The New York Times, by Henry Kamm

By Henry Kamm

TOKYO, June 7—A month after setting out on the open sea in a small fishing boat under cover of night from the port of Vung Tau, near Saigon, 37 Vietnamese refugees are docked in the small Japanese port of Handa aboard the freighter that picked them up at sea.

The Liberian ‐ flag, Swiss ‐ operated freighter, Los Andes, arrived in Japan eight days ago, but authorities have not allowed the refugees to come ashore, even temporarily. Unless the Liberian or Swiss Government guarantees that it will accept responsibility for getting the 37 people out of Japan if no country offers them permanent refuge, Japan will not let them land.

And as long as there is a possibility that responsibility can be passed on to someone else, Vietnamese refugees have been waiting in limbo throughout Asia, tasting the bitterness of having staked their lives on the remote chance of survival at sea for the sake of finding freer life outside their country and finding instead a world that shows them by its inaction that it wishes they had stayed where they came from.

“As a Government policy, we don't accept refugees,” a high Foreign Ministry official said, explaining the Japanese attitude. Because of the disproportion between Japan's wealth and the small number of refugees that reach Japan's waters, their icy reception here is a token of the full measure of the distress of the approximately 100,000 Indochinese refugees in Asia.

Since the Vietnam war ended more than two years ago, Japan has received 689 refugees who escaped by the only available means: small boats that set out on the open sea with as much water, food and fuel as they could cram aboard in addition to the passengers and the hope that, if their own countrymen do not catch them and the boat can stay afloat on the high seas, their supplies will not give out before a passing ship acknowledges their SOS and picks them up.

How many of them are caught as they set out or are picked up by vessels from Communist countries and returned, or perish at sea will never be known.

Of the 689 who have found temporary refuge in Japan, 258 have gone on to permanent immigration elsewhere, mainly the United States. But countries ready to take Indochinese refugees are getting increasingly rare. The United States now issues visas to only 100 persons and their immediate families a month for what it calls “boat survivors” throughout Asia, and stays in “temporary” havens are taking on the air of indeterminate waits for word from an embassy.

By allowing the refugees to wait in Japan, the ,Japanese Government makes it clear that it considers it has carried out its humanitarian obligations. It does not feed, clothe or shelter them, extends no medical, educational or social services and allows no refugee to work to provide for his or her own needs.

U.N. Supports Refugees

The refugees are cared for by religious charitable organizations, principally the Roman Catholic Caritas group. They are supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who represents the refugees in dealing with the Japanese Government and tries to find permanent homes for them, as well as paying a daily stipend of 900 yen ($3.21) per refugee and some medical expenses.

“The refugees are granted a temporary stay to give them breathing space before going on to a final accommodation,” said Shunji Kobayashi, chief of the general affairs section of the immigration control bureau, the principal official concerned with the problem. “We are limited by Vie lack of basic facilities and people to look after them.”

Mr. Kobayashi and the Foreign Ministry official emphasized in interviews that Japan had no tradition of receiving foreigners, which seems to disregard the hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Taiwanese brought here when their countries were conquered by Imperial Japan.

“We don't have Government facilities for refugees,” the Foreign Ministry official said coolly. “This is a very new thing for us, and we have enough problems looking after ourselves for housing.” There are now 431 Vietnamese in Japan, a nation of 113 million.

Asked why the Japanese Government did not contribute to the refugees’ support, the official said that since there was no provision for refugees in Japanese legislation, no budget appropriation could be made. Mr. Kobayashi went on to cast doubt on the refugees’ authenticity as political refugees and suggested that they were leaving Vietnam for their material advancement, like the great number of Korean illegal immigrants here.

Japan's Contribution Cited

The Foreign Ministry official said that while Japan made no direct contribution to the refugees’ living, it was a leading contributor to the United Nations High Commissioner. A Foreign Ministry specialist said that Japan made an annual contribution, which was $70,000 last year and will be $80,000 this year. In addition, he said, Japan had made a special contribution of 600 million yen ($2 million) for Indochinese refugees in 1975 and 175 million yen ($583,000) last March.

The Immigration and Foreign Ministry officials both expressed concern over the mounting number of Vietnamese nearing the coasts of Japan. In addition to the refugees of Los Andes, 80 are reported inbound on three vessels.

If they are to be allowed to land, these conditions must be met, said Hitoshi Mise, Japan's representative here of the United Nations High Commissioner: The United Nations must guarantee the costs of their stay and their eventual transport to another country as well as their adherence to Japanese law. This includes abstention from political activities, which is interpreted to mean that they must not speak out about conditions in the country from which they fled.

Asked whether Japan feared complications in the relationship it hoped to develop with Hanoi, a Foreign Ministry source thought a long time before saying that he didn't know. But he pointed out that the Tokyo‐Hanoi relationship was quite new and in a sensitive stage. A European banker here, blunter, said that the market of 50 million Vietnamese was the strongest magnet to business and banking in Asia today that few countries would risk offending Hanoi for the sake of humanitarian considerations.

The problem, that they have provoked by surviving until they entered Japanese waters has caused only a thin echo among the 37 refugees on Los Andes. They are still recovering, with the customary absence of self‐pity that distinguished the millions of Vietnamese displaced by both sides, from their ordeal at sea.

This group is typical of the broad range of people fleeing Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and it resembles in variety those, for example, who fled Hungary in 1956 or other Communist countries since World War II. Except for one former sergeant in the Saigon air force., who, has strong anti‐Communist views, they displayed no ideological commitment but rather deep unhappiness over an increasingly restrictive life, arbitrary arrests for “re‐education” at forced labor with no provision for release and a sense of being cut off from the world and their relatives and friends abroad.

