Journeys from Vietnam: A Vietnamese Australian’s Reflections

Issue 1 | 3 March 2009

On Tuesday 3 March 2009, The Sydney Institute held a discussion of the Vietnamese contribution to Australian settlement presenting Quang Luu, a Board Director of Austcare and former Head of SBS Radio, and Dai Le, a community relations coordinator, member of the NSW Liberal Party and a former producer and broadcaster with ABC Radio National. Quang Luu and Dai Le recalled their very different journeys to Australia which led them to becoming Australian citizens, along with their experiences and gradual adoption of Australia as “home”.

JOURNEYS FROM VIETNAM:  A VIETNAMESE AUSTRALIAN’S REFLECTIONS

TUONG QUANG LUU

The Chair looked at me hesitantly for a few seconds longer than usual before calling “Australia” to speak. I was holding up the “Australia” name banner, seeking the floor to deliver my remarks. I was not a mind reader, but it appeared to me that the Chair might have thought I did not look “Australian” enough or perhaps I was sitting at the wrong place.

That was in 1986and the occasion a meeting of the Social Economic Committee of The United Nations in New York. I had my first opportunity not only to speak as an Australian delegate but also to represent Australia at an international forum. When I finished speaking, a member of the delegation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) rushed to me smiling and said something in Mandarin. I was not as skilful in Putonghua as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but I could guess that he might have expressed something positive on my contribution.

“Thank you, but I do not understand Chinese. I’m an Australian of Vietnamese background,” I said. He responded: “Oh, you’re not Chinese – but still my congratulations.”

Such an occurrence is quite ordinary for delegates to international meetings and some diplomats often have far more interesting stories to tell.

New opportunities and challenges

I found it a bit more amusing personally, though, because of my background.

Australia had gradually embraced a multicultural approach for almost two decades – starting with a tentative first step by Prime Minister Harold Holt in the 1960s, then the official burial of the “White Australia” policy during the Whitlam years and the bold testing of public tolerance by the Fraser Government in its dealing with the post-1975 Indochinese refugee crisis by re-settling large numbers of asylum seeking Asians. But this fundamental change in the Australian social fabric did not as yet manifest itself to the extent that Australia could be seen represented by Australians from a culturally and linguistically diverse background.

I had been in New York previously, in 1969, when President Richard Nixon addressed the 24^th General Assembly of the United Nations to announce his policy on Vietnam. I was there as a diplomat on a short term mission at the Office of the Observer of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). South Vietnam, like South Korea, was granted an Observer’s Status at the United Nations after Vietnam’s application for its membership in the early 1950s was twice vetoed by the Soviet Union. Vietnam was divided at the 17^th parallel under the Geneva Agreement in 1954.

When I returned to New York in a different professional capacity, I must admit that I had a mixed feeling and my mind travelled to and from my past and my present.

One year earlier in Geneva, I was part of the Australia Delegation to a conference on mass movement of people across national borders convened by the UNHCR. As it turned out, I was not the sole delegate of Vietnamese background. One Vietnamese American came from Washington DC with the US delegation, and the OECD Team from Paris had one Vietnamese French expert. None of us had an opportunity to speak on behalf of our respective delegation and the only Vietnamese participant who took the floor was the Ambassador of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV).

Unlike the Chinese, the Greeks and the Italians, the Vietnamese were not a migratory people. During their long history, the Vietnamese people expanded their border by moving southward – from the Red River Delta to the Mekong Delta, making Vietnam a country of narrow landscape and long shore touched by the waves of  Bien Dong /the East Sea (which is also known as the South China Sea). Before the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, only France and to a lesser extent the French colony of New Caledonia hosted a sizeable Vietnamese community as a result of colonial link.

The Vietnamese did not have a migrant experience and tradition like the Chinese. During their first decade of resettlement as refugees, the Vietnamese Diaspora was taking shape in North America, in Western Europe and in Australia/New Zealand, but it was still early for many of us to be in a position of responsibility in our adopted countries.

Excluding Vietnamese delegates representing the SRV, participants of Vietnamese background at those international forums were still rare in the 1980s and in early1990s. An east-Asian looking member of a non-Asian country delegation was more likely then to be of Chinese background than Vietnamese.

