One
man against the pirates / by Clark Norton and
Howard Kohn
“For
weeks the drunken toughs had terrorized the Vietnamese boat people stranded on
a tiny island. Rape, torture, murder—seemingly without end. Now it was up to
one young American to stop it,”
On November 16, 1979, Theodore (Ted) Schweitzer, a new
field officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, was in his
office at the Songkhla refugee camp in southern Thailand, a temporary home for
thousands of “boat people” who had fled Vietnam. For Schweitzer, a simple,
soft-spoken, 37-year-old American overseeing the camp was not an entirely
exotic assignment. He had taught English in Bangkok three years earlier, and
was married to a Thai woman. Fluent in Thai, he had already battled local
authorities to get better conditions for his refugees. But now his job was
about to take on a new dimension.
That morning, Schweitzer was visited by an oil-company
helicopter pilot who reported spotting dozens of refugees on Ko Kra, a tiny
island 50 kilometres off Thailand’s eastern coast. Schweitzer had never heard
of Ko Kra, but with missionary zeal he asked the pilot to fly him over the
island. Soon he was looking down on a one and a half-square-kilometre patch of
mountain, jungle and coral-flecked beach. Below, tattered refugees waved at him
in desperation.
Schweitzer pleaded with the pilot to land, but the man
had spotted pirate boats offshore and bodies floating in the water, and he
refused. “I’m not hired to fly combat missions,” he said.
Back on the coast, Schweitzer persuaded Thai marine
police to take him to Ko Kra by launch. Together, they rescued 157 men, women
and children.
Schweizer was aghast at the refugees’ tales of terror:
pirates had attacked their boats, robbed them, then they towed them to
uninhabited Ko Kra, where the refugees were thrown overboard hundreds of metres
from shore. Seventeen had drowned. The rest were marooned with little more than
their clothing. Then the real nightmare began. Boatloads of pirates—as many as 50
vessels in a day—repeatedly returned to Ko Kra to rape the refugee women. (For
centuries, many Thai and Malay fishermen have doubled as pirates. In the past
decade, with a million boat people setting sail from Vietnam in fragile
vessels, the piracy has swelled like the tidal waves that also plague these
waters.)
One young woman, Vu Thanh Thuy, a former journalist in
Vietnam, begged Schweitzer to do something to stop the pirate attacks. “I
promise,” he told her.
Before leaving Ko Kra, one of the 157 refugees had
scratched Schweitzer’s name and UN affiliation on the wall of an abandoned
lighthouse. Two weeks later, an old fisherman smuggled a message to Schweitzer:
“SOS: we are 17 South Vietnamese refugees, just arrived Ko Kra island. Our
lives are in danger and we need immediate help.” On December 3, Schweitzer
returned to the island on a police boat and rescued this second group. A month
later he rescued another 80 people.
Piercing screams.
Then, in mid-january 1980, after sighting more refugees
from a helicopter, Schweitzer set off on his fourth rescue mission. It was
plague by trouble from the start. The weather was stormy and the Thai police
were unwilling to risk the violent north-east monsoon. Schweitzer ended up
renting an old fishing boat and its crew for $500 of his own money.
Alerting the Thai authorities to his plans, Schweitzer
and crew set off in the late afternoon on January 14, hoping to reach the
island by morning. But the storm tossed seas heaved the boat on six metre
swells, driving it in circles. Not until midnight on the second night did they
reach Ko Kra, dropping anchor 400 metres offshore to avoid the rocky shallows.
Then the captain shut off the engines.
Suddenly, screams from the island pierced the night.
Exhausted from the journey, Schweitzer sat on deck and listened until he could
listen no more. I have to do something, he
thought. Impulsively, he stripped to his underwear and dived into the water.
The current was swift, and Schweitzer struggled towards
the beach. But instead of getting closer to it, he could see it receding. I’m being swept out to sea!
Straining
desperately towards a rocky outcropping at the far west end of the island—the
last piece of land before kilometers of ocean—Schweitzer collided with
something in the water. His blood froze as he stared into the face of a dead
man. Then a mountainous swell picked Schweitzer up and smashed him against the
outcropping. Somehow he grabbed on to a small ledge.