The bulk of the group is made up of the 57‐year‐old owner of the fishing boat, his wife, their four sons, one daughter, one daughter‐in‐law and two nephews, fishermen and farmers from Vung Tau. There is the wife of a former South Vietnamese army physician who has been undergoing “re‐education” for two years and her 6‐year‐old son. Their closest friend, a Saigon secretary, came with her. And there is a Saigon high school student hoping to finish his education in France.

When asked about their escape, they spoke softly of the night they spent hiding in the forest near the place where the boat was tied up, admonishing their children to be quiet. They recall how seasick they all were, especially the two pregnant women and the 13 children. They tell how 10 days out their motor broke down and they drifted for two days, losing hope.

A Freighter Stops

With their boat drawing a lot of water and their strength to bail it out waning, they were joyous when a freighter stopped for the SOS, but crushed when after long deliberation it did not take them aboard, instead lowering a vessel for them to continue the voyage on their own.

Soon after, the motor of that craft broke down and the men rowed with the oars that had been provided. Again they drifted as their strength flagged. Days passed. Then a Philippine freighter, stopped. But instead of taking the exhausted people aboard, its crew gave them a map that marked their position near Okinawa and told them, falsely,that they were only nine miles from land and to keep rowing. “We were crying,” the former sergeant said, because they had no strength to row.

Then came Los Andes. Capt. Carlo Guidi, an Italian, has accommodated his passengers as best he can, although they outnumber his crew and far outstrip his facilities. He does not know what he will do if Japan refuses to accept the refugees. His next stop is Argentina, a voyage of perhaps 35 days around Cape Horn. In their eagerness to get rid of the refugees, he said, port authorities at his first Japanese stop persuaded them to continue on his itinerary although with 66 persons abroad and lifeboats for only 40, Los Andes is in clear violation of safety rules.

Captain Guidi said there was no way he could set out for Argentina with his passengers.

“We don't understand Japan,” said the Saigon high school student. “They call themselves a country of freedom.”

Mr. Kobayashi, the immigration official, said he hoped the problem of Vietnamese knocking on Japan's door would diminish rather than grow.

By Henry Kamm

SINGAPORE, June 12—A few miles out from this city of wealth, in Malaysian waters, a vessel that has been looking for a port for nearly four months stands at anchor. She is the 1,570‐ton oil tanker Leap Dal. Her present cargo is not in her hold but on her single deck.

The Leap Dal—the name, ironically, means good luck in Cambodian—is carrying 249 Indochinese refugees. They have lived on its open deck since January, waiting. At first they waited to go to a country that would give them a home. Then they lowered their hopes to finding a country that would recognize their existence and let them ashore at least temporarily until one government or another decided to let them come to stay.

In the sad picture of the wanderings on land and sea of tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia since the end of the Indochinese war two years ago, nothing exemplifies so fully all the ironies and pain of people who thought they were choosing freedom and wound up in a limbo of hostility or indifference from those from whom they expected help.

The passengers of the Leap Dal are mainly Laotians and include 99 children, two of whom were born here, and 62 women, the oldest 82 years old. They were misled or even cheated into boarding the ship. They were ready to be betrayed because of the despair in which they lived.

Exposed to Elements

Exposed as they are to the rigors of the rainy season on an open deck of ship that cannot move under its own steam or communicate with the outside world, open to the risk of a blaze from the dozens of cooking fires on board, it is nearly miraculous that neither epidemic nor catastrophe has struck the Leap Dal thus far. Those concerned have come to fear that the ship's luck—such as it is—may run out before help comes.

The Leap Dal, built in New Jersey about 30 years ago, was chartered by the World Conference on Religion and Peace and its Asian branch last January to cruise the sea lanes leading south from Vietnam to pick up as many as possible of the Vietnamese who set out from their countries in fishing craft in a search for more freedom than their country presently offers.

The ship was diverted by its first director, Thich Nhat Hanh, a well‐known leader of the antiwar forces in Vietnamese Buddhism, and some of his assistants. Instead of directing the ship to the sea lanes, they loaded it’ with refugees already in Thailand, either from camps or those living illegally in Bangkok. Apparently the Buddhist leader intended to send the ship to Australia, there to release its passengers to run ashore and dramatize to the world the plight of the Indochinese refugees.

In a report by Dr. Homer A. Jack, secretary general of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, who is based in New York, it is suggested that an unscrupulous assistant to the Vietnamese monk sold places on the ship for $800.

Bribe Story Denied

Shipboard interviews brought denials and ridicule for the possibility that many of the refugees could have raised such sums. Some said they had raised what money they could to help to buy supplies and equipment for the voyage. Others, the majority, pointed to their pitiable present condition and their narrow escapes from their countries and asked how people like them could have paid for place on the Leap Dal.

All the refugees interviewed recalled the enthusiasm that was generated when rumors spread through Thailand’s refugee community of a ship that would take as many as 1,000 to a safe haven in Australia. Some escaped from refugee camps to make their way to the coast, others saw an end to their illegal status in Thailand, where they were at the mercy of hostile and demanding petty officials, and made their way to the Leap Dal.

They stressed that their life in Thailand had brought them so close to despair that they were ready to grasp at any possibility.

Their despair has deepened in the last four months. Scantily protected by tarpaulins stretched overhead, they have spread their thin rattan mats to fill every inch of the rusty, wet deck. Their children find their only exercise by climbing on the tanker's pumps and other fixtures, leading to many painful falls. Their total hygienic equipment is a set of makeshift toilets installed behind sack curtains and hanging over the outside of the ship. There is no lighting equipment, so nights are long and even duller than days.

Shortage of Water

Because water is scarce, all that the Singapore branch of the World Conference on Religion and Peace sends out by tug is reserved for drinking and cooking. The refugees wash themselves, their clothes and their dishes in the dirty water of one of the world’s busiest ports. They attribute the widespread skin rashes and open, swollen sores, to the use of this water. Even their drinking water is murky.

