Piratical Murders and Rape at Sea

The worst hazards the boat people face are not the elements

With 67 other refugees, Nguyen Phuong Thuy, 15, slipped out of Viet Nam in a 33-ft. boat. The craft was well into the Gulf of Thailand and the presumed zone of safety when it was attacked, not by pursuing Vietnamese but by a vessel carrying eight Thai fishermen. The pirates kidnaped Thuy and another young girl, then sank the refugees' boat with the rest of the Vietnamese still clinging to it. "I can't forget the look on my little sister Tran's face when she slipped below the water," Thuy said later. "I still can't sleep. The pirates were so cruel."

Cruel indeed. Thuy was seized last May. During the next 3 1/2 months, she often was gang-raped 30 times a day. She was kept in a dark locker where the temperature hovered around 100DEG F and fed a subsistence diet of rice and water. When Thuy passed out, she would be roused by being drenched with a bucket of salt water and then raped again. Her kidnaped companion was treated the same way and then thrown overboard. Thuy was bartered, along with baskets of fish, to 14 other boats, where her ordeal continued. When the last pirates set her ashore, Thai authorities jailed her as an illegal immigrant. Two weeks later she was finally sent to a refugee holding camp in Songkhla in southern Thailand.

Nguyen Phuong Thuy is not alone. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), women on 81 % of the boats reaching Thailand in the first nine months of 1981 were raped, most of them many times over. A total of 552 were attacked in front of their relatives; another 200 were carried off to other fishing vessels. The attackers, many of them carriers of venereal diseases, often left the women infected as well as brutalized. Many victims became pregnant. A report to the relief agency CARE by a doctor who worked at the Songkhla camp vividly described an attack on one group of young women: "All they could sense at the time was the stark fear of being faced by naked, sweating, foul-smelling men; the look on the rapists' faces as they laughed and leered; the shock of slappings and beatings; and finally the tearing pain as violation after violation took place in the most forceful and crude manner."

The plight of the boat people began after the fall of Saigon in 1975, when increasing numbers of South Vietnamese began fleeing the oppressive Hanoi regime in rickety fishing craft. By 1980, Thailand was overwhelmed by nearly 300,000 refugees from Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. Government policy in Bangkok shifted, and Thai fishermen, who once came to the aid of the refugees, were given three-day jail sentences if they towed a leaking refugee boat to shore.

The Thai government, extremely sensitive about the fact that pirates are active in the Gulf, exerts enormous pressure on U.N. officials and workers with private relief agencies to keep the atrocities unpublicized. Nor have the Thais taken much action to stop the assaults at sea. One promising venture was an antipiracy unit, supported by a $2 million U.S. grant, that included two spotter planes and funds to repair an aging coast guard cutter. After some success against the pirates, Bangkok asked the U.S. for another $1.3 million in June. The Reagan Administration countered with an offer of $600,000. Thai officials said the funds were insufficient and the program died. This week Bangkok will study a proposal by UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross that concerned nations contribute $3.7 million for an antipiracy campaign.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Phuong Thuy is slowly recovering from her nightmare. Recently, she wrote to her family in Viet Nam: "My dear mother, don't think about coming by sea. Escape or not, you surely will be dead, but I think it's better to be dead in Viet Nam. For me, I will never forget my travail on the sea. Don't follow me, my dear mother."

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