600 PROTESTERS SEEK WIDER GATES FOR INDOCHINESE REFUGEES

About 600 local Vietnamese residents demonstrated in front of the White House yesterday in hopes of persuading the Reagan administration to pressure Thailand into accepting more Indochinese refugees.

Organizers of the Lafayette Park protest said that nearly 130 refugees have died since late January when the Thai government, faced with crowded refugee camps, began turning away refugee boats from Vietnam. More than 500 refugees are stranded on rocky islands off Thailand's coast, and 1,500 are in beach shelters on the mainland, according to the organizers, who represent a coalition of more than 30 local Vietnamese groups.

Speaker Kassie Neou knows the terrors of refugee life firsthand. He said he walked through the jungles of his home country of Cambodia to reach Thailand in 1975, only to be bused back to the border by Thai police four years later. He walked back to Thailand through the jungle, eating tree leaves and bamboo shoots. Then in 1981, he left Thailand for the United States with those members of his family who did not perish during the war in Cambodia. He now works in a car repair shop.

" 'Boat people' deserve the right to be protected," Neou told the largely Vietnamese crowd. "They deserve to be settled in a third country."

"These people are victims and should not be punished," said speaker Le Xuan Khoa, who directs a local organization called the Indochina Resource Center.

The speakers urged the Reagan administration to be generous in accepting Indochinese refugees as an example to Thailand and other countries. The number of Vietnamese resettling in the United States has held steady at about 8,500 a year for the past few years. But under a Reagan administration budget proposal, fewer admissions would be allowed.

The Thai government decided in January to limit the flow of refugees by blocking the Vietnamese boats that try to land on Thailand's eastern coast. In the past, Thailand accepted the Vietnamese refugees until other countries could resettle them.

According to refugee officials, many of the refugee deaths occurred when Thai fishermen deputized by the Thai government to help in the interdiction effort rammed or pushed away boats to keep them from landing.

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