A young Vietnamese, following his country's tradition of hospitality, offered a visitor food, and when this was refused, he suggested at least a glass of water. But noticing the visitor’s reaction, he said quickly, “You are right, you'd better not. It's not so safe.”

“Life is so monotonous,” said Phayoanh Phoominor, a soft‐voiced 18‐year‐old girl who escaped from Pakse in southern Laos to Thailand shortly after her marriage to a fellow high school student. “Every morning we eat, and then the waiting starts.”

So rare is any contact with the outside world that the arrival of the water boat is an occasion for applause for most of the passengers, who line the railings. They applaud no the water but the fact that someone ashore has thought of them.

No News From America

The refugees reacted with joy to news that France and West Germany were said to be preparing to issue visas to a limited number of them. “From America, is there any news?” asked the 18‐year‐old bride, whose husband has a brother in Houston. None has reached the Leap Dal. “We would like a little hospitality,” she murmured when asked what she would like to say to the people who live on land.

“We left to look for liberty.” said Liane Sounavong, a Laotian from Savannakhet. “We will go to any country that will accept us. The important thing, is to get off this boat.”

Meanwhile, the sponsors, who have dismissed Thich Nhat Hanh, continue their multiple negotiations to get the people ashore and to make life bearable for them during the wait. Neither Singapore nor Malaysia have made it easy to keep the ship supplied with the bare necessities, possible host countries are reluctant and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees appears to feel somewhat less eager to help the passengers of the Leap Dal than refugees in camps in Asia.

In his most recent report on the issue, Dr. Jack offered an “extremely realistic” estimate that the Leap Dal passengers might have to stay aboard for many more months. This conclusion has not been communicated to the passengers, to whom, in fact, very little information is given on anything.

Fishing Boats Turned Back

But they are in no uncertainty on how unwelcome they and other Indochinese refugees are. Several times a week, as they look out from their floating prison, they see refugees’ fishing boats that had drifted in from Vietnam being turned back by immigration authorities or being towed out again to the high seas to look for a haven elsewhere.

“If you get to shore break up your boat so they can'can tow you out again,” a young Vietnamese aboard the Leap Dal said, he shouted down to refuges on fishing boat as they passed. That is how he escaped from Vietnam to Thailand, and after a month in prison for breaking immigration laws he was allowed to enter a refugee camp, from which he escaped to come aboard the Leap Dal.

His escape to the ship was his third, he said in a soft voice, smiling apologetically. A member of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, he walked for several months to reach Saigon after the fall of Phnom Penh.

“If there is still a hope, we can wait on the ship a little longer, even under harder conditions,” said Boun Nhou, clerk from Vientiane, Laos. “But can we be in despair forever?”

By Henry Kamm

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, June 19—Boatloads of Vietnamese refugees are landing along the east coast of Malaysia almost every day, and how many are pushed back out to sea by police, navy and immigration authorities will never be known.

Six hundred were given shelter in May in the largest monthly total since the flow began last year.

Thirty‐three refugees were reported to have drowned a few days ago off the coast of Sabah, a Malaysian island state in northern Borneo, when their boat struck a rock as it headed for the Philippines after having been refused entry on Sabah and earlier in Sarawak, a neighboring Malaysian state. Four persons survived.

Accounts are multiplying of refugees who move from country to country in Southeast Asia, who are rejected at eight or nine ports along Malaysia's long coastline until they scuttle their boats and are allowed to land. The surprising flow runs counter to expectations — that when North Vietnam won control of all of Vietnam, all of the county would become as airtight as the North always was.

Little Obligation Is Felt

As the flow increases, the attitudes of the countries where the boats run ashore are hardening.

Asian countries, no matter how much they may have profited during the war in Indochina, feel little obligation to extend help to the war's final flotsam. To Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand or the Philippines, it is up to the large Western powers—first in line, the United States—to provide new homes. At most, and increasingly unwillingly, they will provide temporary haven.

International officials and diplomats dealing with the problem are concerned that unless the principal countries that receive refugees in the West increase and accelerate their intake, there will be many more deaths among those who are hounded from port to port, and more misery in the camps and on the boats for those fortunate enough to have been granted temporary shelter.

The refugees wait in virtual isolation from the world on the boats and in the camps for officials from the American, French, Australian or Canadian embassies or from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to tell them that an end is in sight.

The United States has been caught, more than two years after the war, as unprepared for the continued escape of people from Indochina as countries that were less vitally linked with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the past. Washington has no effective program to cope with the thousands that have fled this year and those that are still arriving.

Then the Boats Came

After the original program of taking in 130,000 refugees after the collapse in Indochina had been exhausted, Congress grudgingly granted authority for another 11,000. It did so on assurance from the Administration of President Gerald R. Ford that this would be the final request.

“Then the boats started arriving,” an American official said. Unwilling to go back to Congress because of earlier assurances of an end to special immigration privileges for people from Indochina, the Ford Administration put into effect last March a program under which 100 “boat people”—Vietnamese who escape in what is still the only way possible—would be granted entry every month. This would fall under the “conditional entry program” for refugees, such as Soviet Jews, from all Communist countries.

Those chosen must either have close relatives in the United States, have been trained in the United States during the war or have worked closely with American forces or agencies. Their families are allowed to accompany them, but under a nonprivileged immigration status that causes long delays.

At the moment, family members whose applications were made no later than last Nov. 15 are eligible to accompany their relatives, and the cutoff date will not be changed before Sept. 30, if then. But the heavy flow of refugees started this year.

As a result, the Government of Malaysia is aware that it is now sheltering, in number of scattered camps, well over 2,000 refugees, most of whom arrived this year, that so far this year only 75 have left for the United States—with 48 more due to leave this week—and that the record of the other refugee‐receiving countries is similarly low.

