Freedom’s Light Dim in Camps of Hong Kong

Le Tuan Hung has little use for his masters degree in economics these days. University degrees mean little inside the steel cages of Hong Kong’s human warehouses.

Surrounded by jail guards, barbed wire and the dank stench of a 12-story factory building that houses 4,000 refugees in an average space of one square yard per person, the 30-year-old intellectual from the city once known as Saigon sat on a 4-by-6-foot plank that is home to him, his wife and daughter and tried to explain why he risked his family’s life and future for this.

“When we left Saigon, I had no idea we would be put in a jail like this,” Hung said of the high-rise refugee camp that the Hong Kong government calls San Yick. “We were searching only for freedom, for the chance for a better life.

“My father was a novelist in 1975 when Saigon fell. He was a supporter of (South Vietnam’s pro-American) President Nguyen Van Thieu. Later, the Communists found out about his background and punished me for it.

“I have a graduate degree, and the best I can do is a lowly job as an accountant with no future. So, finally, last year, we got in a little boat, traveled 36 days through the typhoons and pirates and ended up here.

“Yes, it was desperation for us. We saw it as our last chance to get out.”

Unfortunately for Southeast Asia, so have tens of thousands of other Vietnamese “boat people,” who have been washing up on the shores of Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines in alarmingly large numbers during the past year. It is the largest mass exodus from Vietnam since 1982, and it has left the once-hospitable nations of Southeast Asia with an unprecedented refugee crisis.

Unlike the first decade after South Vietnam fell to the Communist regime in the north, a period when about a million Indochinese refugees were given citizenship and new lives in America and the West, recent years have seen the resettlement countries lose interest in taking in the newest wave of largely economic refugees.

Refugee officials and international aid workers in the region say most of the recent human flood is fleeing Vietnam’s destitution rather than its political persecution, which is a key factor in the international definition of a refugee, as well as the U.S. standard for determining a refugee’s qualification for resettlement.

Faced with declining refugee departures and the huge influx of arrivals of “boat people” who are largely unwanted in the West, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia--which are bearing the brunt of the recent wave--have said, quite simply, “No more.”

In Thailand, which announced that any “boat people” arriving after March 1 would be sent to harsh Cambodian border camps, the new policy appears to be working. Only about 1,000 “boat people” washed up on the Thai coast in the next six months.

But in Hong Kong, where the government implemented what it calls a “policy of deterrence” in June, the new approach has had a devastating human result.

Beginning June 16, after a six-month period in which 7,772 Vietnamese refugees arrived in a daily wave so huge that the abandoned boats actually clogged navigation in Hong Kong’s harbors, the British colony also began classifying all “boat people” seeking asylum there as illegal migrants.

All new arrivals have been locked up in detention cells on two remote islands, where they are being held until Hong Kong and Vietnam can reach an agreement on sending them home without retribution.

Although the deterrent effect of the policy has been questionable--9,200 “boat people” arrived in Hong Kong in the first three months after the policy was announced--the human impact of it has been more certain.

Moved Into Warehouses

To make room for the illegal migrant detainees, the government moved 9,000 legitimate refugees into two human warehouses in crowded sections of the city, one of them the factory building where Le Tuan Hung and his family spend their days doing nothing but sitting on their overcrowded plank.

What is more, the United Nations has confirmed reports of severe and systematic beatings of the refugees at the new detention centers by government prison guards, who are trained to control criminals, not care for refugees.

In a series of telexes after the most dramatic such incident last July 19--the severe beating of 97 “boat people” after a food riot in one of the centers--the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees concluded that the situation in Hong Kong “is simply so complex and so volatile that the ability of this office to respond adequately and rapidly to protection concerns of (the refugees) is imperative.”

The Hong Kong government is investigating the incident. But it still gives U.N. officials only limited access to the detainees. The U.N. agency considers the detainees to be legitimate refugees, and it has continued to pressure the colonial government to move the 9,000 official refugees from the overcrowded warehouses such as San Yick.

Showered with international criticism, the Hong Kong government has pledged several times in recent months that it will close the high-rise camp. But it must first complete a camp now under construction, and it is not expected to be ready until sometime next year.

The government reaffirmed its intention this month when it acknowledged that San Yick is unfit for habitation. Almost 700 of the 2,800 refugees there have caught chicken pox since an epidemic began in October. Relief officials charged that the lack of sanitation, ventilation, sunlight and exercise space contributed to the quick spread of the disease.

