Remembering Hell Island

TODAY marks the 40th anniversary of a place in our country that is practically unknown to most young Malaysians and even some older ones.

It’s a tad ironic that they may be aware of the plight of the Rohingya and Syrian refugees but are ignorant of the fact that 40 years ago, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Singapore were all caught up with one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises.

This was the exodus of two million Vietnamese who fled their country by various routes after the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

More than 800,000 took to rickety, overcrowded vessels to sail the dangerous South China Sea in search of asylum in South-East Asian nations and resettlement in developed countries. They became known as the Vietnamese boat people.

The first boat with 47 refugees arrived on Malaysian shores in May 1975, just days after the fall of Saigon on April 30. But as the numbers swelled, the Malaysian Govern­ment decided to set up a refugee camp on Bidong Island off Tereng­ganu. It was officially opened on this day in 1978.

By November, the New York Times reported that up to 500 boat people a day were arriving in Malaysia. By June 1979, Bidong was said to be the most heavily populated place on earth, with 40,000 refugees cram­med into a 13ha area in the south corner of the island.

Other Asean countries that saw landings by the boat people also set up camps for them: on Palawan Island, Philippines; and Galang Is­­land, Indonesia. Even Singapore had a refugee camp in Sembawang.

As the number of boat people grew and grew at a faster rate than the resettlement process, these countries began to feel the strain.

On June 15, 1979, Tun Dr Maha­thir Mohamad, then Deputy Prime Minister, created an international stir when he announced Malaysia would remove some 70,000 refugees from the camp and put them out to sea again. Not only that, its security forces would shoot on sight any more boat people who tried to land on its shores.

“If they try sinking their boats, they will not be rescued, they will drown,” Dr Mahathir was extensively quoted in news reports.

His tough stance shocked the world, as he probably intended to focus attention on what had become a massive crisis. Indeed, it galvanised the US and other governments and the United Nations to act to resettle the refugees faster.

Amusingly, then Home Minister Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie tried to explain that Dr Mahathir had meant Malaysia would “shoo” new refugees away and not “shoot” them!

The tactic worked. After negotiations and a UN-organised confe­rence on the Indo-Chinese refugee issue, Vietnam agreed to an orderly departure of its citizens, mostly ethnic Chinese. The affected Asean nations agreed to accept the boat people temporarily as long as other nations, especially the developed countries, paid the cost of upkeep of the refugees and their resettlement.

That process took many years. Pulau Bidong was closed on Oct 30, 1991. The remaining refugees were moved to the Sungai Besi transit camp and the process of repatria­ting them to Vietnam began.

By the time Sungai Besi was closed in June 1996, Malaysia had sent 248,194 to third countries and repatriated 9,592.

That was just 22 years ago. And it has been 40 years since Pulau Bidong first served as a refugee camp. But it seemed like ancient history that few remember.

I supposed that’s not surprising. Information was tightly controlled and access to the island was restricted. In an age when the Government could control the media and information tightly, Bidong remained largely underreported in the years of its existence as a camp.

Today there is so much we can learn about what went on in the island from books, blogs, articles and videos by the boat people and their offspring. They called it Hell Island and for good reason because of the difficult living conditions and the often long wait for resettlement.

In the camps across Asean, the boat people created their own little Saigons. Sadly, while the authorities on Palawan and Galang have made efforts to preserve some of the structures, including the churches and temples, and set up museums to record the existence of those camps, no such effort was made on Pulau Bidong.

There would have been much to preserve. According to two retired Home Ministry officers who were in the taskforce overseeing the boat people, the place had restaurants, bars and even a cinema.

“There were many families living on the island and because of the large number of residents, there was no privacy,” recalled one of the officers.

“To deal with this issue, they dug tunnels and made underground rooms that would be used for couples to have some private time. The rooms would be rented out on a per hour basis. It was very lively.”

Despite state and federal tourism officials saying they were interested in preserving some semblance of the camp, practically everything has rotted away or vandalised.

That is such a pity because the thousands of resettled boat people have prospered and many of them are keen to revisit those camps, especially with their children and grandchildren, to relive and share the immense hardships they went through for the sake of their families. While Vietnamese have long left our shores, Malaysia has ano­ther wave of boat people. These are the Rohingya who fled Myanmar with most of them arriving by boat before 2015.

According UNHCR statistics, there are 150,000 refugees registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, out of which more than 62,500 are Rohingya.

Unlike the Vietnamese, these people are not confined to a camp but live precariously in various parts of the country without any rights or protection.

They are but among the estima­ted 65 million people around the world who are displaced either by interstate war, ethnic and non-ethnic conflict and flight from repression, which is the basis of Human Flow, the critically acclaimed documentary by Chinese artist and acti­vist Ai Weiwei on the current global refugee crisis.

No country likes to be forced to take in refugees but as Human Flow quotes Dr Hanan Ashrawi, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisa­tion department of culture and in­­for­mation: “Being a refugee is ... the most pervasive kind of cruelty ... against a human being. By depri­ving a person of all forms of security, the most basic requirements of a normal life, by placing that person at the mercy of sometimes inhospitable host countries that do not want to receive the refugee, you are forcibly robbing this human being of all aspects that would make human life not just tolerable, but meaningful in many ways.”

We who live in a good and stable country may think we will never be refugees. But I’m sure neither did the Syrians, the Yemenis, the citizens of the former Yugoslavia or the Indians of Uganda.