The situation is comparable and the host governments' sentiments are similar in Thailand, with about 2,300 “boat people” and more arriving; in the Philippines, with 1,000; Singapore, with about 100; Indonesia, with more than 400, and Hong Kong, with 200.

Each for their own reasons—eagerness to avoid complications in budding relationships with Hanoi, sensitiveness of existing communal problems between ethnic groups within the country, fear of becoming identified as a haven for refugees, anxiety that the refugees might contain a Communist fifth column—the unwilling hosts fear that the Vietnamese might stay because no one wants them.

“The other day I nearly broke down in tears,” an American diplomat said, recalling a field trip to refugee camps in which he had little but negative news to give to people who saw him as their principal hope.

But another American official spoke without seeming disturbed of how many refugee boats left Singapore for the Philippines in 1975 because the United States would receive refugees only there and on Guam. “Most of them probably made it,” he said, seemingly dismissing probable losses at sea, which he estimated at 10 percent.

Officials in general are agreed that present procedures tend to be too pedantic and cumbersome, especially in the case of the United States, and that all recipient countries should make the political decision to admit greater numbers quickly. If they do not do so, it is feared that attitudes that now seem hard‐hearted will settle into systematic cruelty.

How 8 Set Out, 4 Arrived

Already, in maritime circles, there is an unhappy discussion over increasing neglect of the fundamental rule of the sea that passing ships must stop to rescue people from vessels in trouble. But from Japan to Singapore, governments have taken punitive attitudes against companies whose ships try to put ashore refugees they have picked up.

According to maritime sources and refugee accounts, SOS signals are ignored to avoid difficulties in the next port. In a not untypical account of an arrival in Malaysia, four young men in an overcrowded refugee camp in a police station in Kuantan told how they had left Vung Tau, near Saigon, last Dec. 15, with four other men in a boat. They arrived in Malaysia on Dec. 20 and were driven off; they reached Singapore on Dec. 23, and were driven off.

Next they were chased away from Indonesia, where they had spent five days fishing—their trade—and selling their catch to islanders. They went back to Singapore, to be driven off again. They caught and sold fish for a few days to islanders off Malaysia and set out for Thailand.

Their boat broke up off Kuantan, and they swam from 4 in the afternoon until 5 in the morning, catching their breath occasionally by holding onto fishnets attached to buoys. Four never reached the shore. The survivors were detained in jail for four weeks before being “freed” to the Kuantan police station.

A total of 117 Vietnamese, including many children, are confined in the barracks and lockup, which is under constant guard and which no one is allowed to leave, Outsiders are not allowed to enter. Some detainees have been there for year.

Security and Mail Censorship

In Malaysia the National Security Council, a powerful and cautious body, handles the refugee situation, and no Government official was prepared to discuss the situation with this correspondent. The refugees mail is censored and greatly delayed, which complicates their efforts to locate relatives abroad and to arrange for emigration.

In a camp at Endau, the police guard forbade a visitor to leave something for the many children, and insisted that the visitor obtain permission from the police station. It was refused. To get into such camps, Vietnamese take the risk of scuttling their boats or setting fire to them offshore, endangering the lives of all, just to avoid being pushed back into the sea.

Recently a boat arrived in Sarawak intact, with a woman in labor aboard, and it was not scuttled. As a result, the woman and her infant were returned to the boat two days later and the boat pushed off. Only then did the boat catch fire, and the passengers were taken ashore.

In a series of interviews in camps on the Malaysian east coast, the view most often expressed was that if the stays in the camps were transitory and emigration would soon follow, it would have been worth the ordeal, even if the transit stop closely resembled a prison camp.

Refugee officials and diplomats accent the positive, stressing that no matter how cold the reception, at least Malaysia lets a good number come ashore.

But Americans are finding it difficult to explain to Vietnamese who have taken enormous risks to escape to what they still often call, in the language of the war, “the free world,” why the power that coined the expression and encouraged them to aspire to freedom does so little now to allow them to go further in the world in which they have arrived but the hostile atmosphere of restrictive camps.

By Henry Kamm

BANGKOK, Thailand, June 23—For the children, even Vietnamese children who have long experience of the worst, the boat trips are frightening and remain alive in nightmares. But the refugees' receptions wherever their boats arrive—if they arrive—are incomprehensible.

Perhaps a third of the 5,000 refugees from Vietnam who have arrived in Thailand and elsewhere in Asia this year after fleeing from their country in small boats are children. In one of the largest refugee camps in Thailand, 327 of the nearly 1,000 exiles are under 17. and 41 less than a year old.

They share the living conditions common in the camps here as well as in the Philippines, Malaysia. Indonesia and Singapore: crowded, without privacy for families or much playing space, under police guard and often fenced in by barbed wire. Like their elders, they don't complain much to outsiders. But they opened their hearts to a Vietnamese interpreter.

Common strands appear in most of the children's accounts of this extraordinary wave of refugees, who unlike escapees from authoritarian regimes throughout the world in this century of mass political flights do not take the comparatively easy route of crossing a frontier surreptitiously into a neighboring country but throw themselves at the mercy of the South China Sea on small craft never intended for such voyages.

Children Aren't Told

The secrecy necessary in organizing the escapes usually excludes children from advance knowledge of what awaits them. They are told at the last moment that they are going to take a trip, and no questions are to be asked. They usually assemble in woods near the coast where the boat is moored at night, are constantly admonished to make no noise, and spend long hours waiting for the coast to be clear.

The organizer of an escape of 94 persons told how his wife, a nurse, injected, all the children with a barbiturate shortly before departure.

But for all children questioned the boat trips are days and nights of terror, whether the trips take less than a week, if the first shore on which they touch is hospitable, or many weeks there are errors or they are rejected by passing ships or officials ashore.