The last decade, however, has seen the emergence of the 1.5 generation – i.e. those who were born in Vietnam and grew up in their countries of resettlement – and the second generation of Vietnamese background as they went through their education and moved into mainstream society. Delegates of Vietnamese background to national and international gatherings have become more common.

Indeed during my terms as the Sydney-based NSW State Director for the Federal Department of Immigration and Ethnic/Multicultural Affairs (1987-89) and as Head of SBS Radio (1989-2006), I saw this change as a positive indication of multicultural Australia as a country of equal opportunity and a fair degree of success and contribution by Vietnamese Australians in many fields of activities – particularly in education, technology, business and the liberal professions. But young Vietnamese Australians were not as active in political participation as their cohorts in the Greek, Italian and Jewish Australian communities. There remains a lot for Vietnamese Australians to learn from Australians of earlier waves of immigration to complete their integration process.

That was what I tried to do when I returned to Australia as a refugee after the Fall of Saigon. I had been in Australia from 1970 to 1974 as a diplomat. Beyond my two journeys from Vietnam, I ceased to be a Vietnamese political observer and analyst in Australia and became a social learner and citizen of this country.

The Vietnam War and freedom of speech

My first journey to Australia was conventional but my 4-year term here was quite eventful. I arrived in Canberra in March 1970, when General Lon Nol seized power through a coup d’e´tat in Phnom Penh and thus creating a more suitable environment for South Vietnam and its main allied supporter – the United States – to fight the communist forces in Cambodia. Until then, North Vietnam used Laos and the eastern part of Cambodia with impunity as safe haven to attack South Vietnam.

The expansion of the war into eastern Cambodia and southern Laos by the allied forces presented a new impetus for the so-called “Moratorium Movement” in Western democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia to mobilise their street marches against what was claimed as the “American imperialist invasion” against a poor and small country or “the Eagle and the Lotus” as Dr Jim Cairns shrewdly chose the title for one of his books.

Our difficult task at the RVN Embassy became even more difficult, because our message of self-defence and victim of a well-planned and well-supported communist aggression was lost to anti-war protests which were very well-orchestrated worldwide, especially after the unfortunate shootings of students on 4 May 1970 at Kent State University in the US.

Four days later on 8 May in Melbourne, I witnessed the biggest mass rally in Australia where Dr. Jim Cairns played the key role in whipping up popular sentiment against the war and conscription. I felt the intensity of emotion much more clearly displayed in Australia than in the UK where I had seen the biggest protest at Trafalgar Square after the Communist Tet Offensive in February 1968. In retrospect, the decision to send Australian conscripts to fight in South Vietnam was a political mistake.

I believed then, and I still do now, that tens of thousands of Australians who took part in those street marches were genuinely against the war and conscription. Australian mothers, who demanded their government  bring their sons home from Vietnam, had a legitimate concern and a democratic right to do so. I was myself a conscript and my mother spent many sleepless nights even when I only spent a short time in the army.

However, I believed then, and I still do, that the so-called anti-war moratorium was led and manipulated by a loose alliance of leftist movements and hard core communist activists that supported a communist victory under the disguise of a “Peace for Vietnam” campaign. We all remember this writing on the wall at various places in capital cities of Australia: “For Peace in Vietnam, Recognise the PRG”.

The “Provisional Revolutionary Government” of South Vietnam was a political creature of North Vietnam in 1969 to give legitimacy for the National Liberation Front (the NLF) – born in 1960 to the same mother – to sit at the Paris “Peace” Talks which led to the Paris Agreement in  early 1973.

One of the most successful communist propaganda products was the myth that this was a war of liberation by the local people in South Vietnam against the corrupt and authoritarian government in Saigon. Admittedly, the South Vietnamese government could not claim to be a shining example of transparency and democracy, but South Vietnam was not a one-party state and the government did not control the media. Members of the International Press Corps in Saigon were free to travel anywhere and interview anyone they wanted. The Saigon government could be compared very favourably with the Hanoi government then and the SRV government now in terms of widespread corruption at all levels and an abysmal record of human rights abuses.

South Vietnam tried to set the record straight without much success and our efforts in Australia gained at best only a mixed outcome. I went out lobbying the media, politicians and public opinion makers, attending debates and giving talks on the issue to community groups, at town halls and universities. Many meetings took place without any incident, but others were rough and violent. I was subject to abuses and threats of violence and sometimes physical violence.

