Commemorating Freedom: The Fortieth Anniversary of the “Fall of Saigon” in Canada

Abstract

On 30 April 2015, hundreds of Vietnamese Canadians congregated on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the nation's capital, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and to celebrate the proposed state-sponsored construction of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism. Amidst a sea of Canadian and South Vietnamese flags, former refugees denounced the Vietnamese government for its human rights abuses, focalizing the “problem” of forced migration and refuge(es) on the issue of rights over those of war and geopolitical conflict. This telling scene demonstrates how Vietnamese diasporics remember their histories and negotiate their place within the Canadian national imaginary through the discourse of human rights. It reveals how such rememberings are legitimated and appropriated by the state and how they work to construct a particular understanding of the “good” of refuge. Employing the commemoration event in Ottawa as a site of analysis, this article explores the entanglements of refugee discourse and human rights. The mobilization of human rights by former refugees, as a form of national visibility, necessitates an examination of the ways in which refugees have relied upon the language of rights to make various claims: for asylum, for recognition, for diasporic agency, and for community formation. Human rights, then, do not just form the basis for claiming legal status as “refugees” but also critically function as a force that sustains various collective identities (personal, diasporic, and national) produced in the aftermath of migration and refuge.

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