ON THIS DAY ·
Khao-I-Dang refugee camp
21 Nov 1979 — One month after Thailand opened its border to Cambodians, UNHCR opened a camp at the foot of a hill near Aranyaprathet. Within four months, Khao-I-Dang held about 140,000 people. For a time it was one of the largest Cambodian settlements in the world.
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The moment in context
At Geneva the immediate problem was how to let people land without leaving their first hosts responsible for them indefinitely. Resettlement countries promised places, and monthly departures to permanent homes rose from about 9,000 before the meeting to about 25,000 afterward. Regional governments could reopen their shores; Western governments no longer faced the spectacle of boats being towed back to sea. Vietnam, for its part, gained relief from condemnation after promising to “make every effort to halt illegal departures”. Arrivals fell sharply as Vietnamese police stopped boats leaving.
From 1979 Geneva conference on refugees, chapter 10 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1979).
The place: Khao-I-Dang refugee camp — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The threat at the shoreline. In June 1979 ASEAN declared that no new arrivals would be accepted, and boats were pushed back. The prospect was plain: people whom Western…
- The turn — Geneva, 20–21 July 1979, and the camp at Galang. Galang shows what the Geneva agreement required on the ground. Before the meeting, refugees landing in Indonesia waited in makeshift camps without…
- What it changed — Leaving by aeroplane. Orderly departure gave some families a route through regulated emigration instead of a sea crossing. Numbers grew from a trickle in 1980 to about…
Then ask the room: How far did the Geneva meeting of July 1979 solve the boat-people crisis? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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