A ship for Vietnam
A ship for Vietnam , French Un bateau pour le Vietnam , was an action by French left activists who provided humanitarian aid to the civilian population against the backdrop of the atrocities of war in Vietnam . The German offshoot Ein Boot für Vietnam e. V. chartered the general cargo ship Cap Anamur and rescued over 11,000 refugees from the South China Sea with it from 1979 . The campaigns were financed exclusively from private donations.
background
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled their country after the end of the war between North and South Vietnam in 1975. They were often threatened with torture and death in the re-education camps of the victorious North Vietnamese. Their destination was mostly the islands of Malaysia and Indonesia. But many of these boat people drowned on the way there.
A group of young French took the initiative. Its leader was André Glucksmann , who ten years earlier had been one of the leaders of the French student movement and had demonstrated for a communist Vietnam. In 1979, given the plight of the refugees, ideology no longer played a role for him and his friends. He, Bernard Kouchner and others founded the Comité: Un Bateau pour le Vietnam and chartered a ship to rescue the boat people . The first ship was named L'Ile de Lumière (Island of Light).
In February 1979 André Glucksmann met the journalist Rupert Neudeck in Paris . Neudeck worked as a reporter for Deutschlandfunk in Cologne. Now he was immediately ready to assist the rescue ship . The French action lacked money. Neudeck wrote a petition to the writer Heinrich Böll . Two days later, Böll called back and said: “We have to do that and I'll be there.” Together with Böll and his wife Christel, Neudeck founded the German committee A Ship for Vietnam . Neudeck hoped that a name as famous as Bölls would best make the idea known in Germany and encourage people to donate money. But the appeal for donations had little success. Neudeck and Böll realized that their compatriots would only generously support a German project.
Therefore, together with Böll and two colleagues, Neudeck founded a German committee “A Ship for Vietnam”. In July 1979 he presented his plan on a television broadcast. Three days later there were 1.2 million DM in the committee's account.
According to the statistics of the host countries, it can now be assumed that more than a million people have been saved with the help of international campaigns. Many in untold numbers drowned or died in the boats and camps. Because of their war participation, France and the USA had a special responsibility towards the opponents of the north. They made large contingents available for admission. The Federal Republic of Germany increased the initial admission quota from 10,000 to 38,000 people.
L'Ile de Lumiere and Baie de Lumiere
The L'Ile de Lumiere was the first ship and the Baie de Lumiere the second of the “A ship for Vietnam” campaign. However, the German public hardly noticed these two ships.
The problem was what should happen to the refugees who were taken in. France only issued an exemption for a trip on L'Ile de Lumiere once . During this voyage in October 1979, the ship took 884 refugees.
Cap Anamur
Political background
"You can't bear that," said Lower Saxony's Prime Minister Ernst Albrecht , affirming his decision to take in South Vietnamese refugees off the coast of Malaysia . On December 3, 1978, the first 163 of the so-called “boatpeople” were flown into the Federal Republic of Germany and taken to the Friedland transit camp in southern Lower Saxony (GDL). They were among the mostly ethnic Chinese refugees who had stayed on the overcrowded and ailing cargo ship Hai Hong off Malaysia and who had previously been refused to go ashore in Malaysia. The media presence of the Indochinese refugee disaster led to a wave of solidarity from very different social groups. It was in this mood that the German committee was formed.
The German rescue operation initiated by Neudeck was confronted by conservative German politicians with the charge of encouraging even more Vietnamese to flee and worsening the humanitarian catastrophe. In response to pressure from the German public, the Federal Government under Brandt decided on a compromise: Those refugees who were taken in directly by the Cap Anamur should be granted asylum, but not those who had already been rescued and surrendered by ships of other nationalities (“Law on Measures for refugees admitted as part of humanitarian aid ”). In July 1982 the German government decided to stop admission, so that the helpers on Cap Anamur had to temporarily stop their work.
A boat for Vietnam e. V.
Heinrich Böll, Martin Walser , Norbert Blüm and Rupert Neudeck, among others, founded the association Ein Boot für Vietnam e. V. The voluntary occupation was organized by the association and soon came into conflict with the German authorities, as they rarely coordinated their actions with them.
The strong support in the German population, who continued to support this campaign with their donations, resulted in 1982 from the existing support association Ein Boot für Vietnam e. V. to found the aid organization Komitee Cap Anamur / Deutsche Notärzte e. V. After public protests against the federal government's ban on admission, in which prominent supporters such as Böll, Alfred Biolek and Freimut Duve also took part, the rescue operation was able to continue until 1986.
Ship and action
The German section initially chartered the German freighter Cap Anamur (6,350 GRT) for three months . The ship, which belonged to the shipowner Hans Voss from Rellingen (Pinneberg district), was anchored in 1979 in Kobe , Japan. It was provided with food, medicines and a medical staff from Germany and then set out for Singapore . A charter of 7,000 marks per day was paid for the ship. On August 13, 1979, under the command of Captain Klaus Buck, the rescue of so-called boat people in the China Sea began. In the course of the following years, thousands of mostly Vietnamese refugees were rescued and provided with medicine and food on board the ship. The crew of the Cap Anamur took over refugees from other ships who were no longer in acute distress, which the Federal Foreign Office disliked. The office instructed the crew of the Cap Anamur to refrain from this practice in the future. In 1987, the Cap Anamur's career as a hospital ship ended.
The campaign brought 11,340 Vietnamese to Germany.
Aftermath
In November 2014, former refugees from Vietnam remembered the rescue of the "boat people" by the Cap Anamur 35 years ago. No foreign group has integrated as well in Germany as the Vietnamese, said the former Federal Minister Philipp Rösler (FDP) at the event. This is mainly due to a good education. In the course of the refugee crisis from 2015, Neudeck recalled the “Cape Anamur” campaign and described himself as a “smuggler”.
Individual evidence
- ↑ January 21, 1979 - “A Ship for Vietnam” committee founded - Contemporary History Archive - WDR.de
- ^ Franz J. Hutter, Anja Mihr, Carsten Tessmer: People on the run.
- ↑ Two new ships come to the aid of the refugees - 1979 - Hamburger Abendblatt
- ↑ The admission of the first “boat people” to the Federal Republic - bpb
- ↑ 35 years of Cap Anamur - the cargo ship that saved the lives of refugees
- ↑ Refugees: Syrians will be the second Vietnamese - DIE WELT mobil