§ Cialist countries which have placed
ue limits on emigration are also
. Cuneed with violating human rights?
ee which has at various times lim-
bh dor placed no limits on emigration,
I Tas been similarly charged without
_ Variation.)
th ere, one is compelled to ask, are
z © Baez ads and the Freedom House
| oc tpaigns and the International Res-
| “Ue Committee finances and the daily
) hiltorials for the more than two million
ye estinians forced into exile, pre-
€nted by arms from repatriating to
fir homeland, denied. nationhood,
} While the remaining one million of their
‘ompatriots live under armed occupa-
on? That is a nation 67% of which is
0 Ving in exile.
b ‘ The New York Times reported today
at 600,000 Nicaraguans are now
i €Xiled, victims of the savagery of
¥ moza’s napalm bombs, dynamiting
4 churches, carpet-bombing of bar-
(Tos, Nicaragua has a population of less

SS three million, so the Times’ esti-
m

,

ate, conservative at that, means
Ba than 20% of the country is in
n le, by percentage 20 times the
cee of Vietnamese exiles, twice as
d oY by absolute numbers.
“fle d he-third of Uruguay’s people have
f Tw fascism in their home country.
f that Million Puerto Ricans or 40% of
I boy Nation have fled starvation and
tthe erty in their own land to find jobs in
1 Sig, OSPerity of the South Bronx and
b too T barrios in the United States. Not
f Much talk here, though, of crimes

if

against humanity, of the most urgent
issue facing humanity, or organizing ad
campaigns and céordinating editorial
policies on behalf of refugees. So much
for selectivity.

Still, are we on the left so blind to
human suffering as to have no compas-
sion for the boat people? The fact is,
after all, that they have chosen to leave
Vietnam and are cast at sea and need
homes before they face the real possi-
bility of drowning. What can be done
for them?

I, for one, advocate an open immig-
ration policy by those countries that in-
stigated the exodus, in the first place,
the People’s Republic of China and the
United States. However, for the United
States, open immigration must be con-

sistent. To allow Vietnamese in and to

deport Mexicans, Haitians, Domini-
cans, Salvadoreans, Chileans and other
refugees from economic deprivation
and political repression is, after all,
selective, and we certainly can’t allow
that.

‘Furthermore, to set up agencies to
find homes and jobs for newly arriving
Vietnamese while 60% of our oppressed:
minority young people have no jobs nor
prospects of jobs is also the kind of
selectivity that we must avoid. And
there must be one certain exception to
our “open arms” policy: We have had
the darndest time for 35 years in get-
ting rid of the hundreds of Nazi war
criminals who pollute our communities
and we must prevent a similar cycle.

We are already giving haven to the

Pe os
“ontrast to the boat people, these Vietnamese children are from families

te oS se
who have chosen

to stay in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Saigon police chief who executed
teenagers in the streets of his city; to
Nguyen Cao Ky and other officials who
oversaw the napalming of their cities,
the torture of the tiger cages, the as-
sassination programs to eliminate tens
of thousands of opposition patriots. The
old Saigon regime had some 1.5 million
officials and officers and the most ex-
tensive criminal operation of narcotics,
prostitution and smuggling in the
world. Those of them who are ‘‘re-
fugees” from criminal charges should
be denied safety within our frontiers.
Okay, our detracters might say,
given that many of the boat people are
criminals, how do you explain the
others? Well, people leave their home-
land for many reasons. Many Viet-
namese choose to leave because they
are tired and afraid of war. It is not
stretching the imagination to see the
relation between the latest exodus and
the recent Chinese invastion which de-
troyed every village, town, hospital,
school, shop and factory in the northern
provinces, with promises of more to
come emanating from Peking and Pen-
tagon prognosticators. This, re-
member, on top of the most devastating
floods in recorded Vietnamese history
last year, which left four million people
homeless and helpless with a land de-

The Deerhunter, that the U.S. military
was in Vietnam to stop barbarism, not
to perpetrate it.

