1 Screening Subjects: Humanitarian Government and the Politics Of

1 Screening Subjects: Humanitarian Government and the Politics of Asylum at Palawan James Pangilinan A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in International Studies: Southeast Asia University of Washington 2014 Committee: Enrique Bonus Arzoo Osanloo Christoph Giebel Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Jackson School of International Studies 2 © Copyright 2014 James Pangilinan 3 University of Washington Abstract Screening Subjects: Humanitarian Government and the Politics of Asylum at Palawan James Pangilinan Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Enrique Bonus Department of American Ethnic Studies Contemporary humanitarian government of refugee resettlement entails a formative politics of asylum that legally assesses the truth of persecution and thus claims to "refugee" identity. In the Palawan First- Asylum Camp from the early 1980's until 1997, forces of sovereign violence and compassion manifested how international refugee law translated through concrete humanitarian practices of camp education, emergency care, and legal contention. These multi-scalar discursive processes served the basis for resettlement of Vietnamese American. For the latter diasporic Vietnamese community, legal determination of refugee status encountered a limit in the form of hospitality that reconfigured the borders of the Philippines and Vietnam in light of cosmopolitan visions of sanctuary and pastoral care. By highlighting overlapping conditions of refuge, this thesis offers an analysis of refugee narratives and conditional recognition of refugee “identity” in relation to a selective regime of truth addressing "refugees" in contrast to other migrant subjects. A genealogy of Vietnamese-Filipino asylum-seekers underscores the mixed history of humanitarianism delivered by different stakeholders in light of militarized conflict as well as the emergence of peace, a "neoliberal" politics of immigration, welfare reform and market liberalization in the US, Vietnam and the Philippines. 4 5 Acknowledgments This thesis owes its existence to the supports of others. I am grateful to all my professors and friends who have engaged its issues and experiences with me over the previous year of research and writing. Among them, I specially thank Professor Arzoo Osanloo for her thorough engagement, criticism, and gracious assistance. With regards to the subject manner and analytic inspiration during two seminars on asylum and refugee law and humanitarianism, this research project would not have emerged as it stands without her singular grace and erudition. I also thank Professor Christoph Giebel for allowing me to sit in on in his lively Vietnamese history lectures and his graduate seminar. He made an overwhelming density of modern Vietnamese history approachable and fun. I have, of course, debts of gratitude to Rick Bonus and Vicente Rafael for pushing my appreciation for discrepant histories of the Philippines and the transnational connections these nevertheless entail. Rick has offered me singular guidance in thinking about the interstices of American ethnic studies and Southeast Asian studies. For the latter, Laurie Sears certainly offered the most conducive support and overall intellectual encouragement. I could go one. Finally, I appreciate the assistance of James Eder, Noah Theriault, and Oscar and Susan Evangelista, Anne Candelaria from Ateneo for their transnational support and leads in partaking in the small guild circle of Palawan Studies Of course, I am also grateful to my Philippine studies friends- Arthit Jiamrattyoo, Lauren Pongan, Allan Lumba and Christopher Gorund- for their pakikisama. Finally, I would not have written on diaspora with a sense of fun and intensity if it were not for the friendship and affection of Rinna Rem. Her ethos of “keeping it real” and grounded in a non-jargon-filled sense of play is irreducible. I am also deeply appreciative of the Southeast Asian Studies Center at the University of Washington for material support for undertaking this research and for presenting earlier drafts at academic and informal settings such as the presentation of Duc Nguyen’s timely film Stateless at the University of Washington. 