From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Subject: [NEWS] Flow of Vietnamese Boat People Drops to a Trickle
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Date: 18 Nov 92 00:10:09 GMT

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From Washington Post (11/17/92)
By William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service

HONG GAI - Vietnam-For Nguyen Bich Hanh, the 12-day trip to Hong Kong across
stormy seas in a crowded fishing boat last year had seemed a way to escape
an unhappy family life and the poverty of this coal-mining corner of
northeastern Vietnam.
    She hoped to be accepted there as a political refugee and given help in
a Western country.  But after eight months in a teeming, often violent,
prison-like camp, Hanh, now 13, joined thousands of other Vietnamese boat
people in opting to return to her homeland.
    Faced with increased hostility from countries that once offered temporary
asylum in the region and with diminished chances of resettling abroad,
Vietnamese have practically stopped leaving their country in rickety boats.
Amid growing economic opportunities in their homeland, they are returning in
record numbers.
    Last year, more than 20,000 Vietnamese boat people arrived in Hong Kong,
the main destination for would-be refugees in recent years.  So far this year,
only a dozen have landed there, and fewer than 50 others have turned up
elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
    In terms of departures from Vietnam, "the boat people problem is over,"
said Jon Liden, a Norwegian spokesman for Nordic Assistance to Repatriated
Vietnamese, a group that helps unaccompanied children, such as Hanh, who
return to Vietnam.  "It has finally sunk in that there is no way out of these
camps" for Vietnamese detained in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the region.
    "Before, we were trying to repatriate people but illegal departures (from
Vietnam) were continuing," said Marie-France Sevestre, who heads the Hanoi
office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.  "Now we can expect to see
an end to this problem of boat people."
    Another factor in reversing the flow was a cutoff imposed last year on
$360 stipends that had been provided by the U.N. refugee office to Vietnamese
internees who agreed to join a voluntary repatriation program.  After
determining that the money had become an incentive for Vietnamese to make the
trip to Hong Kong, the agency declared that anyone arriving after Sept. 27,
1991, would not be eligible for financial support.
    Since the repatriation program was begun in March 1989, in an attemp to
ease the region's refugee crisis, about 33,000 Vietnamese have returned, most
of them voluntarily from Hong Kong.  In the past year, other Vietnamese have
forcibly been sent back by Hong Kong authorities aboard six flights under a
controversial agreement with Vietnam.
    Human rights groups have charged that screening procedures in Hong Kong
are unfair and often disqualify legitimate refugees-those seeking to escape
political persecution rather than economic hardship.  U.N. officials say boat
people routinely invent political motives for seeking better economic
conditions abroad.  In addition, they say, no evidence has been found of
political reprisal by Hanoi government against returnees.
    For refugee officials, the main problem now is the fate of more than
97,000 Vietnamese in camps around Asia.  Of that number, only about 11,500
have been recognized as political refugees with a well-founded fear of
persecution in their homeland.  The rest either have been "screened out" by
local authorities as economic migrants or are awaiting decisions on their
cases.
    Of the total, nearly 50,000 are crammed into detention centers in Hong
Kong that resemble concentration camps.  Surrounded by high fences topped
with barbed wire, many of these camps display an atmosphere of hopelessness
and have become breeding grounds for crime, gangs, gambling and violence.
    It was in one of these camps, the Sek Kong detention center, that Hanh
found herself last year at the age of 12.  She was detained there as a
presumed economic migrant after arriving with 43 people aboard a fishing boat
from this port in Quang Ninh Province bordering China.  Her story illustrated
the plight of an estimated 4,500 unaccompanied minors in camps for Vietnamese
in Southeast Asia, about 85 percent of whom have been found ineligible for
resettlement as political refugees.
    Like many other boat people, Hanh left for reasons unrelated to the
Communist one-party political system that prevails in Vietnam despite
capitalist economic reforms.
    "My father divorced my mother and I was so sad that I decided to leave,"
she said as she sat at a table arrayed with snacks and drinks for sale
outside her tiny house here.  "I didn't have any expectations at all.  I just
wanted to go there."
    She said an aunt lives in another camp and an uncle made it to Canada
after sailing to Hong Kong in 1985 before tough restrictions on refugee
status were applied, but she was unable to contact either of them.
    A cousin who worked for the boat's owner arranged a place for her at a
cut-rate-price about $30.  The normal fare was about $100.  She dropped out
of school and, with her father's blessing, set off.  But the boat had to wait
out a storm on the Chinese island of Hainan, and it was 12 days before the
famished passengers arrived in the British colony.
    At the camp, Hanh said, Vietnamese men secretly made liquor from rice and
sometimes became violent after losing in gambling sessions.  One night, she
recalled, an enraged loser smashed another man's face with a hammer as he lay
sleeping in her crowd barracks.
    "He bled a bucket of blood," she said.  "There were a lot thefts and
fights...I was so afraid.  If I stayed there, I could become a victim."
    She decided to come home last December.  By then, however, her friends
were a grade ahead of her in school, and she said she has been too embarassed
to resume classes.
    Now she tends her makeshift store and lives with her father, Nguyen Manh
Do, 38, a former North Vietnamese army sergeant, and his new wife.  Both work
for a railroad that carries coal from nearby mines to the port here.
Together, they are paid about $34 a month.
    "At first, I didn't want her to go,"  Do said.  "But she was so
determined that I finally gave my permission.  I also hoped that she would be
able to resettle in a third country and that later she might be able to
assist her family."
    He knew she had no claim to political refugee status, he said, but
neither had her uncle, his first wife's brother, who had worked as a driver
before leaving in 1985.  "The only problem we face is that we are poor," Do
said.



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