With waves threatening to wash him back to sea,
Schweitzer crawled his way 15 metres up the slippery cliff to a wider ledge.
His legs, slashed by the rocks, ran with blood. Shivering, he crouched and
waited for daybreak.
Hellish prison.
An
hour passed like a year. Then he heard voices.
“Hello!” Schweitzer shouted, pulling himself to his feet.
He looked up and saw the smiling faces of two Vietnamese men pop over the edge
of the cliff. One cried in English, “Oh, we are saved!” Using a pair of
trousers, they hoisted Schweitzer to the top of the cliff, then bandaged his
legs with an old skirt. Schweitzer asked about the screams.
“The robbers are raping the girls,” he was told.
The men led Schweitzer down the back side of the cliff.
In a grassy area by the beach, he saw campfires. Dozens of fierce looking young
toughs lay around them in an alcoholic stupor. The pirates ! The Vietnamese told Schweitzer that the pirates had
taken their watches, jewellery and other valuables. One old man had his
gold-filled teeth wrenched out with pliers and a screwdriver. But what really
kept the pirates around was the refugee women. Ko Kra had been turned into a
hellish prison of rape and torture.
Some women had fled to the hills or into the tall
elephant grass. But the pirates tortured the men to reveal their hideouts.
Once, when the pirates set fire to the elephant grass to smoke out the
terrified women, a teenage girl jut let the fire burn over her, not crying out
as it scorched her back. But when the elephant grass was gone, the pirates
found her and raped her anyway. Now, Schweitzer watched with horror as the
pirates raped Vietnamese girls in view of everyone.
“Where are the other men?” he asked the two Vietnamese.
“Hiding.”
“Show me where.”
An hour later, Schweitzer was at the head of a ragtag
band of about 35 half-starved Vietnamese men. Hanging on to one another for
support, they advanced towards the pirate campfires.
At the sight of the foreigner, the pirates cursed and
rose on unsteady legs. Speaking Thai, Schweitzer called out that he was from
the United Nations. “All these people are under my protection,” he shouted. “
If you leave immediately, I won’t have you arrested.”
About 50 pirates stood their ground, facing Schweitzer
and the refugees. Schweitzer looked grimly at their scarred bodies and rippling
muscles. Doggedly, he stepped closer.
The pirates waved a small arsenal of weapons—guns,
hammers, axes, lead pipes—and shouted, “Stand back! Stand back!”
Schweitzer and his outmatched band halted. If he didn’t
act fast, the men behind him might retreat to the bush. I can’t show any sign of weakness, Schweitzer thought. If I do, I’m a dead man.
“ I am a representative of the United Nations!” he
repeated. “ If you kill me, the whole world will hunt you down!”
The pirates laughed, yet some began to retreat. The sight
gave the refugees sudden courage, and several sprang forward, beating the
pirates with their bare hands.
“Don’t! Come back !” Schweitzer yelled. But it was too
late.
The pirates turned and attacked. With one swing of a lead
pipe, their leader opened a bloody gash on Schweitzer’s head. Another blow sent
him to the ground. In a daze, he felt his side and stomach being kicked in
repeatedly. Then he lost consciousness.
“All must make
it.”
When
Schweitzer regained consciousness, it was dawn and the pirates were gone. But
he could see their boats lingering off-shore. Knowing that their attackers
would return, some of the refugees fell at Schweitzer’s feet, begging to be
taken from the island.
With no time to lose, Schweitzer told the hysterical
refugees, “Be quiet! Do exactly as I say!”
Their first task was to find the women and children who
were still hiding. From previous rescue missions, Schweitzer knew of several
hideouts, including a rocky cave half-filled with sea water. On his first
mission he had found a young woman who had stood waist-deep in water for 18
days. She had had chunks of her flesh eaten away by sea crabs. Seeing her,
Schweitzer had broken down and cried. Now he found more women in the cave, some
too weak to walk. He carried them on his shoulders down the mountain to the
beach.