I was a guest speaker at almost all universities and more than once at some of them, but I got my worse experience particularly at the University of Queensland on 4 September 1970, the University of Sydney on 24 June 1971 and La Trobe University in Melbourne on 9 August 1973 when I first met a young and upcoming political scientist by the name of Gerard Henderson.

At the University of Queensland in Brisbane, I was prevented from leaving the university premises after my talk under the pretext that I did not answer all the questions raised, including this funny one: “What did you do in 1945 when Ho Chi Minh fought for the independence of Vietnam?” I was born in 1940. I was actually kept in the basement of the Students Union Building against my will and under threat of violence by some Maoist students.

Queensland Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod sent 70 police to the University to rescue me, but I had been freed by university staff and left the university premises before the police arrived.

The issues left for the consideration of the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Zelman Cowan, included not only the role of university as a place of free speech but also the vexed problem of police entry into the university campus, even though in this case, it appeared that Commissioner Whitrod’s response was made at the request of the university.

Police was not involved at Sydney and La Trobe Universities but the important issue of freedom of speech remained. I was drowned out by noisy abuses and shouting so much that Philosophy Professor David Armstrong, who chaired the meeting, had to abandon the talk. I was then prevented from leaving and under threat of violence.

Three students came to my assistance and I was driven away in his car by Professor Peter Lawrence, a well-known Australian anthropologist. One of those students is now Dr Stephen J Morris, once Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and for the other two – one became a successful barrister specialising in labour law and one was appointed a Commissioner of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission after a long standing service to the trade union movement.

But the worst one, in terms of freedom of speech at a learning centre in pursuit of excellence, took place at La Trobe University. As an invited guest, I was not even allowed to speak, because members of the so-called Workers Student Alliance “passed” a motion to deny me the opportunity to be heard and to ask me to leave the campus, then attempted to prevent me from leaving. When Gerard Henderson gave me refuge in his office, left wing radical students “packed the corridor and began beating on the door and screaming abuse” (The Australian, 10 August 1973).

When I was a younger diplomat in London in the mid 1960s, I had also taken part in debates and talks on the Vietnam War at a dozen of universities. As expected, I was also subject to abuse and verbal violence, but never did I experience threat of physical violence and more importantly, never was I denied the right to speak. The one occasion I still remember well, took place at the University of Birmingham in 1968 when I was abused verbally violently, because of my different interpretation of the causes of the war from that of my opponent – an equally young Dr. Tariq Ali who later became one of the leading left-wing authors and writers in the UK.

Another failure of diplomacy on our part was our inability to convince the Australian government to support our position against the United States. The bitter lesson was when South Vietnam correctly anticipated the disastrous outcome of the Paris Agreement and took a different position from that of Washington. For that, it became totally isolated because none of our other allied nations was prepared to raise its supporting voice either publicly or confidentially.

Dr. Henry Kissinger flew to Saigon in October 1972 in an attempt to get President Nguyen Van Thieu’s endorsement of a draft agreement he planned to co-initial with Hanoi’s Politbureau member Le Duc Tho.  President Thieu refused, because this draft agreement would dramatically change the balance of military power in South Vietnam, by allowing the 14 fully-equipped North Vietnamese Divisions to remain while all armed forces allied to the RVN would have to be withdrawn. Saigon argued that all non-South Vietnamese forces would have to be withdrawn from South Vietnam for a truly peaceful solution to be achieved. For this reason, it was unfairly accused of “obstructing” a peace agreement.

Kissinger was not happy but determined to proceed. Washington already lost its political will to stay in Vietnam which was no longer an allied country of priority to the American interest under Nixon’s Guam Doctrine and after Nixon’s ground breaking visit to the PRC in February 1972 which concluded with a joint US-Chinese “Shanghai Declaration”.

Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Tran Kim Phuong, a former South Vietnamese Ambassador to Canberra, flew in from Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in his capacity as President Thieu’s Special Envoy, to see Foreign Minister Nigel Bowen at his Sydney office on Friday 3 November 1972. I accompanied Mr. Tran Kim Phuong to the meeting with Minister Bowen who was assisted by Ambassador David Anderson, a former Australian Ambassador in South Vietnam. We received a polite hearing but nothing else. After the meeting, Ambassador Richard Woolcott fronted the media and gave them the Australian position of pursuing peace in Vietnam.

