Vietnamese and Filipinos: The Competing Representation of Cold War “Refugees” in Malaysia, 1977-1980

• In Event: Protest, Repatriation, and Resettlement in Southeast Asia: Counter-Narratives of Vietnamese Boat People in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines

Abstract

By 1979, more than 54,000 Vietnamese refugees were waiting in limbo in an archipelago of refugee camps in Malaysia, and despite its hostile policies, Malaysia hosted the greatest number of Vietnamese Boat People in the 1970s in Southeast Asia. As a counter-point, in eastern Malaysia, more than 100,000 Filipinos found refuge in Sabah.

While the Vietnamese exodus was a result of complex political machinations on the ground—in particular, the war between China and Vietnam, the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, and the Vietnamese government’s expulsion of its ethnic Chinese population—the symbol of the “Vietnamese Boat Person” become synonymous with “refugee,” and as such “anticommunism,” in the American media and much of the U.S. political discourse. In contrast, the more than 100,000 Filipinos escaped the Western media’s attention, as they resettled in eastern Malaysia as regional migrants and Muslims.

This is a story of the Cold War, and yet it is also a story that addresses questions that predate and postdate the Cold War. However, the Filipinos fleeing Mindanao and the southern Philippine islands were also mired in the Cold War politics of the Marcos regime and its alliance and clientelism with the United States. Collectively, these stories demonstrate the porousness of this chronology and the need to recognize other regional politics that emphasized religious solidarity (or exclusion), colonial era territorial disputes (namely over Sabah), and internal ethnic politics alongside and within the bipolar framework of the Cold War and the Malaysian government’s vehement anti-communism.

Author

• Jana Lipman, Tulane University