Fateful Point for the Forgotten

The curtain is coming down on the sad drama of the Vietnamese boat people, tens of thousands of families that fled across the Gulf of Thailand or the South China Sea to escape the imposition of Communist rule.

For 20 years now, an ever diminishing number of these hapless refugees have lived in camps on foreign soil--in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and, in a second wave, Hong Kong. An estimated 36,000 are left, so far unable to gain entrance to the United States and other Western countries but refusing to return to Vietnam.

Their cause long since faded from favor in the West, the last of the boat people have arrived at an anxious reckoning. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees and other agencies will shut down the last of the camps in June. The United States, the No. 1 recipient of Vietnamese immigrants, says it will take in any who can prove a close connection to America, such as those who worked with the U.S. military or its South Vietnamese allies during the Vietnam War.

The catch is that the refugees, including young men and women who were infants when their parents sailed away to uncertainty, will have to return to Vietnam to apply for passage to America. These camp dwellers are not the returnees that Vietnam wants. None among them are investors carrying checkbooks issued by Southern California banks. The refugees, with reason, look upon a return to their country with trepidation.

But the United Nations and the United States and other recipient countries have no rational alternative. The boat people are gone from political view. The host countries for the camps have long since lost patience. In Hong Kong, which houses 18,358 Vietnamese in hard conditions, the government has tried to force them out or buy them out without success. This will be the hardest chapter to close, especially amid the uncertainty of the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong next year.

What a tragic vision it was: a battered boat washing ashore, the family within it wretchedly sick, the dangers of escape and sea pirates past but the future uncertain. Well, the future is now.