Not all of the Hong Kong government’s efforts to stem the refugee tide this year have been as harsh as the cages of San Yick. A powerful Hong Kong radio station occasionally broadcasts messages in Vietnamese telling listeners across the South China Sea, “Do not come here, you are not welcome.” And volunteer workers at the camps said that, from time to time, refugees’ letters destined for relatives in Vietnam are opened by the Hong Kong government--not to censor them but to slip in leaflets urging the relatives to stay where they are.

Meanwhile, said Carrie Yao, a senior official in Hong Kong’s Security Branch, which is in charge of the refugee camps, “It is important for outsiders to look at things in perspective.”

Space Is Scarce

In a city of 5.5 million people where the population density is 231 times greater than in the United States, Yao and other Hong Kong officials say the most expensive and scarce commodity is space.

Adding to the pressure on Hong Kong officials is a longstanding two-track policy that the island’s Chinese residents increasingly see as a double standard favoring the Vietnamese: Hong Kong has been brutally strict on a similar flood of illegal migrants trying to enter from mainland China.

Noting that, on average, between 10 and 20 Chinese illegal immigrants a day are caught and arrested crossing into Hong Kong’s New Territories in search of a better life, Yao said: “These people are caught, handcuffed, jailed and sent back (to China) within 24 hours.

“We are very tough with our own brothers and sisters across the border, and we have been criticized by our own people as having a double standard.”

Last year, Hong Kong police and British army patrols rounded up and sent back 26,932 Chinese to the mainland, according to government statistics. By the beginning of October, more than 18,000 had been caught and sent back this year.

“Our accommodations are outstripped by the sheer numbers,” Yao said of the Vietnamese. “We do not try to make these places uninhabitable. There is simply nowhere else to put them.”

Nonetheless, aid workers said, they are uninhabitable at best.

“This place is simply not fit for human habitation,” said Adrie Van Gelderen, a Dutch aid worker in the factory building that houses Le Tuan Hung and his family. “The other day, it took me 45 minutes to get out of here because there was no guard to unlock the gate downstairs. Mark my words: If there’s a fire, thousands will die.”

But for refugee advocates such as Albert Fan, Hong Kong’s project director for the London-based aid agency Oxfam, the refugees’ dilemma in Hong Kong is even more basic than physical safety.

Psychological Impact

As the refugees themselves are increasingly trapped in a web of conflicting international interests, groups such as Oxfam are focusing on the psychological implications of long-term institutionalization of the refugees.

“Yes, it’s very true, Hong Kong hasn’t much land to house people, but it’s a fundamental question of how you treat people,” said Fan, who authored three reports sharply critical of Hong Kong’s handling of its refugee crisis. “Are these people human beings or are they animals? I believe it is absolutely inhumane to treat the refugees like this.”

For officials such as Yao, though, the heart of the issue is whether any or all of the 25,500 boat people now packed into Hong Kong’s high-rises and warehouses--and, indeed, those now languishing in Thai border camps--are actually refugees.

Yao and her Security Branch believe that most of the recent arrivals simply do not qualify under international refugee standards and are instead illegal aliens who have broken Hong Kong law simply by landing on its shores.

“The whole profile of people coming into Hong Kong has changed,” she said. Yao points to detailed analyses by Hong Kong statisticians that indicate 70% to 80% of all recent arrivals are from northern Vietnam--people who never associated with America during its decade of involvement there and, in fact, were students or soldiers under the Communist regime in the north.

“These are simply people looking for a better life. And it’s no good giving people theoretical refugee status when the resettlement countries are not taking them.”

Fan and most refugee aid workers see the dilemma as far more complex.

“It is difficult to distinguish between economic and political refugees,” he said. “They themselves cannot make this distinction. They are looking for a better life, plain and simple. Now, how is that different than the waves of immigrants through the past century who made America what it is today? Why are these people any different?”

During several recent tours through the thousands of bunks and billets of the camps of recent arrivals throughout Thailand and Hong Kong, The Times sought to determine just who these new and desperate refugees are.

Many said they have relatives already settled in the United States, and a handful had documents to prove they are former South Vietnamese military officers who were recently released after nearly a decade of captivity in Vietnamese forced-labor and re-education camps--both of which would qualify them almost instantly for U.S. resettlement. But the overwhelming majority said they simply escaped an economically devastated land because Western nations had long since set the precedent of offering them a better life.

