Barking up the wrong tree

Get it right: People holding up their UNHCR cards during an operation to round up illegal immigrants in June. Malaysia’s Human Rights Commission recommends that any refugee management framework we create should offer safeguards against arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation of legitimate asylum seekers. — IZZRAFIQ ALIAS/The Star

DIPLOMAT Tan Sri Ahmad Kamil Jaafar in his book Growing Up with the Nation (2013), wrote a chapter on the challenges of dealing with the “Boat People” – refugees fleeing a civil war in Vietnam in the 1970s.

Ahmad Kamil, who was in the thick of action back then, shared that the first 47 refugees arrived in Malaysia in May 1975, and the last remaining Vietnamese refugee left Malaysia 30 years later. By then 250,000 refugees had landed in in the country, wrote the former Foreign Ministry’s secretary-general who died in 2021.