121 Refugees in Hong Kong Fly to Vietnam
A group of 121 Vietnamese returned Thursday to the land they fled, marking the largest voluntary repatriation of refugees from Hong Kong’s teeming camps.
Waving handkerchiefs and clutching bags packed with clothes and radios, they boarded a Boeing 737 at Hong Kong’s airport and took off for Hanoi.
From there, the 46 men, 40 women, 17 boys and 18 girls will be taken to their hometowns and monitored by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Hanoi’s Communist government has said it will not prosecute those returning to the country, one of the poorest in Asia. U.N. officials reiterated Thursday that they would monitor the returning refugees closely.
Until last year, Hong Kong allowed all Vietnamese refugees the right to settle in the British colony if they could not emigrate to another country. But under a tough policy instituted in June, the government ruled out resettlement for new refugees unless they could prove they were escaping political persecution.
Since then, about 38,300 Vietnamese have sailed to Hong Kong and are being housed in camps, detention centers and halfway houses in the crowded colony.
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