Washington, DC -November 17, 2005- Boat People SOS (BPSOS) welcomes the decision to open the doors for those who had been excluded from U.S. refugee programs for reasons beyond their control. On November 15, 2005, the United States and Vietnam officially announced the resumption of refugee programs for Vietnamese former US allies under the newly established Humanitarian Resettlement (HR) program.

"Thousands of re-education survivors and former South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians will finally be able to find freedom." said Dr. Nguyen Dinh Thang, Executive Director of BPSOS. "These men and their families deserve a life in liberty and dignity after their tremendous sacrifices."

BPSOS would like to express our special gratitude to the bi-partisan, bi-cameral support of Congressman Christopher Smith (R-NJ), who since 1996 has tirelessly backed our effort to give thousands former U.S. allies a fair chance to be considered for refugee resettlement and Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) for the Lautenberg Amendment, which has facilitated the resettlement to the United States of 200,000 refugees from Vietnam and will apply to the new HR program.

After the last of the U.S. troops left in 1975, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam began to target Vietnamese who aligned themselves with Americans to be placed in internment camps. All except for the lowest ranking military and civil servants were targets for incarceration in prisons and concentration camps referred to misleadingly as "re-education camps."  Most of those imprisoned were tortured which included beatings, mock executions, prolonged solitary confinement, watching the mutilation and execution of former colleagues, or being worked to death.  In later years, starvation, isolation in jungle encampments, forced labor, withholding of medical treatment, and forced public confessions became more common forms of mistreatment.  By best estimates, between 50,000 and 60,000 men died in the prison camps.

In 1994, the U.S. government announced the September 30 registration deadline for refugee programs that resettle former "re-education" camp detainees and former US government employees, with little advance notice. Many former U.S. allies, otherwise eligible for the programs, did not hear about the deadline until after the deadline passed. Others who were aware of the deadline did not have sufficient time to gather the required documents or large sums of money to pay the bogus "administrative fees" to access the program.