There is the fear of being discovered by government boats. There is the shock of the heavy seas, and in small coastal craft all seas are heavy to people not used to them. There is the almost realization that not very seaworthy boats take a lot of ‐water and require constant bailing. And there is the violence and apathy of seasickness, for days and nights on and.

“I was so afraid,” said a soft-spoken 13‐year‐old boy, confiding to his mother, who interpreted. I saw the water coming in the boat, and I thought we would sink.” “I was afraid especially at night. If we sink then, nobody would see us or save us.”

Food and water are strictly rationed because no one knows how long the voyage will last. For the 13‐year‐old. there was no food at all. Because of a mixup among the group of 14 that escaped, there was only water aboard during the six‐day crossing from Rach Gia on the southernmost coast to Thailand. “But I was not very hungry; I was seasick,” the boy said.

Most parents and children said the children did not cry during their trips. “The big people cried, we didn't,” said an 11‐year‐old girl from Saigon, matter‐of‐factly.

Whatever the terrors of their ordeal at sea, they were understandable to the children. But the children remain bewildered by the shock of the generally inhospitable, often hostile receptions received from ships that they had expected would help or at ports or fishing villages that they reached with all the joy of those regaining life after confronting death for days.

Boats Refused Them

“I was very happy to see boats, because T thought they would take us aboard,” the 13‐year‐old said. “The grown‐ups asked, but the boats always refused us. They said they have no permission, and the police would punish them if they took us.”

In all of Asia, from Japan in the north to Indonesia in the south, authorities have been reluctant to accept refugees from boats wanting to put them ashore at their next part of call. Some countries, notably Singapore, refuse categorically in most cases.

“I didn't know what to think,” said the 11‐year‐old girl, recalling in Thailand how the Malaysian authorities forced them back out to sea when they tried to land. “I was afraid to go back out to sea. There were high waves, and the boat was already breaking. But the big people said it wasn't so bad, at least they gave us something to eat.”

The children displayed no emotional reaction W the shock of refusals, but when asked said it made them angry. “I think people don't like the Vietnamese,” the 13‐year‐old boy said. “I think people don't understand that we are only refugees.”

Conditions Bewilder Them

The children are equally bewildered by the conditions under which they live and by the nervousness of their families as they watch the weeks and months pass and transit stops take on the aspect of semi-permanence. It is hard far parents to explain to children whom they have told that, they left their own country to find freedom why all their time is spent under police supervision within the confines of crowded and uncomfortable barracks, shacks or unused factories.

In Thailand, considerable extortion on the part of the police and petty officials of the refugees' belongings— the gold some smuggled out with them or the money sent to them by relatives —has been the rule since the refugee flow began in 1975. Refugees also complain of acts of petty tyranny by the police, whose control over the camps is nearly absolute.

Younger children in one Thai camp said that teenage boys were particular victims of police brutality because in their boredom they often get together to sing Vietnamese songs and accompany themselves with the percussion of cooking gear.

The children said, and the teen‐agers and adults confirmed it, that police often beat and kicked people severely for minor infractions of camp routine or occasional escapes into town for a few hours. Sometimes the punishment consists of forcing youngsters to climb trees and stay in them under the cruel sun and tormented by red ants for hours.

But women in the camp reported that the Thai market women from whom they buy their food treat them with friendship and take no advantage of their misery. And the 13‐year‐old said that the Thai fishermen's children were his friends and often gave him more fish than his family could eat.

By Henry Kamm

BANGKOK, Thailand, June 30—More than 80,000 Indochinese refugees are killing time in camps throughout Thailand waiting for other countries to open their doors to them or Thailand to resettle them in this country. More arrive from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam every day than leave for new homes.

Because of its long borders with Laos and Cambodia and its long coastline along which refugee vessels from Vietnam seek shelter, Thailand has been the most hospitable country in Asia for refugees from Indochina. As a result, it is the only Asian country in which the number of refugees is large enough to constitute a real problem for the host Government.

“Hospitable” in the context of the reception that awaits Indochinese refugees in Asian countries is a relative term. It is largely because Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines show such little readiness to accept the refugees even temporarily that the word can: be applied to Thailand. “We are unlucky to have the three countries close to us,” said Interior Minister Samak Sundaravei, the official in charge of the problem, illustrating Thailand's unhappiness over its role as host.

People familiar with the situation say that, depending on their nationality, the refugees are at best treated with neglect by the Thai authorities and at worst are regarded as possible subversives and’ mercilessly exploited by petty officials and’ employers.

Vietnamese Are Worst Off

The Vietnamese, the smallest group, are in the worst situation. “We have some feeling for the Lao and Cambodians,” said the,Interior Minister, implicitly stressing the absence of sympathetic feelings for the Vietnamese.

“They think they are very smart,” he said disparagingly.

Mr. Samal said he suspected the Vietnamese, particularly those who are arriving, from Laos, where there is a large Vietnamese community, of subversive activities in connection with the Thai Communist insurgency.

The official antagonism sets the tone for the treatment of the 3,400 Vietnamese refugees, who complain of extortion and mistreatment in their camps. One Vietnamese was killed earlier this year in a riot in Si Khiu camp, where the inmates are mainly from Laos.

In the camps where refugees from Vietnam who arrive in fishing boats are sent, complaints of extortion or theft of the property they arrive with are widespread and believed to be true by outsiders.

Bribes Required

In the detention facilities maintained by the Bangkok immigration authorities, where refugees cleared for departure to other countries spend days or weeks awaiting final clearance, Vietnamese have to pay minor bribes to their guards to be allowed out for shopping. Laotians and Cambodians do not.

The most favored group are about 10,000 Laotians of Lao ethnic origin in the large camp at Nong Khai, across the Mekong River from the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Close to Thais in ethnic character and language, they enjoy correct treatment and relatively easy movement out of the camp.

