Friday, November 14, 2008

PHIM TÀI LIỆU về CON TÀU MỸ THO MT065 và THUYỀN NHÂN VIỆT NAM

A life-changing encounter on the South China Sea
By Mark Corcoran14.11.2008
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/14/2420365.htm


The refugee boat was packed with 74 people, ranging from toddlers to grandparents. (Royal Australian Navy)
http://www.lyhuong.net/web/data/tailieu/ditan/BoatPeople.jpg

Video: Vietnamese refugees revisit their past (Foreign Correspondent) Related Link: Foreign Correspondent The most dramatic TV images came as Saigon fell in 1975. Dozens of overloaded helicopters lurched out to American warships off the coast.
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200811/r312580_1377988.asx

So crowded were the flight decks that once unburdened of their human cargo, aircraft were unceremoniously dumped over the side.
It was a striking metaphor for the end of US-led involvement in Vietnam.
But that was only the beginning. In the months and years that followed, more than a million Vietnamese refugees fled.
But there would be no more flights. The only escape route was by sea, on anything that floated.
It was an extraordinarily dangerous voyage across the South China Sea.
There were no TV cameras recording dramatic images as an estimated 250,000 people perished over the following decade, claimed by treacherous seas, attacks from pirates or rejection at gunpoint from the countries where they sought asylum.
A quarter of a century ago I was, briefly, a bit player in this tragedy playing out in slow motion across the vastness of the South China Sea and archipelagos of South-East Asia.
I took part in an encounter that has weighed heavily on my conscience ever since. It was my first tough lesson in realpolitik.
At the time, I was a young sailor serving on a Royal Australian Navy warship. We were several hundred kilometres north-east of Malaysian territory, nearing Vietnamese waters when a boat was detected on the ship's radar making five knots.
It was one of those late afternoons so typical of the South China Sea. Not a breath of wind to provide relief from the relentless heat and humidity; the ocean smooth as a sheet of glass that fractured as we carved a course towards the boat.
I can still remember the scene: The vessel was drifting without power. What appeared from a distance to be a strange, low superstructure was, on closer inspection, a teeming mass of humanity.
It looked like a giant rugby scrum packed on a low timber hull, rising barely a metre above the water line.
There were 74 people, ranging from toddlers to 70-year-old grandparents aboard a vessel barely 10 metres long.
They sat and watched passively as we lowered a ship's boat with a boarding party that included our doctor, chief engineer and marine mechanics.
The refugees said they had been sailing around in circles for two weeks.
The entry in our ship's cruise book takes up the story: "a refugee spokesman told them the motor didn't work. But it was still hot and the engineer started it quickly, and found its only defect was a slight fuel leak; when they realised one of the inspecting officers was a doctor the histrionics started - some of them started acting sick in an effort to be taken aboard the (ship), who wouldn't? But a quick check revealed they were in good health and the boat seaworthy."
It is hardly a statement of compassion. We all knew the very real dangers they faced in these tropical seas, where the weather can turn with extraordinary speed.
But the boat was in international waters and orders were orders; unless lives were in immediate danger we were not permitted to take refugees on board.
Some of the younger crew, myself included, found this order difficult to comprehend.
Just a few years earlier Australia had ended its involvement in the Vietnam War. Didn't we have a moral and ethical responsibility to take these people onboard?
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the war, didn't we have an obligation to protect the families of those who had fought alongside the Australians and Americans and were now fleeing their homeland? The short answer was yes and no.
In the late 1970s the Fraser Government had implemented the orderly departure program. In the decade following the end of the war, more than 90,000 Indo-Chinese refugees were eventually resettled in Australia, provided they made it to designated refugee camps in Malaysia and elsewhere and were assessed by Australian officials.
Our orders were clear. There would be no shortcuts or queue jumping for this boatload of humanity.
We sent across food, charts and a compass, and pointed them in the direction of the nearest landfall (Indonesia).
By early evening we sailed away, quite literally into the sunset, leaving 74 bewildered people to their fate. Not our finest hour.
I have often wondered if they made it or, like so many others, succumbed to the seas or the savagery of Thai and Malay pirates.
I left the Navy and about six years later while working as a journalist in Canberra went to the Vietnamese Embassy to cover an anti-communist demonstration.
The crowd, several hundred strong, was entirely Vietnamese-Australian, bussed in from Cabramatta in Sydney.
They were angry and wanted the hapless Vietnamese diplomats inside the compound to know it.
During a lull in the chanting and speeches I struck up a conversation with a Vietnamese teenager.
He started to tell the familiar story of escaping with his family on an overcrowded boat and how the incompetence of the captain led them to be lost at sea.
But what really got my attention was the timing. We'd both been in the same area at the same time.
He described his boat being boarded by Westerners from a warship, who rendered assistance before sending them on their way. In his case, this was to a Malaysian refugee camp for a couple of years before being accepted by Australia.
It was like one of those extraordinary random encounters we all hear about that defy laws of probability - a chance meeting on the other side of the world with a friend or acquaintance.
But was it all too good too be true? The dates roughly corresponded and although some of his account matched mine, other details were vague or contradictory.
He was clearly traumatised by recounting the experience. As I attempted to calm him down and asked him to repeat the story, the crowd surged again, communist flags were burnt and police moved in to quell the chaos.
I lost track of the young survivor and never managed to get his name or locate him again.
I would like to believe there was a happy ending, that the boatload of people we encountered that day in the South China Sea had in fact survived due to our assistance and eventually started new lives in Australia or the US.
That young man would be in his mid-30s now. I hope he reads this somewhere in the blogosphere and gets in touch.
You know where to find me. There is a conversation I'd like to finish.

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