Speech by Parliamentary Opposition Leader, and DAP Secretary-General, Lim Kit Siang, at a tea-party reception for the visiting Japanese Democratic Socialist Party Youth delegation at Federal Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, on Friday, July 13, 1979 at 10 a.m.
Call on ASEAN countries to jointly request a United Nations General Assembly debate and jointly sponsor a resolution condemning Vietnam for its racism and genocide in extorting blood money and exporting refugees
It is reported that Vietnam has formally agreed to attend the United Nations conference on South East Asian refugees in Geneva next week, on the understanding that only humanitarian aspects of the problem were to be discussed.
This is most ironical and insulting, when Vietnam, through her barbaric and uncivilized conduct in extorting blood money and exporting refugees, sending some 250,000 to 300,000 to their watery deaths in the high seas, should have the cheek to talk about ‘humanitarian aspects of the problem.’
Vietnam would attend the Geneva conference next week with the blood of a quarter of million human beings in her hands, and the sufferings and agonies of over another quarter of a million people on her conscience – if she still has one!
The only ‘humanitarian’ thing that Vietnam could do at the Geneva Conference is for her to announce her regaining humanitarianism, and to announce a total halt to the barbaric, uncivilized and despicable policy of extorting blood money and exporting refugees.
Otherwise, Vietnam would be like a ‘butcher of mankind’ trying to prate about humanity in Geneva – which is totally unacceptable to the civilized community.
In a short span of time, Vietnam has transformed from the most admired nation to be the most hated nation in the world, showing that the atrocities and brutalities the Americans and South Vietnamese regimes were guilty of were but child’s play when compared to the atrocities, brutalities and inhumanities she is perpetrating on her own people!
The Geneva Conference should regard it as a matter of utmost importance to get Vietnam to halt her inhuman policy, or to mount international pressure on Vietnam to end this ‘New Barbarism’ of the Twentieth Century.
ASEAN countries, which is bearing the brunt of the Vietnamese inhumanity, should jointly request for an emergency United Nations General Assembly debate for them to jointly sponsor a resolution condemning Vietnam for the international crimes of racism and genocide in extorting blood money and exporting refugees.
All other countries which have respect for humanity should take a unqualified stand to condemn Vietnam’s inhumanity and spare no efforts to bring such a holocaust to an end.
Japan should take a clear-cut stand on this greatest moral question of this generation, and also greatly increase her commitments to aid in the resettlement of the Vietnamese refugees.