From: ngo@iscnvx.lmsc.lockheed.com (Tuan A. Ngo)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: (none)
Date: 12 Oct 92 21:52:08 GMT
Reply-To: ngo@iscnvx.lmsc.lockheed.com


VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE FIND FREE WORLD IS A MIRAGE

by Andrew Lam, Pacific News Service

EDITOR'S NOTE:  If there is one thing that Vietnamese boat people now
awaiting forced repatriation in Hong Kong detention camps have learned
from their sage, it's that the free world they dreamed about is, in 
fact, a mirage.  In clandestine interviews with asylum seekers in the
sealed-off camps where the press is banned from access, PNS editor 
Andrew Lam is told that if you're countryless and homeless, it doesn't 
matter where you are -- you're either treated as an animal or ignored
as if you didn't exist.  Lam's research was funded in part by a grant
from the Fund for Investigative Reporting in Washington D.C..  A cartoon
drawn by a Vietnamese teenager at the Whitehead detention camp illustrates
this story.  Copies are available through Pacific News Service.


HONG KONG -- The scars on his back failed to convince the Hong Kong 
immigration officer of his tragic past in Communist reeducation camps.
Now Mr. Dai Nguyen, 38, waits at Hong Kong's Whitehead Detention Center
to be forcibly repatriated to his homeland.  "Before I left Vietnam I 
used to immage there was a free world.  Now I know there is no free
world for people like me."

When forced repatriation was first applied in July 1988, it provoked an
international uproar.  Today, it has become an internationally condoned
standard:  some 24,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers now await deportation
here, and another 33,000 wait to have their cases heard.

The pope, various pop stars and international agencies -- all one-time
boat people champions -- are preoccupied with more recent tragedies.
The U.S., which once condemned the policy, has now forcibly repatriated
thousands of Haitian refugees.  While Hong Kong politicians blasted the
U.S.'s double standard, England signed a treaty with Vietnam making 
mandatory repatriation possible.

"But two wrong don't make a right," insists Michael Darwyn, a British
lawyer who works closely with boat people.  "Regarless of what the U.S. 
does to the Haitians, the Hong Kong government's behavior towards the
Vietnamese boat people is absolutely inhumane."

Mr. Darwyn and international human right groups like Asia Watch and 
Amnesty International charge that Hong Kong's screening process for
determining who gets refugee status is seriously flawed.  Of the tens
of thousands of asylum seekers immigration officials have interviewed,
for instance, only 3,295 so far have been "screened in" -- most because
they have relatives in the U.S. or married foreign citizens.  Many of 
those "screened out" -- in camp slang, "given a chicken wing" -- say
their horror stories fall on deaf ears.

Mr. Xuan Tran, a former South Vietnamese Army officer who spent six years
in a reeducation camp, says his refugee status was denied even though he
told how his home had been confiscated, his children deprived of jobs and
education, and the family packed off to a malaria-infested new economic
zone.  "If I am refused how can the rest of the Vietnamese here have a 
chance?" he told a reporter in a clandestine interview at Tai A Chau 
Detention Center.

"The immigration officer slapped the table and called me a lawyer," Mrs.
Van Pham, widow of a former South Vietnamese Army officer, recalled.
"He said he didn't have time to write down a novel so that I should come
to the point.  But how can you describe two decades of suffering in
less than an hour?"

In the sealed-off world of the camps, once refugee status is denied 
there is no way out.  "In theory," Darwyn says, "boat people are 
allowed to have lawyers to assist them.  In practice, the government
refuses to allow lawyers to enter the centers, refuses to install
telephones, and bans the press from entering these places."

But even if the asylum seekers were to get the attention of the 
outside world, it is doubtful anyone would care.

"Hong Kong simply has had enough with refugees," says Dr. Duyen Nguyen,
a Vietnamese American who is deputy director of the U.S. Joint
Volunteer Program here.  "Besides, it is under pressure to get rid 
of the problem by the time China takes over in 1997."

A recent letter to the editor in the South China Morning Post from a 
Hong Kong resident urged that "Vietnamese boat people should be sent
to labor camps to work as slaves."  Other letters suggest Hong Kong
should force everyone back to Vietnam regardless of screening.

Even the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, according to several 
disaffected former staffers, has capitulated to the precess because it
believes the only way to solve the problem is to make life so unbearable
for the Vietnamese they will volunteer to go home.

"In fact, forced repatriation is working, -- the number of asylum 
seekers has dropped from 20,207 to only nine this year," one ex-staffer
who asked to remain anonymous pointed out.

As Hong Kong goes, so goes the rest of the world.  "This is a Post
Cold War era and refugees are no longer political pawns in the
ideological game," he added.  "Forget human rights and compassion -- the 
bottom line is to find a quick fix approach to the refugee crisis."

Mr. Dai Nguyen says nothing the free world can do would surprise him
anymore.  "It's the same outside Vietnam as inside Vietnam," he shrugs.
"You have no rights to anything if you are homeless and countryless.
Either you're treated like an animal or you're ignored like a ghost."