How many boat people died

I lost count of how many I brought up in that. At just four, Paul Tran was too small to climb. He was pulled up in a net. Most of the refugees were packed on to the decks in a makeshift village under tarpaulins strung over the hatch covers. The Wellpark sailed on to Taiwan, where the government was sympathetic, sending food and clothes to the ship, but insisted they would not be allowed to leave the ship until the UK agreed to take them in.

After two weeks of pictures of the destitute refugees on the news, the British government said it would bring them to London. A couple of lawyers. We had a whole typing pool. There were typewriters banging away, doing all the paperwork. The refugees were not universally pleased at being told they were going to Britain. Some were keener on the US, a country they knew more about.

The were flown to Stansted airport and taken by coach to Kensington army barracks. But when we got to the barracks people were waiting for us, to give us soup.

They put flowers on our beds. Roses or coronations. I got a carnation. I was really happy. Gifts poured into the barracks. A circus visited, complete with an elephant for rides. Woolworths laid on a Christmas party for the children. The reception in the press was generally welcoming, even among tabloids as hostile to immigration then as they are now, perhaps because the Vietnamese were fleeing communism.

But official hostility was rising. Within a few months Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, confronted with four more British ships rescuing hundreds of boat people. She also wanted Britain to withdraw from the refugee convention. All of this went largely unnoticed by those rescued by the Wellpark as they sought to map out a future in a strange land.

Three months later Quan moved north. Then came school, English lessons and cultural adjustments. He would open up the factory first thing in the morning. At one point he spoke English with a Greek accent. The Nguyen brothers have retained a Vietnamese inflection to their English as well as a disposition for finding humour in even the most difficult circumstances.

Hung Nguyen was sent off to a school near Kensington barracks where he remembers a teacher called Elizabeth. It looked dangerous. Why would you stick it in your mouth? So we used spoons. After that they hid all the spoons. We stuck the knives in our mouths quite happily, but not forks. This was the s, when the National Front and casual racism loomed large in Britain.

The adults themselves felt it more keenly. They found it really hard. Others among the Wellpark refugees said they regularly found themselves in fights with racists at school or on the streets of the council estates where they lived. Some of the adults struggled with a new language and found only irregular work far below the professional positions they had once held. But, in time, their children thrived. Within a few weeks of arriving at Kensington barracks, Hung Nguyen landed a job with a project distributing second-hand books to developing countries.

She offered to help Hung resume his medical studies. I was cocky. I turned it down because I wanted to do it on my own. In the holidays he went on a trip with his mother to visit relatives in America.

They encouraged him to apply for medical school there and he was accepted. After his medical degree, he studied for an MBA and in time did well out of the considerable overlap between medicine and business in the US. Today, Hung Nguyen owns an entire block in an area southeast of Los Angeles known as Little Saigon, home to the largest gathering of Vietnamese outside their home country. His company is named Wellpark Inc and, outside, he is building a memorial to the ship that rescued him.

Hung also hosts a weekly medical phone-in on local radio in Vietnamese. But we remember and we might never be able to pay them back, but we can pay it forward. We can help other people in their honour. A decade after he moved to California his parents followed and opened a launderette. About a dozen of the Wellpark families settled in the US. The bulk remained in Britain, including Huy. The number of asylum seekers dying at sea has been the subject of a previous FactCheck , which drew on figures from the Australian Border Deaths Database to estimate that around asylum seekers had drowned between and July In August , the Expert Panel Report on Asylum Seekers received information from the Department of Immigration and the Australian Border Services that, since , an estimated people had died while attempting to reach Australia by boat.

Of this, deaths had occurred since October , the report said. Labor took power in late After this report, it is difficult to find any official statistics from government sources. There appear to be two other sources of information whose figures are broadly consistent with those given to the Expert Panel.

Both rely upon collating data from a range of official, media and non-government organisation sources:. The database contains incidents involving people who have died en route to Australia on boats. Estimates from that source are that between and December there were around deaths, of which approximately occurred during the Labor government.

So the best available data, from these two websites, puts the number of refugee drownings under Labor at somewhere around Combining the data from these two online sources also shows that under Coalition governments between and people died en route to Australia. While the Australian government states that it has stopped boats coming to Australia, a recent report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR found that in more people than ever took to the seas in search of asylum — an estimated , people.

The UNHCR and other agencies estimate that last year more than individuals, including hundreds of children, did not survive these journeys.

Hundreds of others were moving further south in the Indian Ocean. From January to September , it was estimated that 1, migrants died while crossings the Mediterranean Sea.

In , the number of deaths amounted to 1. However, the accurate number of deaths recorded in the Mediterranean Sea cannot ascertained. Between and , for instance, about 12 thousand people who drowned were never found.

Casualties and missing people Worldwide, it was estimated that eight thousand people died in the attempt of fleeing their country.

According to estimations, over five thousand refugees lost their lives in the attempt to reach the European shores in Therefore, the Mediterranean Sea was the deadliest migration route. Indeed, over the last couple of years, the Mediterranean Sea held the largest number of casualties and missing people. Out of these routes, the Central Mediterranean route was the deadliest.

In , roughly 4,6 thousand people lost their lives while pursuing this route. Sadly, the identification of bodies is challenging due to the sea. In , for instance, the vast majority of refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea were not identified and their country of origin untraceable.

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