6 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 6 Chapter One: The Politics of Asylum at the Palawan First- Asylum Camp 23 Chapter Two: Humanitarian Disorientations 54 Chapter Three: Pastoral Hospitality 83 Conclusion 113 Notes 123 Works Cited 132 7 Introduction: Humanitarian Government at the “Frontier” Looking back at the second half of the 20th Century requires accounting for optimistic developments like the institutional growth of human rights and humanitarianism. These must be regarded in light of the dismal realities these projects attend to. Few other issues during the last century’s final decades troubled the conscience of “global humanity” than the intransigent persistence of forced displacement, violence-generated diasporas, and the recurrent production of refugees. Increasing figures of displacement highlight the limits of the “New World Order” proclaimed in the early 1990’s. Set against the backdrop of international relations among sovereign states, the worldwide population of refugees, internally displaced people, stateless, and other “subjects of concern” has indeed proliferated1 as patently witnessed in Syria, North and Central Africa, Myanmar (Burma) and Central Asia. These regional and international problems have required repeated remediation as a seeming symptom of the broader pathological conditions of the “national order of things” (Malkki 1992; Nguyen 2013, 72). Even as the “abnormality” of refugees appears perennial and thereby requires repeated normalizing redress, it must not be forgotten by globally concerned citizens that the very “refugee” developed formally through the international organization of the post-Second World War global order. As one of this order’s formative clients, the refugee has a genealogy that must be critically read, re-contextualized according to the situations of its production, and reformed at different scales. This is so, because despite the sustained assistance of displaced “subjects of concern” in recent years, the very category of “refugee” has significantly decreased in concrete importance. Indeed, the very agency mandated to assist refugees claims: The number of ‘people of concern’ to UNCHR [the United Nations High Commission for Refugees] increased from 19.2 million to 33.9 million at the start of 2011, the proportion of refugees among them 8 decreased from 48 per cent to 29 per cent….[the] UNHCR has adapted its operations to respond to the needs of large numbers of internally displaced and stateless people… it can no longer be seen as only a ‘refugee’ agency (2012, 1) Whether or not born out of mere “compassion fatigue” by the citizens of resettlement states and individual sponsors, this apparent global retraction has a historical basis in the discourse of refugee law. As a genealogical subject, the “refugee” implies a politics of truth embodied by an increasingly rigorous procedure of testing subjects for their credible persecution based on the accounts they give of themselves. The Forgotten Ones In 1997, a relatively recent law graduate from the University of Melbourne decided to travel abroad in pursuit of something more worthwhile than the safety of his legal job. As Trinh Hoi himself put it, “I was utterly bored with my corporate job in Sydney.” 2 As a Vietnamese refugee born of parents resettled from the “boat people exodus,” Trinh Hoi had a particularly diasporic desire for returning to work on a “few refugee cases in Hong Kong” before these cases were transferred to Chinese jurisdiction; with Hong Kong’s political reintegration with China in 1997, so went Trinh Hoi’s compassionate calling to enact an identity-based moral obligation. On his way returning to Melbourne, he took a trip to the nearby Philippines- a historically and politically adjacent archipelago. When he arrived there his compassionate vocation took a surprising turn. As a young Vietnamese American women of relatively recent relocation to Seattle recounted to me: He saw two people arguing. One person was arguing in Vietnamese, and one person was arguing in Tagalog. But he didn’t know what was going on. But he knew he saw someone speaking in Vietnamese. And so he approached that woman afterwards and… asked her, “What’s going on?” “Why are you here?” That’s kind of weird, like nobody really knew about us. Umm- that we’re in the Philippines, because I guess nobody knew. A peculiar situation of knowledge underpins this account of how a successfully resettled and politically active subject of the Vietnamese diaspora encountered the “forgotten” plight of others 9 from the “Boat People” diaspora. Since resettlement admissions for this prolonged crisis of displacement ended in the early 2000’s, recounting the Indochina Wars seemed more like a task appropriate to Vietnamese American or multicultural history than living realities of Vietnamese remaining in limbo in the Philippines. These contemporary realities may have been “forgotten” by some members of the diasporic Vietnamese community comfortably settled in countries of resettlement. Such forgetting derives from a cultural location, where an embodied situation of knowledge about the Vietnamese “Boat People” remains tied to the imaginative form of the nation (Haraway 1988; Winichakul 2003). This view of the “forgotten boat people in the Philippines” arose from a perspective effectively

Load more