013 and 2015. Another 46 refugees from Vietnam were repatriated after negotiations with the Vietnamese government. Reports that Australia had bribed smugglers with money to take their boats back to Indonesia caused diplomatic tensions between the states in June 2015.

In light of the refugee crisis in Europe in 2015, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott recommended Europe as a model for its refugee policy. His successor Malcolm Turnbull of the Liberal Party, who came to power in September 2015, is also continuing this policy.

A special feature of Indonesia is that refugees originally from other countries who have been sent back to this country may not have the right to asylum there, but their lives are not in immediate danger either. This is different from the Mediterranean refugees, as Libya is believed to pose an imminent threat to life and limb.

→ See also : Migration and Asylum Policy in Australia

Other regions

Boat refugees from Haiti

Boat refugees from Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh are trying to get to Thailand; In early 2009, it became known that the Thai Navy had sent hundreds of Rohingya boat refugees caught back to the open sea.

Other routes of boat refugees worldwide lead from Cuba and Haiti to the United States or from the Comoros to the neighboring, wealthier island of Mayotte , which is subordinate to France .

Several thousand people flee from Cuba every year across the open sea, preferably to the United States, which is only 150 km away, but also, for example, to Mexico with sometimes adventurous boat designs, which earned them the nickname Balseros ( Spanish for raftsmen). Two major escape movements of this kind have gone down in history: On the one hand, the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, when a total of 125,000 Cubans fled to Florida within a few months , and on the other hand, in 1994, when tens of thousands of Cubans fled within a short time as part of the so-called Balsero crisis made their way across the sea to the United States.

The route from Boosaaso across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen , which is used by war and poverty refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia , is particularly dangerous . In July 2011, almost 200 people died while attempting to cross the Red Sea from Sudan to Saudi Arabia when a fire broke out on their ship. An accident of this magnitude was a novelty on this route at that time, it was therefore taken as an indication that the previously usual escape routes from East Africa to Europe and the Middle East are no longer passable.

Boatpeople from the perspective of science

Escape boat found by Cap Anamur in the South China Sea at the end of April 1984. Today it stands as a memorial in Troisdorf .
Memorial stone in Hamburg with thanks for the Vietnamese refugees

The Southeast Asian boat people were also viewed from a scientific perspective in order to shed light on the phenomenon of resilience based on their life stories . Caplan made the most significant contribution here. He examined the families of Vietnamese boat refugees and found that they had strong family values. Education was rated particularly highly by the boat refugees; this also explains why many of their children achieved above-average school results. In the European context, the educational scientist Olaf Beuchling discussed the integration process of Vietnamese refugees in Germany in his qualitative study From boat refugee to German citizen. Examines migration, integration and school success in a Vietnamese community in exile . He too emphasizes the importance of cultural values, but relates them to the experiences of the refugees and their biographies.

See also

Portal: Walls and Borders  - Overview of Wikipedia content on the topic of walls and borders

literature

TV report

  • Escape to death. The sea, the village and the silence - a ship disaster off Sicily ; TV documentary by Marc Wiese and Karl Hoffmann; July 10, 2005 on ARTE .
  • Loan - a girl from Vietnam (1986), three-part series about Ngô Thị Bích Loan , BR television

