”On the land something happened,” Sa said. She is unclear about the details, but Vietnamese authorities apparently arrived suddenly on the beach. Those caught on shore were arrested, though Sa`s parents apparently got away. Whatever happened, Sa and Ra went on their way to Thailand without their parents: ”When the trouble started, the big boat left right away. There were only nine of us on the boat.”
When Sa and Ra arrived safely in Thailand, they were immediately taken to the unaccompanied-minors compound. More than 10,000 Indochinese children have arrived in Thailand without parents or guardians since 1975, 800 in 1987 alone. Because the U.S. considers the children of ”profound humanitarian concern,” it works to get them out of the camps and resettled in third countries quickly, taking the vast majority of them itself.
The swiftness of their resettlement, however legitimate a humanitarian exercise it might be, also establishes a foothold for the rest of their families to follow. The dwindling number of slots being offered to Indochinese refugees for permanent resettlement in the West has created something of a quandary.
”I`m always thinking about my father,” Sa said. ”I`m always hoping that he will come here. I don`t know why we left, but I know he wanted to go to America.”
It always helps, when applying for resettlement, for the refugee to prove he has close relatives already living in the country to which he wants to migrate. Many refugee workers believe large numbers of children are arriving in Thailand unaccompanied to take advantage of this policy.
Not all of this is cold and calculating. Refugee workers say that unaccompanied children are from very strong, tightly knit, loving families.
”The parents are usually well aware of the risks they are putting their children through,” said a Western nurse working in Phanat Nikhom.
”Establishing a solid future for your children is of paramount importance in Vietnamese society. Many of the children come from families who are at odds with the regime in Vietnam, and the educational and employment opportunities are very limited for their families there as a result.
”Culturally you have to divorce yourself from what a Western parent would do. It`s a different situation. The parents know that circumstances change, that they might never get out of Vietnam themselves or see their children again. But they think that if their kids can get out and get to the West, even if they can`t, they are making sure that their children will be properly educated and given an opportunity to make something out of life.”
Unfortunately, the children are often too young to understand why their parents sent them away, believing they have done something wrong, that they are somehow at fault for the separation. Though about 75 percent of the children spend only a few weeks or months in the camp before resettlement (98 percent of them going to the U.S.), it can take three years or more for others to get out of Thailand. These children, according to Bridget Messana, an American Catholic lay worker at the compound, often get scolding letters from their parents in Vietnam. The letters chide the children for ”misbehaving and taking so long” to get resettled.
”The most pain-filled group are those children who are hopeless,”
Messana said. ”They arrived in Thailand one, two or, for some, more than three years ago and have seen so many other children come and go, and still they remain. What is even more frustrating is that these long-staying children have no idea if 1988 will bring them that long-hoped-for freedom . . . because the international attitude toward these children is not at all welcoming. The workers cannot comfort them with false hope because the reality is that at least half the children will remain in Phanat Nikhom throughout 1988 unless policies change.”
Policies are changing rapidly in Southeast Asia, and most of them make it harder for refugees. Canada, Australia, France and Britain are under public pressure to end the resettlement policy.
The U.S. resettlement of Indochinese is gradually declining, too. In 1986 the country accepted 36,000. In 1987, 32,000. Early in 1988, in the midst of a growing number of refugee arrivals in Southeast Asia, it earmarked slots for 29,500.
Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong all point to large refugee populations in their camps who are long-stayers, people who have been in camps four, five and six years. They are refugees who for one reason or another have already been turned down by Western nations and have fading hopes of ever being resettled anywhere.
More Top Picks Best Av Receivers
Besides the 300,000 Cambodian refugees it wishes to keep for the moment, Thailand also has nearly 100,000 ”residual” refugees whom nobody wants. They are Vietnamese army deserters, North Vietnamese who cannot prove they have been persecuted at home, Cambodians who have been somehow connected to the Khmer Rouge, and Hmong from Laos who do not want to be resettled but only wish to go home when it is safe.
If nobody else wants them, Thailand doesn`t, either. And Thailand does not want to allow any more refugees into its camps, a certain percentage of whom are bound to become ”residuals.”
The Southeast Asian countries most affected by the most recent tide of refugees have been banding together to shut their doors. Most are adopting strict screening of new arrivals. If refugees cannot prove persecution by their home countries, they are arrested and jailed pending their forced removal back to their homelands.
Vietnam, the biggest generator of refugees in the region, promised last July to accept such returns of human merchandise. Previously Vietnam considered any of its refugee citizens ”illegal departures” and labeled them criminals. In July, however, it declared it was ready to allow refugees unable to resettle elsewhere to come home under UN supervision.
Western nations, just as weary as Southeast Asia of the endless stream of Indochinese refugees, are beginning to support the move to send the unwanted home. Last July U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz said such repatriation, if voluntary on the part of the refugees, should be considered as an alternative to Western resettlement.
”It is feared the policies themselves are creating a possible problem,” Schultz said. If resettlement is in fact encouraging economic migrants to pose as political refugees, it should be curtailed, he said.
