UNHCR Press Release: Closure of Malaysia's Last Vietnamese Boat People Camp (25 June 1996)

A United Nations press release dated 25 June 1996 marking the closure of Sungei Besi, Malaysia's last camp for Vietnamese boat people, issued at an event attended by Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi and UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello. It states that since 1975, 840,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers had arrived in the countries of South East Asia and Hong Kong, of whom over 755,000 departed for resettlement in the West and over 81,000 returned safely to Vietnam, with roughly 24,700 still in camps across the region as the release was issued. Its strength is that it is a contemporary UNHCR accounting released at the close of the crisis it describes. Its limit is that its regional total covers only those who reached South East Asia and Hong Kong by sea or by land within the region, and does not include the separate and much smaller wave evacuated directly to the United States in the days around the fall of Saigon in April 1975.