Published in the May/June 2009 Humanist
In April 1975, under the manufactured threat of a mass slaughter of infants and children by advancing North Vietnamese forces, Western relief agencies and orphanages in South Vietnam, and finally the U.S. government, pressed into action a daring “rescue” plan dubbed Operation Babylift. Vietnamese children under the jurisdiction of the relief agencies and orphanages--along with any other child who was either handed to them or picked up off the street--were to be sent out of the country and placed with adoptive parents in Western countries. The operation was controversial; aside from the fact that not all the children evacuated were orphans and adoption documentation was often sketchy, the cargo plane that lifted the initial group of evacuees crashed, killing 141 of 149 children on board. Nevertheless, by the time the Vietnam War officially ended on April 30, 1975, approximately three thousand infants and young children had been taken out of Vietnam for the purpose of adoption.
Although Operation Babylift was specific to Vietnam, it fits into a pattern of U.S. intervention in Asia that includes Korea and the adopting of Korean children in the 1950s for very similar reasons.
Cold War Calculations
After World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States attempted to divide up the world both ideologically and militarily. The Domino Theory promoted by the United States, which speculated that if a region came under the influence of communism then the surrounding countries would follow, justified using the Korean and Indochinese peninsulas as proving grounds for injecting American influence around the world. The U.S. government poured millions of dollars and thousands of combat troops and support personnel into the wars in Korea and Vietnam to preempt any more countries from falling to the communists.
Posté: Ven 8 Mai 2009 14:30