Boat People.

    When the war ended, departures from Vietnam came to a grinding halt. The new Socialist 
Republic of Vietnam began institutung its new ecomoic policy and transporting South 
Vietnamese to redducation and forced labor cams.  But soon many Vietnamese took to the 
seas in order 
to escape the tortuous conditions under Communist rule.




 	The first of the boat peoples arried on the shores of ThaiLand in 1977, but the surge of 
the exodus by boat began in 1987. A group of Vietnamese would get together and buy or 
construct a boat, usually much too small for the number of people expected to board it. 
Most families hadto pay bribes to Hanoi officials as well as boat captains up to 5,00 per 
family.


	Once people were in the boats, food and water were carefully rationed.  If the passengers 
were lucky, they would not run out of gas and they would reach Thailand or Hong Khong within 
a week. But many were not lucky.  They encountered wins that threw them far off course, were 
battered b y fierce typhoons, ran out of fuel, or spent the entire boat ride bailing water 
from the bottom of the low riding, overloaded boat.


	When a boat was subjected to one of these mishaps, it most certainly meant death for some
of the passengers.  Merchant or military ships that discoverd one of these boats would 
sometime of Vietnamese crowded on a 30 or 40 foot long boat.  Often the passengers were too 
weak to move or speak, having been withot food or fresh water for days or even weeks.  The
balism, eating the flesh of those who had already died.

	
	Boast headed for Thailand occasionally faced an even worse fate.  Pirate fishermen off 
the coastof Thailand attacked refuges boats.  With the aid of sophisticated radar and sonar 
equipment, they pinpointed refugee boats drifting at sea and boarded them.  They would rob 
the passengers, cutting off the fingers of those who couldn't remove thir righs fast enough. 
Then they wouldoften kill the men, carelessly dumping their bodies overboad,  The pirates 
tied up the women and raped them repeatedly, sometime for days, keeping them locked in tiny
cabinets with no food or water.  After watching their entire families beging slaughtere or 
raped, many women attempted to escape from the Thai pirates by jumping to their deaths in 
the sea.

	The government of Thailand knew about these attacks but was helpless to do anything about 
them. The pirates attacked far out at sea, where it took too long for patrols to reach the 
boats. Most of the time, the victims had no way of contacting the officials anyway. In 
addition, most of the pirtes attacked at night, when it was too dangerous for surveillance
 planes to track the fishermen and the refugee boats.