The Vietnamese refugees in Thailand: Minority manipulation in counterinsurgency

Abstract

The purpose of this brief survey is to clarify the political role of the Vietnamese minority in recent Thai history. The importance of this subject derives from the long-held but unexamined assumption on the part of the Thai ruling classes and, since World War II, U.S. academic ideologues of neo-colonialism, that social revolution is somehow extraneous to Thai history. If it does rear its ugly head—so the thinking goes—it must be the result of transborder subversion and not of factors indigenous to Thai social history. One villain in this piece of wishful thinking—and the principal one since the 1950s—has been the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. The immediate scapegoats have been those militant anti-imperialist Vietnamese who took temporary refuge in Thailand from the destructive effects of French and later American expansion into their homelands. They have long been viewed—and are still seen by the present regime in Bangkok—as virtual “saboteurs,” frontline agents of revolution that would otherwise be alien to “happy” Thailand.