Ambassador Tran Kim Phuong tried unsuccessfully to contact Governor General Sir Paul Hasluck who, as Minister for External Affairs, was one of the main architects of Australia’s Vietnam policy in the 1960s. We were disappointed but accepted that Australia had to act in its own national interest. Minister Bowen and his two very able and talented diplomats did what they could, taking into account of the reality of the time.

In the end, South Vietnam had no choice and Foreign Minister Tran Van Lam, the first Vietnamese Ambassador to Australia, signed the Paris Agreement on 27 January 1973 on behalf of the RVN. The rest is now history. Tran Van Lam returned to Australia in mid 1975 as a Vietnamese refugee. And so did I.

New Life as a refugee in Australia

My second journey to Australia was unconventional and very hazardous but my family’s permanent residency was peaceful and, I believe, rewarding.

I was still working in my office at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 30 April 1975 when General Duong Van (Big) Minh announced his surrender. Saigon fell to the communist forces and I had to escape for my own survival. After bidding farewell to loyal staff, I walked down the main streets of Saigon for the last time.

Then my father-in-law turned up on his motorbike which became our means of transport to leave the doomed city for the Mekong Delta. Because of communist check points and to avoid detection, we had to change routes and took a truck ride and bus ride to a fishing port near the Cambodian border where I lay low for a week at the home of his fisherman friend. I did not report to the communist authorities for “re-education”.

Then we took a boat ride with the fisherman friend in one of his regular trips to an island called Poulo Panjang (Dao Tho Chau in Vietnamese) where – without his knowledge – we floated out to sea on a round basket-shaped dinghy made of waxed bamboo. This waxed basket is normally used by fishermen to get to shore from boat and vice versa. It is not meant for sea-going.

It was 36 terrifying hours drifting under heavy rain and strong gale on this tiny and unsteerable basket before we were picked up in the Gulf of Siam by a Thai fishing trawler. I lived the life of a fisherman until the trawler returned to its home port of Samut Sakhon a week later. We were under house arrest for unauthorised entry by the Thai Police, at the residence of the trawler owner for another week before I could convince a Thai Police man to allow me to go with him to Bangkok where I sent a telegram to family and friends in Australia. Until then, they did not know whether I was dead or alive.

Upon my return to Australia in late May 1975, I was given a 6-month temporary residence. The Whitlam government was reluctant to re-settle Vietnamese refugees. But my family and I were extremely fortunate to have so many good friends who were willing and able to assist.

A few days later, I received an invitation for morning tea with the Minister for Education, the Hon. Kim Beazley senior, whom I had known during my diplomatic years. When I turned up at his office at the Old Parliament House, the Minister shook my hand with a 3-word greeting I have not forgotten and will never forget: “Welcome home, Quang”. Kim Beazley Senior was the finest Australian I have ever met.

In June, I got a research job at the Political Science Department of the Australian National University where I also began to study law again to re-qualify myself in Australia. My family and I were granted permanent residence in early 1976 by the new Fraser government.

Australia gave me and my fellow refugees a second chance in life. Many of those who had marched against the war extended their hand of friendship and helped the newly arrived in many practical ways. But the hard core leadership of the Moratorium Movement – such as the Jim Cairns of this world – did not even lift their finger to express a concern for the millions of victims of the “Killing Fields” in Cambodia and for the hundreds of thousands of drowned Vietnamese boat people.

They maintained the communist façade, skillfully exploited during the war, and celebrated the “liberation” of South Vietnam. Some even received communist medals as reward for their contribution to the communist victory in Indochina. Nothing seemed able to demystify the Left’s vision of the conflict as a “war of liberation”, not even the fact that the NLF and the PRG were quickly discarded by the Politbureau of the Communist party of Vietnam (CPV). Silence kills as Jim Cairns referred to events leading to the May 1970 Vietnam Moratorium in his book bearing this powerful title. Silence indeed killed as many people in Indochina “at peace” after 1975 as in Indochina “at war” a decade earlier.

I hasten to say that I do not wish to continue fighting a war which ended more than three decades ago. I believe, however, that certain fundamental facts still need be re-stated. South Vietnam fought alone before the Australian and American military engagements and alone again after their withdrawals in 1972 and 1973, while North Vietnam was fully supported continuously by the Soviet Union and the PRC throughout the conflict.

