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.
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