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Galang Refugee Camp, Pulau Galang, Riau, Indonesia; Sunday 25 September 2011

 

We hired a tour guide, Supri, today and he took us all the way down the chain of islands linked with bridges, from Batam to Setoko to Rempang to Galang to Galang Baru.

 

On Pulau Galang there is a place marked Kampong Vietnam, so we expected a hustling, bustling “Little Vietnam” village with lots of handicrafts on sale.  Not so.

 

Supri was a lovely chap but didn’t have great English, so he wasnt able to tell us much about the places we were visiting.  All he could tell us about Kampong Vietnam was that we would see a buddhist temple, and spider monkeys, which we certainly did.  The spider monkeys were quite an attraction, some mums with babies clinging to them, some gambolling infants, all keen to pick up peanuts that people were throwing to them. 

 

The rest was a mystery.  It was a beautiful site, with a tarmac road winding through what could have been a botanical garden with signposts, pointing to temples, houses, hospital, boats, graveyard... This was not a thriving community, but the abandoned site of the Vietnamese boat people’s settlement  that opened in 1978 and closed in 1998.  There were 2 broken down boats, a temple, a catholic church, hospital, tiny prison, and the remains of houses. There was also an information centre, full of photos of smiling Vietnamese, some artefacts, and some explanation in Bahasa, and a couple of very smiley attendants.  The whole site was neatly tended with cut grass verges.  It all felt warm and glowy, till we got home and googled it.

 

This was the story we read from the internet.  Galang camp was home to thousands of Vietnamese who fled from the communists and survived the sea crossing, following the fall of Saigon.  As we know, many were drowned or murdered by pirates.  One boat full of corpses was washed up on Galang and the unidentifiable bodies were buried there in a mass grave.  The Galang site was originally administered by the Indonesian government but was quickly taken over by UNHCR.  As more refugees arrived, numbers swelled to 4 times the intended limit, and conditions deteriorated rapidly.  The UNHCR officials had to decide who qualified for asylum and who didnt; 80% were rejected. The UN people were present in the daytime but not overnight, and this was when widespread abuse and rape of the refugees by the Indonesian guards occurred.  Because of the abuse and the threat of being sent back to Vietnam, there were mass suicides including many cases of hanging and self immolation, and the 500 odd marked graves are predominantly occupied by suicides.  The last Vietnamese were finally shipped out in 1998.

 

In spite of the terrible time many of the refugees had there, the overseas Vietnamese community erected a monument at the Galang site, and another one in a camp in Malaysia, to show gratitude to the countries who gave them refuge.  These monuments were recently removed, however, at the insistence of the Vietnamese government, amid protests of “trying to erase history”.

 

What is really shocking is that all this was building up when we lived in Sinagpore (1976-79) just a few miles away.  As far as I remember, we didnt know anything about it.