“I have a boat standing by,” Schweitzer told the
refugees. Dividing them into three groups—men who could swim, men who could
not, and women and children—he matched up swimmers and non-swimmers.
Then began a grueling series of swims out to the rented
fishing boat. Human chains were formed: Schweitzer or another man towing a
woman, who in turn held a child.
As Schweitzer placed the first refugees on board, he
thought he saw a pirate boat returning. Should
I leave with those already on board? No, all must make it?
A
second boat appeared on the horizon. Another
pirate ship? Schweitzer took note of its markings: a Thai navy boat. Thank
God, we’re going to make it.
And they did—although their boat ran aground just one and
a half kilometers from the mainland and they endured another 12 hours as pirate
ships menaced them. But a rising tide finally carried them to shore and safety.
Because of Schweitzer’s courageous efforts, 88 more refugees survived the
horrors of Ko Kra.
Sense of
accomplishment.
During his remaining four months at Songkhla, Schweitzer
returned to the island another two dozen times, leading an average of one
rescue mission per week. In all, he helped save 1,250 refugees. He was beaten
up twice, shot at, stabbed, and threatened with murder. Once, a pirate kicked
him so hard in the kidneys that red urine spurted uncontrollably down his
trousers. His wife, sick with fear, suffered two miscarriages, and their
daughter was threatened with kidnapping. Much of the time Schweitzer was forced
to act alone, for officials didn’t like to admit the extent of the problem.
Finally, in May 1980, Schweitzer accepted a transfer,
this time an office job in Geneva, Switzerland. His health was wrecked; he
awoke every night in a nightmare sweat. Twice he had to undergo emergency
kidney operations.
Still, Schweitzer felt a sense of accomplishment. Besides
saving refugees, he had persuaded the UN to invest in life-saving equipment so
that others could carry on his work. And he won the “deep gratitude” and
“personal admiration” of Poul Hartling, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,
who presented him with a replica of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the agency
in 1981.
Today, Schweitzer is back in the United States, still
determined to do whatever he can to save the boat people from pirates. He has
formed his own anti-piracy organization, called the SEA Rescue Foundation. Its
goal is to establish a piracy-free zone across the Gulf of Thailand, using
helicopters, speedboats and sea planes.
In 1983 a US-based Vietnamese refugee organization, the
Boat People SOS committee, gave Schweitzer its award of merit. Instrumental in
bestowing that award were California residents Vu Thanh Thuy, the young journalist
Schweitzer rescued on his first mission, and her husband, Duong Phuc, whom
Schweitzer had also rescued.
“We would have died on Ko Kra if not for Mr Schweitzer,”
Vu Thanh Thuy says. “We could never thank him enough.”
And in a city in southern France, a young boy is growing
up, born to one of the women rescued by Schweitzer from the watery cave of Ko
Kra. She has named him Theodore.
“The
big advantage of a book is it’s very easy to rewind. Close it and you’re right
back at the beginning.”
-Jerry
Sienfield
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A tragedy ignored
Pirates continue to roam the Gulf of
Thailand and the South China Sea, preying upon the men, women and children
who risk their lives in rickety boats to free the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam.
In 1985, for instance, 451 boats
managed to make it from Vietnam to Thailand or Malaysia. Crammed into these
vessels were 10,706 Vietnamese. Nearly a third of the boats had been attacked
by pirates, usually more than once. Seventy four passengers had been
murdered, 111 kidnapped, 110 raped.
How many boats failed to reached
freedom will never be known. What is known is that increasingly the pirates
are murdering all passengers after robbing them and often raping the women.
In March 1985, for instance, a refugee boat slipped away from Can Tho,
Vietname, with 117 passengers aboard, including 36 children under ten. Four
days later, it drifted across the path of five pirate vessels. Only one
managed to survive.
Though the Thai navy has expanded
air and sea patrols, the pirates have an essentially free hand since they
operate largely in vast international waters. There are 4,356 documented
cases from 1981 through 1986 of murder, kidnapping and rape, but 40
convictions. And the ongoing tragedy is largely ignored by the rest of the
world.
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