On welcoming refugees : when Italy welcomed the boat people
Milan (AsiaNews) - In the years 1975-1980 the PIME Missionary Centre in Milan (directed by Fr. Giacomo Girardi) and the magazine "World and Mission" (of which I was the director), along with the diocesan Missionary Centre and Ambrosiana Caritas, began a campaign for the Vietnamese and Cambodian "boat people" (1975-1978) which met with unexpected success. On January 12, 1978, at the end of the campaign, the PIME Missionary Centre "Secretariat refugees Vietnam-Cambodia" was born in Milan with a full-time commitment of 18 university volunteers from various movements: Focsiv, Mani Tese, Agesci, Cl, Focolari.
By June 1978, Caritas Ambrosiana and the national Caritas had reached a sufficient number of adoption requests. From January to June, more than 200 conferences on refugees, discussions, prayer vigils were held throughout Italy. The boat people made the front page of every national newspaper.
On 22 June 1979 the Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti invited Fr. Girardi and myself to Palazzo Chigi to thank us: "You led a courageous, providential and victorious campaign", because in the years 1975 to 1980, proclaiming that the peoples fleeing from Vietnam and Cambodia after the "liberation" brought about by the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge, meant being branded as troublemakers "funded by the CIA". Andreotti sent three Navy ships that ferried 3,500 refugees to Italy.
By 1978, Caritas Italy, which had been founded in 1973 by the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), was taking on increasingly international dimensions. Msgr. Giovanni Nervo called me to be part of the Steering Committee. For Caritas, I travelled to Thailand, Eritrea, Pakistan-Afghanistan and I accompanied the President, the archbishop of Taranto, Msgr. Motolese (I spoke English well at the time), to visit some areas bordering Laos and Cambodia.
With Msgr. Motolese on official mission for the Italian Church, the UN helicopter took us to some of the 14 refugee camps, vast fields, where tens of thousands of people had fled, just like today they are fleeing from North Africa to Italy. They lived in Red Cross or the UN tents, surrounded by barbed wire and by the Thai military. I remember the nightmare of the Kao I Dang camp with 130 thousand refugees in the mud waiting for food and water!
The Thai people did not want them, the "pirates" robbed them at sea, fishermen repulsed them into the sea. The army, the police and the national guard were pushing refugees back to the border with Laos and Cambodia, keeping them in the mud to force them to flee and leaving them defenseless when the Khmer Rouge raided the fields and carried out indiscriminate executions. Those were the years of the boat people, which troubled and divided Italians.
The small Thai Church had moved immediately to welcome the refugees and the CEI had supported the campaign to accommodate them in Italy. Caritas Italy, mobilizing Catholic volunteers set up medical dispensaries, run by Italian nuns and lay people. My secretary, Sister Franca Nava, of the Missionaries of the Immaculate (PIME Sisters), a nurse specializing in gynecology and in the care of children and lepers (with missions in Bangladesh and India), was in Thailand for two months " summer holiday"(which became two years) in a Caritas Italy dispensary in the refugee camp in Mairut.
They worked so much for the many emergencies, eating only fish and boiled rice with spicy sauce, but they never got sick; the few Catholics of Thailand visited the refugees, carrying aid, the bishops asked the government to welcome them.
In the summer of 1978, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, considered the god of the nation, a symbol of cultural identity and Buddhism, addressed the nation on TV and said: "We must welcome our fellow Cambodians and Vietnamese, as Christians do, they are giving us a great example. They are our brothers and sisters, we must welcome them, not reject them in the sea, not rob them. If you reject these refugees, rob them or push them back into the sea sending them to certain death, you are not a good Thai citizen".
On returning to Thailand a few years later, Italian missionaries told me that the King's speech, republished by newspapers and on their front page, had convinced Thais to form voluntary associations to help the refugees, not only from Laos and Vietnam but also from Myanmar, another state that persecutes the tribal animists and Christians.
Among the Buddhist Thais, there were very few conversions but there was a change in people’s attitude: the Gospel values, peace, justice, brotherhood, sharing, dialogue began to spread and everyone knew that they are Gospel values. The army, the police and the National Guard followed the example of Christians, and began to defend the refugees from the raids of the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot.
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11/08/2017 20:05
