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Hong Kong : Refugees

Case Closed ? After 25 years, the Vietnamese refugee saga is ending. But its legacy lives on for families struggling to build lives in a place they never expected to call home

One tuesday morning in april, Lau Cun Sang walked into an unremarkable government building and picked up the identity card that all Hong Kong residents carry. The rectangular piece of plastic was the culmination of a decade of waiting: Since 1990, Lau has lived in a kind of limbo, housed in a succession of detention centres and refugee camps. Unable to leave for another country, he also could not return to his native Vietnam, which claims to have lost any record of his citizenship. At the age of 37, much of his life--from his marriage to the birth of his two children--has unfolded behind fences. "There's no place for me," he says angrily.

Twenty-five years after it began, the Hong Kong government is writing the last chapter in the saga of the more than 200,000 Vietnamese who have passed through the territory. On May 30, it will close the last refugee camp, a collection of peeling two-storey barracks called Pillar Point on the territory's western edge. It has offered 1,400 remaining Vietnamese--some classed as refugees, others, like Lau, as "stateless" persons--the chance to stay in Hong Kong permanently by giving them an ID card.

Though it ends their uncertainty, the small plastic card represents a bitter conclusion for Lau and others like him. A few have been in Hong Kong since 1975, the starting point of what would become a 15-year exodus of Vietnamese fleeing persecution and economic hardship. After years of delays, political wrangling and riots in the camps, the lawsuits and the false hopes, their journey has come to an end--not in another country as they hoped, but in a place they thought would be a mere transit stop along the way. The intervening years have not been kind, spent in temporary government living quarters where drugs and crime were part of the daily landscape.

Now, claim the government and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, this forgotten population will have a chance to thrive. "With the Hong Kong ID card, the sky's the limit," says Terence Pike, the local UNHCR representative. "Refugees in other parts of the world don't get this kind of thing." But the legacy of the camps will not be easily erased. Those permitted to remain are a fraction of the multitudes that passed through the territory in the late 1980s and early 1990s: 167,000 were resettled elsewhere, mostly in the United States, and another 56,000 were returned to Vietnam. The reasons why some were left behind vary, but other countries rejected many because they had criminal records or were addicted to drugs--or both. More than one in three of those offered ID cards has been convicted of a crime: In half of these cases, the offences were serious ones like assault or manslaughter. At the same time, a third of those granted the right to stay are children under the age of eight. Their only crime has been to grow up in the desolate alleyways of Pillar Point, where they play among rats, used needles and garbage.

"Realistically, this problem has to be solved for the sake of the second generation," says Brenda Ku, a supervisor for Caritas, the nonprofit body that runs the camp. "But there is a sense of gradual disappointment and despair . . . they still feel upset that this is the end of the road." In Hong Kong, a self-reliant city of former refugees, there is little sympathy. "People are so sick and tired of this problem," says Selina Chow, a member of the Legislative Council who has been involved with the issue for 20 years. "Either you let them stay in the camp or you absorb them. It's not the solution we would like, it's not something we feel is fair to Hong Kong, but it's something we have to do." Part of the ill will is related to the fact that the UNHCR's funding dried up in 1998, leaving the Hong Kong government with a bill for $150 million.

Pillar Point has been an open camp for two years--residents can come and go as they please, and children can attend local schools. But that freedom hasn't done much to improve the toxic atmosphere behind the gates. Police say they have been unable to cut off the steady supply of drugs, mainly heroin, to the camp. They also find it difficult to prosecute disturbances inside the camp, as residents are often reluctant to press charges. On a recent muggy afternoon, Pillar Point was quiet save for the hum of music echoing through the barracks. A fence topped with barbed wire separates the mainly ethnic-Chinese section from the one belonging to other residents--a riot broke out in June 1999 between the two factions. A middle-aged woman--"the monopolist," laughs a social worker--is selling a limited collection of fruits and vegetables beneath a ramshackle shelter. The nearest store is 10 minutes away by car.