I was fortunate enough to have worked at the Federal Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs at a senior executive level in Canberra and Sydney which opened up opportunities for me to contribute toward policy and program implementation for the benefits of Australians from all backgrounds.

But as Head of SBS Radio, I had the best position to make a difference in terms of providing information, education and entertainment to our targeted, culturally diverse audience that may change and enrich their life. When I came, in 1989, SBS Corporation only had a local Radio 2EA in Sydney and a local Radio 3EA in Melbourne. When I left, in 2006, SBS Radio was a network of five frequencies broadcast nationally on-air by satellite and internationally online in 68 languages including English, with forward looking plan to migrate to digital audio broadcasting. I believe SBS Radio was also instrumental in moving its audience forward towards an inclusive and harmonious society.

SBS enjoys editorial independence which is guaranteed by legislation. But as a publicly-funded national broadcaster, it is subject to scrutiny by parliament where its programming decisions may be questioned and its executive may be criticised. This is a good system of checks and balances. As Head of SBS Radio, I received many visiting foreign media delegations and attended many international broadcasting conferences. At times, it was difficult for some of my overseas counterparts in Asia to understand why as a “government” national broadcaster, SBS is indeed independent from the government of the day.

While I was Head of SBS Radio, I was invited in early 1994, but as a citizen of Vietnamese background, to join an Australian Parliamentary Consultative Delegation to visit the SRV. During the 1993 election campaign, Foreign Minister Gareth Evans came to SBS Radio Sydney for a media conference when he was asked by Ms Ngoc Han, Head of the Vietnamese Language Program as to whether the Keating government, if re-elected, would seek to send a human rights delegation to Vietnam similar to the Australian delegation already to the PRC. He said “yes” he would.

After Prime Minister Keating’s “sweetest” victory, Foreign Minister Evans conducted long and hard negotiations with his Vietnamese counterpart, Nguyen Manh Cam, on this matter to fulfill his electoral promise. This delegation was to be led by Labor Senator Stephen Loosley, as leader, and Shadow Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, MP, as deputy leader. But two days before the delegation’s departure, the SRV revoked its visa issued to me on the basis that I breached the “agreement” when I said on a BBC World Service interview that the delegation would be interested in looking at human rights cases during its time in Vietnam.

On 4 July 1994, Senator Evans described the SRV’s visa revocation as “a very regrettable over-reaction” and took a decisive action to cancel the visit. When I met Foreign Minister Evans again two years later in Melbourne, he blamed the 1994 diplomatic setback on Nguyen Manh Cam for his failure to stand up to his fellow Minister for Public Security.

I was once criticised by a government senator at a Senate Estimates Committee Hearing in early 2004 for being in a mock-up cage at Bondi Beach in Sydney as a gesture of protest against the unlimited detention of children under the government’s mandatory detention policy applicable to aliens who entered or attempted to enter Australia without permission. Because I took part in this protest as a private citizen and in my own time on a Saturday, I did not accept such criticism and considered it as an attack on my freedom of speech. The fact that this “cage” protest was organised by a leftist alliance might have attracted the senator’s attention, but it was irrelevant to me. I was only interested in the issue.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has said – and before him, Prime Ministers John Howard, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser – that Australia is a great democracy. Most Australians agree with them, including myself. I am privileged to live here as a citizen.

But a great democracy can be even better when the majority does not ignore the needs of the minority and where we can be caring for the socially disadvantaged, such as our Indigenous brothers and sisters and for those victims of human rights violations in search of a refuge. I believe that the benefits derived from such social advancement and a compassionate approach to people in need of protection will not only be consistent with our laudable tradition, but will also enrich our society. I also believe that our society is defined not only by what unites us – which is obviously important and fundamental to our future – but also in finding solutions to issues which may divide us – solutions unaffected by short-term considerations – solutions we can be proud of.

My journeys from Vietnam brought me into contact years ago with abusive left-wing radicals who saw me as a right-wing diplomat and then later in life as Australian, I was attacked by a right-wing politician as a left-leaning media executive. I was neither. I strongly believe in what I have been doing.

There is nothing in my journeys that I wish to have done differently, except perhaps my escape from the advancing communist forces on a waxed bamboo basket floating in the Gulf of Thailand – but only if I had an alternative.