The largest group of refugees are the more than 50,000 Laotian hill tribesmen, most of whom fled more than two years ago because of their close association with the American‐sponsored army that did the bulk of the fighting against the Communists. They and the nearly 11,000 Cambodians enjoy less favorable treatment than the ethnic Laos but greater tolerance than the Vietnamese.

The refugees continue arriving: each month more than 1,000 Laotians, more than 100 Cambodians and, while the good weather at sea lasts, several hundred Vietnamese reach Thailand.

Resettlement Considered

They arrive faster than they depart, and the Thai Government is painfully conscious that groups of Laotian and Cambodian refugees that no other nation seems to want are building up. In a major reversal of Thailand's earlier attitude the Interior Minister said in an interview that the Government will have to consider eventual resettlement in Thailand of some of the Laotian and Cambodian refugees.

But Mr. Samak said this could not be announced, citing probable negative reactions from Thais who would feel foreigners were being better treated than themselves.

In fact, it is the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and not the Thai Government which bears the expenses of the refugees’ upkeep.

A project that Mr. Samak is considering is the creation of border villages with mixed populations of Thais and Laotians or Cambodians. This, he explained, would not endanger Thai security by creating, entirely foreign populations in border areas. But interviews with both Laotian and Cambodian refugees indicated that while they would favor settlement in Thailand, they feared being too near the border of their former homelands.

Vietnamese Excluded

But the minister said resettlement of the Vietnamese would not be considered. “They must have first priority for talking to other countries,” he said. Only France is regularly taking sizable numbers of Indochinese from Thailand. A total of 771, mainly Laotians. left for France in May. Only 80 went to the United States. The only other departures for the same month were three each to West Germany and Norway and two to Britain.

Mr. Samak said that if other countries did not accept the Vietnamese, “we might one day have to make a deal with the Vietnamese Government to take them back.”

Despite this ominous remark, the minister said that in accepting the United Nations high commissioner's help for the maintenance of the refugees, Thailand committed itself to the principle that refugees could be repatriated only with their consent.

By Henry Kamm

BANGKOK, Thailand, June 30—After more than two years in a refugee camp at Aranyaprathet, on the Cambodian border, where more than 4,000 Cambodians live, an elderly carpenter and his wife spoke with the resignation that distinguished the millions of displaced persons in Indochina during three decades of war.

As members of the Vietnamese minority in the city of Battambang, where they were born, they began their life of homelessness more than seven years ago. Officially instigated assaults killed thousands of Vietnamese and threw most of the survivors into prison camps. Their houses were pillaged by mobs. The couple spent the next five years behind barbed wire in the center of the city where both were born.

Their three children were with them. Two got married in the camp; their two grandchildren were born in camps, one in Cambodia, the other in Thailand. The family of nine persons still lives together, still in a camp. How do they feel about their treatment at the hands of the Cambodians? The carpenter smiled in embarrassment. His wife replied: “What can we say? We were all in the same situation. We were not in our own country. We ate their rice, we drank their water, so we could only accept.”

‘Still Their Country’

Even if they lived there all their lives and worked for their living? “Yes, but it was still their country.”

How do they feel about their life in Thailand? “It's the same thing,” the woman said. “It's their country.” Then why did they want to go to America or France, the principal countries of permanent exile? “We don't know when we can return to Cambodia,” the woman said, as if offering an apology for not wanting to stay in the camp until then. “And also. we heard that in America life is easier and we could work.”

The live in long barracks subdivided into compartments allowing little space and less privacy. Vegetable gardens remove some of the air of transitoriness but emphasize how unsuited for permanence the small, flat expanse of sandy land ridden with malaria mosquitoes is as a home for more than 4.000 men, women and, most visibly, children.

The camp is a dispirited place, because few people leave. Those who have left were generally the most capable of instilling a sense of direction and leadership. Hardly anyone who speaks French remains among more than 4,000 Cambodians, another way of saying that hardly anyone of more than the most basic education lives in the camp.

Few Still Expect to Emigrate

Few still seem to cherish hope for emigration, and lethargic acceptance of hopelessness seems dominant. Part of the hopelessness stems from the fact that many of the men have left their wives and children behind and none has heard from them, because Cambodia is almost hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. Many of the men said that they would rather stay until their families came or they could fight their way back into Cambodia.

Although the refugees are not officially allowed to leave the camp or to take work, many do occasional agricultural or construction work at less than the $1.25 minimum daily wage. But often, they said, their employers refuse to pay them, or pay them less than promised. If they protest, weapons are sometimes brandished, they said. Then why do they continue to work, a group was asked. “Because we have no money,” one man answered with a bland smile.

“When I have something good to eat the tears come to my eyes,” said a former teacher recently arrived after having been received in Thailand with a beating and four months in jail. “I think of my wife and children and their hunger.”

More than 17,000 Laotians live at the huge camp in Nongkhai, Thailand, across the Mekong River from the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Materially, life is better because many of the Laotians brought money across the river with them and life appears more purposeful and organized by the Laotians themselves. The subject of emigration is on everyone's mind, and there is no resignation to the fact that more people arrive every day than depart.

Much Political Bitterness

But political bitterness is strong, and particularly in the section where nearly 6,000 Meo mountain tribesmen are housed. The United States is the target. The United States fought the bulk of the ground war in Laos with a secret army made up largely of Meos, whom it equipped, paid, all but led and whose families it fed and housed and moved about the country. “We came here more than two years ago without thinking of going to a third country,” the head of the Meo administration in the camp said. “We thought we came here for our security and would return to Laos when the situation got better.”

But now, he said, even the Meo leader, former Maj. Gen. Vang Pao, who was in charge of distributing American wealth and thus became almost a king among the Meos, no longer answers letters from his American exile, and the Meos feel abandoned by all whom they trusted.