When the camp closes, Hoang Phuong, her husband and two children will have to leave their cramped 100-square-foot room. "I'm so worried," she says in the careful, hesitant English she learned at a previous detention centre. "I can't earn enough money to have a house on the outside." Hoang has been on the "inside" since she arrived in Hong Kong in 1989 at the age of 14; her parents were later sent back to Vietnam because the screening process determined them to be migrants, not refugees. Screening, a practice that later became highly controversial, was instituted in 1988 by the Hong Kong government and involved interviewing thousands of arrivals in an attempt to discover who had a legitimate fear of persecution. Hoang was able to stay because her husband, whom she married at 21, did have refugee status. But he also had a criminal record, having been jailed for three months for his role in a fight at his detention centre in 1988. That made resettlement impossible.

At one point, they lived outside the camp, sharing a flat with two other families. Hoang worked in a nightclub, her husband on construction sites. Then, in 1997, she became pregnant and he lost his job; moving back into Pillar Point looked like a good option. Soon they too will have their Hong Kong ID cards, but they don't have a place to live and aren't sure how they will manage--these days Hoang's husband works only 10 days a month. For most, this ending is a harsh one. "They're still hoping they'll get to Orange County" near Los Angeles, says Pam Baker, a lawyer who is part of Refugee Concern, an organization that has crusaded for the rights of the Vietnamese for over a decade. But the U.S. has accepted more than 70,000 Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong alone since 1975 and isn't willing to take those with convictions. "As far as this group is concerned, that's it--it's over," says Baker.

Meanwhile, people like Lau will have to make the transition to living outside an institutional setting. He has asked Caritas for a loan to help him get started, but hasn't had a response. Lau isn't optimistic. Smoking a cigarette outside the camp's security booth, he rails at the fact that he can't go back to Vietnam, that living in Hong Kong is expensive, that the job market is fickle. His daughter, who was born here, is now attending kindergarten at Butterfly Estate, a new housing development down the road complete with supermarket and playground. "She's happy," says Lau. "But she's too small to know anything."

Falling through the cracks

Eating a banana and using the available furniture as a jungle gym, Phan Thanh Vinh acts just like any other four-year-old. But to the Hong Kong government, he is a loose end--and one that will linger on long after the last Vietnamese refugee camp is closed at the end of May. Vinh's lips are a dark purple and his fingertips reddish brown, signs of a serious heart condition that's impairing his blood circulation. If he were healthy, Vinh and his family would already have been returned to Vietnam, along with their relatives, who were judged to be economic migrants rather than bona fide refugees. But because he cannot receive the operations and treatment he requires in Vietnam, the Hong Kong government has allowed him and his parents to stay--for now.

The Phan family is what the government describes as an "unclean" case. They will not be offered the chance to become permanent Hong Kong residents because Vietnam has indicated it will take them back as soon as "the factors holding up their return are removed." In this case, that factor is their son. Vinh's father, Truyen, came to Hong Kong in 1989 at the age of 19, hoping to emigrate to a third country and attend university. "But that is lost now," he says with a rueful smile in precise English learned in the camps and at hospitals. Now 30, he works on construction sites when he can while his wife takes care of their son.

There are about 40 Vietnamese in a similar situation, in which a sick relative is the only thing keeping them in Hong Kong. Their lives are frozen in a cruel predicament: Vietnam's door is open, but returning could be a death sentence for the person who is ill. Other countries are reluctant to accept people with serious medical conditions who have not been classified as refugees; and Hong Kong will not give them a permanent status because it expects them to return home as soon as certain "factors" are resolved. Two children at the centre of such cases have died in the past few months. One child's parents will be sent back to Vietnam, while the other's were granted refugee status after a legal battle and so can now receive ID cards. Phan Thanh Vinh may be lucky--his father holds a rumpled piece of paper with an e-mail from a church in Canada that has agreed to sponsor the family to go there. In the meantime, he's due for another operation this month. His family continues to wait--and hope.

By Joanna Slater - Far Eastern Economic Review - May 4, 2000.