novel

theatre

Web links

Commons : Boatpeople  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rudolph Rummel: Statistics of Vietnamese Democide - Estimates, Calculations, and Sources. Chapter 6. In: hawaii.edu. November 2, 2002, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  2. ^ Frank Bösch: Commitment to refugees. The reception of Vietnamese “boat people” in the Federal Republic. In: Contemporary historical research. 2017, Retrieved April 3, 2017 .
  3. ^ The admission of the first "boat people" to the Federal Republic. In: Federal Center for Political Education. November 16, 2013, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Daniela Martens: Historical thanks to the "boat people". In: tagesspiegel.de. Der Tagesspiegel , August 31, 2011, accessed on May 31, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Manfred Rist: Temporary admission of boat refugees: Southeast Asia reacts to the refugee crisis. In: nzz.ch. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 20, 2015, accessed on May 25, 2015 .
  6. ^ "Indonesian Province Prepares to Tow Migrant Boat Out to Sea" New York Times of June 17, 2016
  7. ↑ Achim Reinhardt, Thomas Reutter, Thomas Schneider: How the EU keeps refugees away by all means. Report Mainz, October 5, 2009, accessed on May 31, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Drama before Lampedusa: At least 130 dead. In: diepresse.com. Die Presse , October 3, 2013, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Screams in front of Lampedusa became "weaker and weaker". welt.de , October 4, 2013, accessed on October 6, 2013 .
  10. ↑ Jan-Christoph Kitzler: More than 270 bodies recovered. In: tagesschau.de . Bayerischer Rundfunk , October 8, 2013, archived from the original on January 8, 2014 ; Retrieved October 8, 2013 .
  11. ^ Tilmann Kleinjung: Criminal offense: illegal immigration. In: tagesschau.de . Bayerischer Rundfunk , October 7, 2013, archived from the original on September 1, 2014 ; Retrieved October 8, 2013 .
  12. ↑ Annette Reuther: Religious hatred of refugee boats: "I saw how they were thrown into the sea". In: stern.de. DPA, accessed April 18, 2014 .
  13. ^ Albrecht Meier: Ship accident in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast: Aid organization fears the death of 400 refugees. In: stern.de. Stern , April 15, 2015, accessed April 19, 2015 .
  14. ↑ New drama in the Mediterranean: boat with over 700 refugees capsizes. In: n24.de. N24 , April 19, 2015, accessed April 19, 2015 .
  15. ↑ a b After the refugee drama: Italy calls for a special EU summit. In: tagesanzeiger.ch. Tages-Anzeiger , April 19, 2015, accessed April 19, 2015 .
  16. ↑ 350 migrants reported drowned off Indonesia. In: nzherald.co.nz. October 24, 2001, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  17. ↑ Statement by Australian Ambassador , UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY 56th SESSION , dated November 27, 2001, on Permanent Mission of Australia to the United Nations. Retrieved March 25, 2017
  18. ^ Matt Siegel, Nick Macfie: Australia Reveals Over 600 Asylum Seekers Turned Back at Sea. In: nytimes.com. The New York Times / Reuters , August 11, 2015, accessed December 30, 2017 .
  19. ↑ Till Fähnders: The high price of total foreclosure. In: FAZ.net. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 31, 2015, accessed on May 31, 2016 .
  20. ↑ Could Australia's 'stop the boats' policy solve Europe's migrant crisis? The Guardian, April 22, 2015, accessed November 22, 2017 .
  21. ↑ Subir Bhaumik: Thais 'leave boat people to die'. In: news.bbc.co.uk. BBC , January 15, 2009, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  22. ↑ The Insel Laboratory. In: spiegel.de. Der Spiegel , May 22, 2007, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  23. ↑ Dominic Johnson : Refugees die in fire. In: taz.de. The daily newspaper , July 6, 2011, accessed on May 31, 2016 .
  24. ↑ Olaf Beuchling: From boat refugee to federal citizen. Migration, integration and school success in a Vietnamese community in exile. Waxmann Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-8309-1278-1 ; Nathan Caplan et al. a .: The Boat People and Achievement in America. A study of family life, hard work, and cultural values. University of Michigan Press 1989, ISBN 0-472-09397-5 ; also David W. Haines (ed.): Refugees as immigrants: Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese in America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 1989, ISBN 0-8476-7553-X ; Nathan Caplan et al. a .: Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement. In: Scientific American , February 1992, pp. 18-24.
  25. ↑ The novel describes internal and external reasons to board the boat in Africa. The crossing itself or the arrival in the west are not addressed; a returnees expresses his very negative view of life in Europe