“We are very disappointed in the United States,” the camp leader said. “We didn't think the United States would abandon us without thinking of the loss of our liberty and our belongings. If the United States really means to abandon Laos, it should take us all away from here—either take us all out of here or give us your help to liberate ourselves.”

By Henry Kamm

KOBE, Japan, Aug. 21‐The three groups cf Vietnamese refugees sheltered in a Roman Catholic home in this port city have been recovering from their arduous escapes by small boat since May.

The 104 persons—about one‐third of them children—spend their time learning English from a priest, watching television in a language they don't understand, reliving awful memories and waiting for an embassy to give them a visa to place of permanent refuge.

Since Japan refuses to consider asylum for anyone, their hopes center on the United States, France and Australia. They have vaguely heard of the American decision last month to admit 7,000 “boat people,” but no official has talked to them about it, and they can only hope.

Their memories are of fears of being caught, of drownings, of death of hunger, thirst or exposure and of constantly bailing out their rickety craft while retching with seasickness.

Those were the dangers they expected when they set out. And they can speak of them matter‐of‐factly. But they cover with smiles and little laughs their embarrassment over the anger they feel about the many ships that passed them by while they were adrift at sea.

Asian Countries Reluctant

Before they were rescued—each group by a Japanese merchant vessel—they had all tasted the bitterness of having ship after ship ignore their pleas and SOS signals and abandon them to the sea, with food, water and fuel running low, passengers ill and the coast far off.

Since the heavy refugee flow from Vietnam began last year, there have been increasingly frequent reports of violations of the traditional requirement that all ships encountering others in distress come to their rescue.

In shipping circles here and in Southeast Asia, it is recognized that the violations have become everyday occurrences and suspicions are voiced that some companies may have ordered their captains not to pick up “boat people.”

The reason is that almost all Asian countries are reluctant to grant refugees even temporary shelter and have made serious difficulties for captains wishing to let these passengers off at their next port of call.

Great losses of time, danger to cargoes and governmental bureaucratic complications have ensued for shipping lines. How many lives have been lost because of the reluctance of ports and ships to rescue these refugees will never be known.

Merchant vessels are not the only suspected offenders. The leader of a group of 28 refugees that set out from Saigon May 8 said that on May 10 their boat flashed an SOS to the Australian naval vessel Vendetta. The vessel pulled up by the fishing boat. The Vietnamese group leader—he did not want his name printed for fear of reprisals against his relatives in Vietnam—asked for help and said that some people aboard were ill.

Passed by 21 Ships

While Australian sailors leaned over the rail to photograph the scene, the captain replied that he regretted he could not take the refugees aboard because his ship was on patrol. The refugee leader said the Australians then lowered medicines, water and fruit juice to them and a map indicating that Malaysia was 20 hours away. The Vendetta, a large destroyer that is listed as carrying a crew of 320, returned to its patrol.

“We had hoped to be invited aboard,” the refugee leader said.

The next day, said the leader, a former Education Ministry specialist, 21 ships passed within their sight in 12 hours. The Vietnamese signaled with flares and homemade flags, but no ship acknowledged the signals.

“I thought that they were busy, or because they had to feed us, or because they had difficulties with governments for political reasons,” the refugee leader said in apology for those who failed to try to save the lives of his group, which included three young children and a pregnant woman.

Members of one group that left Vietnam from Cam Ranh on July 12 reported having passed within 50 yards of a ship bearing an Esso band around its smokestack on July 14 and being ignored by its crew. The 56 refugees on the boat later narrowly escaped capture by Chinese in the Paracel Islands, where they stopped to AA for drinking water before being rescued by a Japanese freighter.

By Henry Kamm

TOKYO. Aug. 25—Prodded by the United States and the office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Japan is considering liberalizing its restrictive policies toward accepting refugees from Vietnam who arrive in Japanese ports after having been rescued at sea by ships heading for Japan.

But highly placed officials of the Foreign Ministry and the Immigration Bureau foresee only slow change, if any, in existing attitudes. Long delays and insistence on firm guarantees that the refugees will not remain indefinitely in Japan have made captains of ships hesitant to rescue the “boat people” who flee from Vietnam in small fishing craft. Many of those upon whom the ships turn their backs are likely to perish at sea.

Katsuyoshi Yamano, chief of the entry division of the Immigration Bureau, disclosed in an interview that last month the Japanese Embassy in Washington had been informed by the State Department that the United States would like Japan to act more liberally in granting temporary entry permits, reconsider its absolute refusal even to consider granting permanent asylum and increase its contribution to the United Nations refugee body.

Mr. Yamano said these points were still under study in various departments of the Government. He indicated that any decision would be slow in coming.

Assurance From U.N.

The official also disclosed that the United Nations high commissioner had urged Japan to liberalize its temporary entry procedure based on a United Nations assurance that the refugees would he permanently resettled elsewhere eventually.

Japan now requires that before a ship can land refugees, either the country in which it is registered or the one in which it is owned must guarantee that it will take responsibility for resettling the refugees elsewhere if no other country can be found that will accept them.

This requirement causes delays of about two weeks, curing which the rescuing ship is immobilized at great cost to its owners and to the shippers of its cargo.

Japan also requires that facilities be available to care for and shelter the refugees. But despite its position as Asia's wealthiest nation. Japan provides no governmental aid for feeding and sheltering refugees, leaving this task to private charities, principally the Roman Catholic organization Caritas.

“There are no suitable facilities at the moment,” said Mr. Yamano, explaining his country's failure to provide housing for the refugees.

The total number of Vietnamese refugees in Japan amounts to 606 in a nation of 113 million.

The immigration official said Japan could not agree with the high commissioner's suggestion that the United Nations’ assurances alone should suffice to grant a landing permit. “The rescuing country should have a responsibility,” he said.

