Who Should Cast The First Stone?

ARGUMENTS for screening and rejecting refugees from Indochina who committed atrocities during the war conveniently isolate the refugees from the context of American involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia, and ignore America's responsibility to all of the people it has affected in the course of the war. To refuse to recognize that the U.S. is responsible for all those who fled their homes and who fled Indochina--whether they were high government officials and U.S. employees afraid of "blood-baths," or peasants afraid of the last days of battle or perhaps even more U.S. bombs--is to deny the dominant role America played in Indochina right to the end. That role now dictates the responsibility of the United States to all refugees of the war in Indochina: both those waiting for entrance into this country and those finally returning to their homes.

The problems of refugees waiting to be granted asylum in America must be dealt with immediately. But the American government has no right to distinguish between those refugees who are "qualified" to become U.S. citizens, and those who aren't, between acceptable groups and unacceptable ones. Some of the prostitutes Sen. Byrd feels are "undesirables," for example, became prostitutes precisely because of the war. By the same token, refugees cannot be judged by criteria which separate their politics and actions from the American policies that directed them. The Vietnamee police is one group liable to rejection by the U.S. Their functions included interrogation, torture, and imprisonment of communists and political dissidents--and they were trained and supported by American aid, $125.8 million between 1967 and 1972, with some being trained at the International Police Academy in Washington, D.C. Former participants in the Phoneix Program are another group likely to be rejected if there is a screening process. They assassinated NLF officials and people accused of being NLF officials, and the program was heavily financed and advised by the U.S.--In 1971. William E. Colby testified at Congressional hearings that the--Phoenix program--which was under his direction--was "an essential element of Vietnam's defense against Vietcong subversion and terrorism."

NONE OF THIS is new. It was the United States that supported a succession of repressive regimes in Cambodia and Vietnam. It was the United States that dropped more than 7.5 million tons of bombs throughout Indochina; the United States can hardly determine justly who among the refugees of Indochina are good enough to become its citizens.

Principles established at the end of World War II--that war crimes exist and people can be held accountable for them--are still valid, but the United States government is in no position to put them into practice. For the government to screen out "undesirables" is more like Nazi Germany managing to survive the war and then denying refuge to Quisling or Laval on the grounds that they were undemocratic. If principles established after World War II were used today, justice for war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia would be administered by the victorious governments in those countries.

The moral responsibility of Americans for war crimes committed in Indochina will not be wiped away by rejecting "undesirable" elements who were trained in American know-how and supported by American dollars.

ALL THE refugees should be allowed into the United States because many Americans--too many--bear more responsibility for war crimes in Indochina than even the most corrupt members of the Thieu and Lon Nol regimes. If justice is being sought for Vietnam war criminals, then the place to start is not with middle-echelon refugees, but with American policy-makers like Nixon and Kissinger, the men who engineered the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. And if the war has not taught us to distinguish policy-makers from those who carry out their plans, we should not screen out members of the Phoenix project or tiger-cage guards until the same standards have been applied to their American advisers, American soldiers who committed atrocities, or American pilots who bombed harmless villages.