The softening of the Western commitment to accept all refugees fleeing Indochina is typical of most refugee policy ”solutions.” Primarily it solves the political problems of the powerful-the nations of first asylum and of resettlement. Of secondary importance is the plight of the powerless refugees, who will eventually move where the rest of the world tells them to move. The 23,000 refugees in Hong Kong are prime examples.
Breakfast begins at 8 a.m. at the Hei Ling Chau refugee camp on a hilltop of an isolated island an hour`s boat ride from the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. The camp`s 3,000 Vietnamese inmates have been up scurrying around since a public address system began trumpeting Chinese music at 7 a.m. They have lined up to use the toilets, one for each 145 inmates, and then lined up to get into the communal dining halls for their morning meal of rice, pork and vegetables.
Nowhere else in the world does the image of ”warehousing” unwanted refugees become reality as it does in Hong Kong. The refugees of Hei Ling Chau are housed in 10 brick, barrackslike buildings. Each family is assigned to a cubicle made from industrial shelving exactly 8 feet long, 6 feet wide and 3 feet high. Each cubicle is expected to accommodate a family of five and all their belongings. They are stacked three high. All that separates one family from those on either side is a curtain. Those living on the top tier don`t even have that small nod to privacy.
Once breakfast, served in shifts, is over, there is little for the inmates to do, except for the children, who attend school. At lunch and dinner times they line up again for a prepared, communal meal. The meals are nutritious and probably the most generous provided to refugees anywhere in the world, with beef served twice a week, fresh fish twice a week and pork and canned fish each served once a week. And boring.
”The food is healthy, but it is so repetitive that you sometimes don`t eat enough,” said Tran Huu Tiep. Tran, a 30-year-old bachelor, had been staring the same menu in the face for six years, since he arrived in Hong Kong on a leaky boat from North Vietnam in October, 1982.
Women are not permitted to prepare meals for their own families. Men aren`t allowed out of the camp to find work. Clothing is distributed army-style: You stand in line for it, you take what they give you and you wear it, whether you like it or not.
All the basic needs of life are taken care of in Hei Ling Chau camp, but that can be said of prison, too. Everything operates smoothly and efficiently. The camp is overseen by courteous, no-nonsense young guards from Hong Kong`s Correctional Services Department. Though the young men and women are trained for prison duty, they look more like resort recreation directors in their charcoal slacks, white shirts, ties and blue blazers.
The natty guards stand at the gates in the high fences that surround the camp and divide it into sectors, locking and unlocking them each time a refugee or a camp worker walks from one section to another. There is no greenery or even dirt in the camp, only cement and brick. If it has the sterile air of a prison, that is because the Hong Kong government built Hei Ling Chau for use as a medium-security prison once it is rid of the refugees. ”A lot of people have nothing to do,” said Tran. ”They sit around during the day and talk or watch television in the dining halls, or they sleep. At night they sit around in their cubicles playing cards and talking, making a lot of noise when others are trying to sleep. It is a very bad problem, having nothing to do, when you are living on top of each other.
”If too many people are in a small area, you are going to have fights. Fistfights, bludgeons or whatever. Sometimes the fights send people to the hospital. Usually it`s over something trivial.
”I lived in Hanoi City at home, where I never saw a man hit his wife. Here I can see trouble in families every day. A husband can`t do anything for his wife and children, and people just go slightly crazy.”
The sterility of life in Tran`s camp is no accident. It was designed that way deliberately by the Hong Kong government. In 1982 the colonial government implemented its program of ”humane deterrence,” following Thailand`s lead.
Leaving nothing to chance, the authorities insert a printed flier that graphically describes the misery of Hong Kong camp life into each letter the refugees send home to Vietnam.
But the boats come anyway, arriving in Hong Kong after days or weeks at sea. They are greeted by harbor police boats and officials who try to talk the refugees out of landing, and they offer to reprovision the refugee boats and help them head out to sea again. It is all explained in circulars printed in Vietnamese:
”All former residents of Vietnam seeking to enter Hong Kong since 2 July 1982 are detained in special centers.
”If you do not leave Hong Kong now, you will be taken to a closed center and detained there indefinitely. You will not be permitted to leave detention during the time you remain in Hong Kong. It is extremely unlikely that any opportunity for resettlement will be forthcoming.
”You are free to leave Hong Kong now, and if you choose to continue your journey, you will be given assistance to do so.”
Hong Kong clearly wants to wash its hands of this particular political issue. Since the end of the Vietnamese war in 1975, some 140,000 refugees have come to Hong Kong from Vietnam. About 115,000 have been resettled elsewhere, half in the U.S.
The colony`s population is largely Chinese, many of whom illegally crossed the border themselves or have relatives back in China clamoring to come out. The sight of Hong Kong tax-supported camps housing 23,000 Vietnamese legally admitted to the colony and awaiting legal resettlement elsewhere is a galling one to Hong Kong Chinese.
