North-South Split Follows ‘Boat People’ to Hong Kong

About 300 “boat people” from southern Vietnam pressed demands Wednesday for transfer to another camp, complaining of threats and attacks by refugees from the Communist heartland of northern Vietnam.

Groups of southerners left the Bowring refugee camp starting Monday and sat and slept outside the San Yick camp, where they asked to be let in.

Most of the Vietnamese at Bowring are northerners. Southerners make up the majority at San Yick, a converted factory that the international community condemned as unfit for human habitation until Hong Kong improved conditions.

The group swelled to about 300 people Wednesday, and some carried all their belongings with them, a Corrections Department spokesman said.

The southerners said northerners over the weekend had beaten a southern man who required hospitalization.

“They claimed they were threatened there,” said the spokesman, who cannot be identified under agency regulations. “There are always disputes between northern and southern Vietnamese in the camp.”

The spokesman said department officials had tried to persuade the southerners to return to Bowring and apply for transfer through normal channels.

Along with conflicts inside the camps, the government of this tiny British colony has had to contend with the increasing resentment of the Vietnamese by Hong Kong people, particularly those who live near the camps.

On Tuesday, more than 200 residents of the Yuen Long community protested government plans to open a detention center there for new arrivals.

The marching protesters blocked a road leading to the Sek Kong military airfield, 12 miles from central Hong Kong, where the government plans to erect of cluster of tents on the runway to house the Vietnamese.

David Ford, deputy to the governor of Hong Kong, said Tuesday that officials plan to open the center by the end of the week.