However, it has been difficult to get countries such as Liberia that provide “flags of convenience” for shipowners to take the necessary diplomatic step to issue a guarantee.

Contributions to Refugee Agency

A well‐placed Foreign Ministry official said that the ministry hoped to increase Japan's contribution to the United Nations refugee agency, but that this would still have to be approved by the Finance Ministry and in any event could not go into effect before the next budget year beginning next April I.

Our impression is, frankly speaking, that we are very much surprised,” said Mr. Yamano in reaction to criticism of the Japanese attitude. He was commenting on a recent case that has caused despair among persons close to refugee matters and anguish to a group of 20 refugees.

They were picked up last month by the Greek ship Kilos, which was carrying a cargo of coke from Poland to North Korea. Because the master of the vessel was unwilling to deliver refugees from one Communist‐ruled country to another, he asked to be allowed to make a special call in the Japanese port of Nagasaki to discharge the 20.

But from July 10 to 13, the Krios was denied entry into Japanese territorial waters, while its Vietnamese passengers worried about whether they would soon be handed over to the Government in Pyongyang.

Guarantee From Greece

Finally, on July 13, the Greek Government gave its guarantee and on the following day the ship was allowed into port. Only on July 15 were the refugees allowed ashore. They are still in Japan.

“I would like even a symbol of helpfulness,” said the Rev. Robert Kimura, Jesuit from California who has taken Japanese nationality. He runs the largest refugee shelter in Japan, in the port city of Kobe. “But they live by the book, and this is not in the book, ‘ he continued, describing the attitude of Japanese authorities.

Official Japanese sources ascribe the official reluctance to help refugees to fear that such an attitude would encourage the 650,000 Koreans and 50,000 Chinese in this ethnically nearly monolithic country to insist on a greater degree of assimilation into a society that strongly discriminates against them.

“This is not a quantitative but a qualitative question,” a Foreign Ministry official remarked when reminded of the small number of Vietnamese in Japan.

By Henry Kamm

BANGKOK, Thailand, Aug. 31—President Carter's decision last month to admit 15,000 more refugees from Indochina has already produced one important result, American diplomats report: Malaysia, where most of the Vietnamese fleeing in fishing boats run ashore, no longer pushes them back out to sea, as it frequently did.

Of the 8,000 “boat people” in transit camps from Japan to Indonesia, 3,000 are in Malaysia, many of them after having been sent back to sea several times until they scuttled their craft and had to be sheltered.

The diplomats attribute the change of attitude—which has not spread to Singapore, where refugees continue to be rejected—to more than the American action. Other countries have followed the American lead in offering to take in refugees. Australia will accept 1,500 to 2,000 in a year, Canada 450, New Zealand 420 Belgium 150 and Denmark 50.

This, with a continuing French program of admitting up to 1,000 a month, has given some Asian nations, notably Thailand and Malaysia, hope that they will not be permanently burdened. To the despair of international refugee officials and diplomats concerned, on the other hand, no Asian nation has acknowledged an obligation to give permanent asylum to anyone.

Thailand has come closer than others. As unwilling host to 87,000 refugees—70,000 Laotians, 14,000 Cambodians and 3,000 Vietnamese—it has borne the brunt of the problem and is given credit by refugee officials for having done its part, however unwillingly. The flow, particularly from Laos, continues.

Thai officials have acknowledged that they cannot realistically count either on the refugees’ accepting repatriation or on traditional immigrant‐receiving nations’ taking all or even most of the present camp population and those who may follow. Thailand has insisted only on assurances that no Vietnamese will remain in their country, the cardinal reason being historic suspicion throughout Southeast Asia of Vietnamese expansionism.

Thai officials have been considering a suggestion, submitted independently by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United States, for the resettlement of the bulk of the Laotian and Cambodian refugees in Thailand.

Paradoxically, in this context, United Nations officials fear that such a stopgap program as the American decision to take 15,000 more refugees after a halt in new immigration may hinder the long‐term solution, which they believe has to be in Thailand. The officials believe that unless sudden turnabouts on immigration policy are accompanied by concrete proposals for resettlement, the Thai Government will be encouraged to feel that a hard line will oblige the United States and other Western countries to admit all the refugees. This is not believed to be even a remote possibility, however.

The result of limited programs to take some refugees, according to the officials, is to condemn the bulk of the camp populations to remain just that: people vegetating behind barbed wire with no prospect of resuming a normal life. The solution, according to the officials, lies in the long‐term program, with internationally guaranteed financing, accompanied by an equally long‐term commitment to maintain a steady flow of departures to permanent homes elsewhere for the minority best able to make their way in the Western world. Many of the rural Laotians and Cambodians now in camps here do not appear to be easily assimilable far from their native lands.

Foreign officials here accept the Thai view that the refugees represent a serious domestic problem. It is likely to be difficult to resettle foreigners, even with assistance, amid a rural population that is poor and can be expected to be envious. Furthermore, the mounting refugee flow from Laos—generally ascribed to a near‐collapse of the Laotian economy and widespread deprivation and now running at 70 a day at the largest camp alone—is taking on the air of a protracted hemorrhage across the Mekong River, raising the prospect of a serious diplomatic problem with Thailand's Communist neighbor.

At a time when Thailand is worrying over the continuing flow, 92 refugees, mostly Laotians, are staging unexpected resistance against going to Thailand. They are the remaining refugees on the ill‐fated ship Leap Dal, at anchor off Singapore since January. Most of the passengers, originally numbering 249, were lured out of Thai camps by the false hope that the vessel would take them to asylum in Australia. The bulk were admitted to other countries, and the United States negotiated for Thai permission to let the rest come back to camps here in return for admitting some present camp inmates to the United States. But when a plane stood by in Singapore to carry the 92 here, they refused, apparently in the hope that staying aboard would hasten their admission to a Western country.