For the last several years Chinese legislators in the colony have been demanding that any new Vietnamese arrivals in Hong Kong either be pushed back to sea or held in detention until they can be sent back to Vietnam.
”We have 6 million people (in 400 square miles),” said Nigel French, the senior civil servant in charge of Hong Kong`s refugee policy. ”We have 27,000 illegal immigrants a year coming in from China alone to top our own population pressures. We can`t resettle a lot of Vietnamese. We can`t politically resettle Vietnamese when we are sending home illegal Chinese immigrants, many of whom are close relatives of our own citizens, every day.” About 70 percent of the Vietnamese boat people coming to Hong Kong are from the north of Vietnam, not the south, which makes them difficult to resettle. The U.S., inundated with requests from South Vietnamese, its former allies, generally will not consider northerners. Because Hong Kong has been by far the most generous area in terms of the numbers it accepts for resettlement, departures have not matched the influx of new arrivals.
The Hong Kong government believes the vast majority of current Vietnamese refugees are simply people hoping to improve their lot by resettling abroad, or merely joining family members who preceded them. Acting on that belief, on June 15 it, too, imposed strict screening of new arrivals. Those deemed to be economic immigrants are locked up pending shipment back to Vietnam. Still, more than 7,000 boat people arrived in Hong Kong in the first two months after screening began.
”It`s not legitimate to become reunited with your family by leaving in a small boat and imposing yourself on the nearest regional nation by posing as a refugee,” French said. ”It brings the status of refugee into some disrepute.”
Many would call Tran Huu Tiep, a slight, cheery but earnest young man, an economic migrant. Tran grew up in Quang Ninh province in North Vietnam. In 1974, a year before the North Vietnamese victory over the South, he was sent to Czechoslovakia to study electrical engineering. He stayed there for five years until the government brought him home in disgrace before he could finish his degree, he said.
”They (the Hanoi government) told me I was not a good Communist and said I had to come home. I met students from many countries when I was studying there, and I began to see the world wasn`t exactly like I was told by the government when I was home. I began to question why my country was constantly at war. Every year we had three periods of vacation, and all Vietnamese had to use that time for political education among ourselves. I complained at these meetings about not being told the truth and wondered why we had to fight continually.”
Removed from the Czechoslovakian engineering program for political heresy, Tran said he was sent back to his home province and was told first to become a charcoalmaker, then a truck driver. When his name came up in the draft, he said he ran away to Hanoi and began to plot his escape.
”If I had to go into the army, I thought I would end up in Kampuchea
More Top Picks Small And Home Office
(Cambodia),” he said, ”and that is not the choice I wanted. I had a friend in Hanoi who had a boat, and he was planning to take some people to Hong Kong. I chose Hong Kong because it was the closest.”
For nearly five years after he arrived in Hong Kong, Tran was routinely rejected in interviews with resettlement countries. He is a bachelor, a draft dodger, presumed to be unsettled in life and potentially difficult to deal with. By contrast, young children, young single women and established families are considered the ideal immigrants.
Early in 1987, however, Canada interviewed and accepted Tran for resettlement. He, of course, was ecstatic and began researching everything he could about his intended new home, becoming a fan of ice hockey in the process, he said. Even more promising, a young Vietnamese woman he had met and fallen in love with in the camp, Pham Thi Minh, had been accepted and left for Canada in September, 1986.
In preparation for his departure, Tran was sent from Hei Ling Chau to another camp for intensive English and cultural instruction. He had been there for three months when in May, 1987, another Canada-bound refugee was allowed out of the camp to pick up a few things in preparation for his trip. When the man did not return after five hours, the camp administrator asked Tran, a friend of the man`s, to go out and look for him. Tran found him in a small shop having a heated argument with the Chinese shopkeeper.
”My friend said the shopkeeper had insulted him about being a refugee, and he thought he was already Canadian,” Tran said. ”It was all such a silly affair, and I tried to calm them both down. I thought I had settled it, but my friend persisted in arguing with him.
”The security police came, and the shopkeeper accused both of us of stealing from him. We were taken to court and given a year`s probation. After court, I got a letter from Canada rejecting me.”
Considered by refugee workers and administrators who know him as a model citizen and a tragic victim of the system, Tran nonetheless is now back in Hei Ling Chau sharing a cubicle with two other bachelors. With the rapidly developing new policies aimed at repatriation rather than resettlement, he may one day find himself back in Vietnam, the fate he said he feared the most.
”I`m not sure what will happen,” Tran said last May. ”Sometimes I think I`ll never be resettled. In the camp many people know me very well, and my camp record is very clear and very good. I hope that will clear things up and the Canadians will eventually forget this past incident.”
Any plans Tran once had for a future with the young woman he met in the camp are now abandoned. She is now a dressmaker in Edmonton, Canada.
”Since this trouble, I wrote her a letter saying that I don`t know when I`ll get out.” he said. ”She wrote back and said she was sorry, that it wasn`t my mistake or hers, that perhaps someday I still can come. I told her in the last letter I wrote to her that she should look for somebody else.”