Doan Van Toai, the Vietnamese
“boat person”’ who, after service in the
Thieu Regime’s police apparatus and
the CIA, has become Baez’ source of in-
formation and inspiration, gave one re-
cent interview which Baez has chosen
to ignore. The interview is in the cur-
rent issue of Soldier of Fortune
magazine, the mercenaries’ journal
which recruits free-lance hit-men to
fight for Somoza and Ian Smith.

Baez, who eschews ‘‘all forms of vio-
lence’’ and refers to Toai as ‘‘a good
guy,’’ is silent with good reason. In the
interview, Toai says that he and the
other refugees understand now, if they
didn’t before, that the U.S. troops were
in Vietnam. as ‘‘freedom fighters,’
balm to eyes of Soldier of Fortune sub-
scribers and promoters of The
Deerhunter.

These are the consequences of the
present campaign against Vietnam:
Not only were ‘‘we’’ right in Vietnam.
It would follow that Pol Pot, who ex-
terminated three million Kampu-
cheans in his war against Vietnamese
communism, was right as well. As
were the Chinese troops who leveled a
thousand villages in their attempt to

_ “The campaign around the refugees is
meant to convey the message borne by
The Deerhunter, that the U.S. military was
in Vietnam to stop barbarism, not to per-

petrate it.”’

vastated, defoliated and destroyed by
the most barbaric air war ever visited
upon a people.

At least half of the refugees are, of
course, children, innocent victims who
leave the country of their birth at the
will and decision of their elders. Others
choose to join their families who have
gone before. Not least of the boat
people are those who cannot adapt to
the new society of socialism, so indoc-
trinated are they with capitalist values
or corrupted by the passing society.
High among this latter category are the
businessmen and shopkeepers, particu-
larly those of Chinese ancestry who
prefer to view themselves not as Hoa
people of Vietnam but as ‘‘overseas
Chinese”’ with special allegiances to
Peking or Taiwan.

We cannot accept the ‘‘apolitical”

_ posturing of Joan Baez and her sup-

porters as they wage their political
campaign against Vietnam. In fact,
any social convulsion, not to mention
revolution, will leave thousands of re-
fugees who cannot accept the new situ-
ation. As we recently celebrated out
own nation’s 203rd anniversary, it is
worth remembering the history lessons
of our childhood, including the scores of
thousands of colonists who collaborated
with the British or simply sympathized
with the Tories and chose or were
forced to flee the newly independent
United States for Canada.

The politics of Baez and her follow-
ers find their most popular expression
in the film, The Deerhunter. They are
telling us that the Vietnamese re-
volutionaries are murderers, are tor-
turers, are the perpetrators of My Lais.
The campaign around the refugees is
meant to convey the message borne by

“punish Vietnam and who promise to
be back later this year for another les-
son. If we can demonstrate that we
were right in Vietnam, we can justify
new Vietnams in southern Africa, in
Lebanon, in Central America.

One hesitates to psychoanalyze a
public outcry, but it is possible to say
that many of our own people are still
unable to deal with the consequences of
the most barbaric war in modern times
save Hitler’s, waged in our name, and
thereby seek to justify it by distorting
its results. But this has consequences of
its own, and the consequences are more
war in Vietnam and new wars
elsehwere. What are we going to say,
for example, about the Nicaraguan
Somocistas and guardistas that will
surely become boat people as well?
Better instead to recognize our continu-
ing responsibility to Vietnam, to com-
pel our government to finally recognize
and normalize relations with Hanoi,
after 34 years of stable government
there; and to uphold our promise of $3.4
billion of ~ehabilitation aid pledged and
signed by our government in Article 21
of the Paris Accords.

Twenty years ago, the first of what
were to become nearly a million of the
Cuban equivalent of boat people came
to our shores. Last month 10,000 of
them presented a petition to President
Carter asking for normalization of rela-
tions and an end to the blockade of the
country of their birth. This month, and
every month of this year, 15,000 Cuban
exiles in our country return to the
socialist island in search of their
families and their roots. Must the Viet-
namese refugees spend similar dec-
ades as victims of a campaign in
search of anew Cold War?

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—AUGUS

TTT

T 3, 1979—Page 5