Le Van Binh and his wife Pham Thi Van left the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong because they were destitute. The husband spoke vaguely of hating Communists, but he stressed that he risked the lives of his wife and two children for 23 days in a leaky boat without an engine because he could earn only about $10 a month carrying vegetables from Haiphong’s harbor to the local market.

Some Hope of Resettlement

Through a fluke of fate, Binh’s family arrived in Hong Kong on June 14, two days before the new policy took effect. Had he arrived two days later, he would have no hope of resettling abroad. Now, he said, his hopes lie with a brother who lives in Canada.

In a bunk nearby, packed along with Binh into the former army warehouse and World War II prisoner of war camp called Sham Shui Po, Moung Van Nhat had a similar story--but a far older one.

The 27-year-old former street vendor said he came to Hong Kong from northern Vietnam in August, 1983, because “I was looking for a better life.” He had tried escaping his homeland three times by boat. Three times, he said, he was caught and imprisoned. He has no relatives abroad. He has no ties to the U.S. government. And he has been living in Hong Kong refugee camps for five years.

“No, I am not happy here. I came here, I know. But I have been here so long. I am so very tired of living this way. I am tired of the camps, but I am also so tired of Vietnam. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to stay.”

It is this seemingly paradoxical saga of a trapped and absurd existence that is repeated over and over in the so-called first-asylum camps of Southeast Asia.

In Thailand’s eight-year-old Phanat Nikhom camp, where life in utilitarian billets is far better than in the dank and dark warehouses of Hong Kong, long-stayer Nguyen Cao Su tells of an even longer saga than those heard in Hong Kong.

“Waiting, just waiting,” the hulking 30-year-old refugee said when asked to describe his seven years in Thai refugee camps. No Western nation wants him, he said. He served in the Communist army of Vietnam after Saigon fell, a fact he knows works against him. Perhaps out of desperation, Su took a wife in the camp, a 23-year-old woman, now pregnant, whose father lives in Oakland.

Nearby, Tran Van To, 34, although a refugee from the south of Vietnam, also readily concedes his motives for leaving. To, a welder who fled in December, 1984, with his wife and three children, said, “The Red government made me work as a laborer and would not let me do business.”

But To is lucky. His father was a sergeant in the pre-1975 South Vietnamese army, and he could prove it. To has been accepted for migration to Australia.

But it is the languishing, long-staying refugees like Nguyen Cao Su and Moung Van Nhat who have become the focus of concern among refugee officials and aid workers. They see a crisis-within-a-crisis developing inside the Southeast Asian first-asylum refugee camps.

“A mental health crisis is at hand,” declared Andrew Pendleton, the United Nations’ senior camp officer at Site Two, Thailand’s largest first-asylum camp, at a conference on camp conditions held in Bangkok in July.

“Six to 10 persons in each thatched hut. Nothing goes without notice. Idleness predicates rampant gossip. A few years ago, families shared rice. Now smiles become frowns.

“Many arguments between adults start with fights between children. There were seven violent incidents in June, 1987, nearly 100 in June, 1988. . . . One man found his wife with another and tossed a grenade into the hut, killing a 4-year-old boy.

“People don’t sleep well--maybe three, four or five hours--then they wake up in a sweat.”

Also last June, 10 members of one family in Phanat Nikhom attempted mass suicide by poison. None died, but it was just one of several similar incidents reported around the region.

Despair in Hong Kong

If morale is low in Thailand, though, it is approaching utter despair in Hong Kong.

Sitting on his three-tier bunk in the San Yick factory building--six refugees are assigned to eat, sleep and live on the 4-by-6-foot boards stacked three-high floor to ceiling--Le Tuan Hung stared through his thick glasses out the barred windows beside his 10th-floor bunk.

“You know, the biggest problem inside this place is breathing,” the economics graduate said sadly. “We are sleeping 700 to a floor here, everyone jammed together like this, like animals, and the ones inside just cannot find the air to breathe at night.

“Most everyone has skin infections. There is a doctor, but you know, we Vietnamese sometimes are afraid to show our bodies to a stranger.

“And the biggest crime is there is just nothing to do--no exercise, no books, no school, nothing. When we eat we feel full all day.”

Hung paused a moment and stared at his once well-clothed, 4-year-old daughter, now smeared with dirt and the brown water that sits in pools on the floor, playing on the cold concrete.

“But that is not the worst part,” he added, his eyes glazed with resignation. “It is the newly born children, the youngsters who must spend all their early years inside places like this.

“You tell me, how can these children grow up in a world without light?”