Powerful Gestures

In November of 1979, First Lady Rosalynn Carter made a trip to a refugee camp near the Thai-Cambodian border. The fall of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to Communist forces, four years earlier, produced three million refugees—Vietnamese boat people fleeing persecution, Hmong people escaping the Pathet Lao, and Cambodian victims of genocide, war, and famine. No one wanted these uprooted souls. Neighboring countries turned away flimsy, overcrowded Vietnamese fishing vessels; the Thai government refused to recognize the Cambodians as refugees, while its military pushed many back across the border into minefields; and Western governments preferred to send aid rather than provide rescue. The New Yorker