Peace Begins Here by Thich Nhat Hanh

Author:Thich Nhat Hanh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2011-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

THE BOAT PEOPLE

In 1978, I went to Singapore to attend a conference on religion and peace, and there I discovered the plight and the suffering of the boat people. Boat people were dying on the ocean, and Singapore had a very hard policy against them. Every time a boat carrying refugees tried to come to shore, they pushed them out to sea to die. They didn’t want to help them. The fishermen who had compassion and saved boat people from drowning were punished; they had to pay a huge sum of money so that the next time they wouldn’t dare save people.

I stayed on in Singapore in order to secretly organize a rescue operation—secretly, because I knew that the Singapore government would not want me to do it. Other people came and helped me—friends from France, Holland, and other European countries. We hired a boat, took medicine, water, and food out to sea, and tried to rescue people.

Malaysia’s policy was also to reject the boat people. They preferred to have them die on the ocean rather than help them to land and take them to prison. A number of our group who traveled to the Malaysian coast witnessed many tragic events. In one incident, two boats full of people tried to land, and the police forced them back out to sea. Then, one of the boats capsized because it was no longer solid enough to be seaworthy. Everyone in the other boat saw the people drowning; no one was able to swim to shore. The people in the other boat were determined to go in again. They managed to land and then they destroyed their boat so that they could not be pushed out again. The police had to take them to prison while they waited for another boat to come so they could put them on it and push it back out to sea. That was the normal policy.

Immediately, our friends called the press, because we knew that the journalists were the only ones who could save the boat people. If the journalists knew there were people being held, they would take photographs and publish them in the newspapers. Then the Malaysian government would no longer dare to push the boat people out to sea. That was one of the ways to save the boat people—they were put in prison, but they were safe. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had an office in Malaysia. We invited them to come and take notes and take down the names of refugees. These refugees might stay there for several years without the opportunity to be settled in another country because the UNHCR did not work diligently at all. We discovered that many boat people were kept year after year on a number of islands, without any hope of being resettled.

In Singapore we had to do something illegal. We went to the houses of fishermen and told them, “Anytime you rescue boat people, please telephone us. We will come and take them, and in that way you will not be punished.

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