Disease, Despair at Camps : Hong Kong’s Pent-Up Refugee Crisis Erupts

It started last Sunday morning over 85 grams of rice, the daily ration for each of the 5,500 Vietnamese “boat people” already suffering from malnutrition and disease at one of Hong Kong’s refugee detention camps on an island called Tai A Chau.

When it ended Monday afternoon in an assault on the island by police helicopters, gunboats and 350 anti-riot police, the Hong Kong media had dubbed it “24 Hours of Terror.”

Scores of police and refugees had been injured, five South Vietnamese women had been raped by fellow refugees, 50 others had been severely beaten and search teams were scouring the remote camp for corpses.

It was the worst violence yet in Hong Kong’s controversial detention facilities for Vietnamese refugees. News of the weekend riot flashed through the British colony last week, heightening the fears and anger of a local population increasingly intolerant of an unending wave of refugees and deepening the despair of 55,000 Vietnamese stuck in other camps in the colony.

Later in the week, hard-pressed authorities adopted a plan to evacuate Tai A island, at least temporarily, by moving refugees now there to a detention center on another island as the latter’s inmates are transferred to new accommodations, beginning Thursday.

Meanwhile, refugees at another camp rioted for three hours Saturday, arming themselves with rocks and sharpened tent pegs and killing one man before authorities controlled the situation. British army Gurkhas were then sent into the Shek Kong camp to search for hidden weapons--the first direct involvement of British troops in Hong Kong’s troubled camps.

Clearly, what began last Sunday as a food riot over a small bowl of rice at the Tai A camp quickly became a nightmarish omen for one of the world’s most desperate refugee crises.

The violence at Tai A, one of the 14 hopelessly overcrowded Vietnamese refugee camps that Hong Kong now calls detention centers, climaxed a long, hot summer both for the refugees and for an overtaxed government that has run out of places to put them.

Fights Increasingly Common

During this summer’s human tide, which has brought as many as 10,000 refugees a month to an island colony so densely populated that it can barely house its own people, riots and gang fights have been increasingly common in the detention centers.

The violence also has fueled an already intense anti-Vietnamese sentiment here. Posters demanding “Viets Go Home” have appeared outside refugee centers, and last month police had to use tear gas to break up a six-week sit-in by Hong Kong residents protesting construction of a new refugee camp in their neighborhood.

In short, experts predicted last week, the worst is yet to come.

“What we’re facing here is the prospect of a great tragedy,” said Robert van Leeuwen, the head of the U.N. refugee mission in Hong Kong.

Barbed Wire, Inadequate Food

“Already, people are living in conditions of great overcrowding, behind barbed wire, and without adequate services or food. These conditions breed a climate just like a tinderbox that any spark could set off.”

What is more, he added, as popular sentiment toward the refugees hardens among Hong Kong’s 5.5 million largely Chinese residents, and the British Colonial government here continues to pursue plans ultimately to send thousands back to Vietnam involuntarily, the desperation will lead to large-scale death.

“We risk suicides,” Van Leeuwen said, “and some of the refugees have even talked about killing their children before they will take them back. When that starts, it will spread like fire.

“The Vietnamese psyche is such that we have to take that seriously.”

Geography and culture are at the heart of the crisis for Hong Kong, the hardest hit of all the so-called first-asylum refugee destinations in Southeast Asia during the latest wave of boat people.

“The bottom line, if you will, is space and race,” said one Hong Kong official who asked not to be identified by name.

Densely Populated Area

Only 20% of Hong Kong’s 400 square miles of mostly mountainous terrain is habitable, giving it one of the world’s highest population densities.

The housing shortage here is so acute that most Hong Kong residents live cramped in tiny apartments in towering complexes.

When refugees began arriving in record numbers early last year in a largely economic exodus from northern Vietnam, Hong Kong officials had to scramble to find space.

Refugees were stuffed into abandoned warehouses and surplus World War II army barracks, where they lived four to a bunk in a sea of three-tiered metal cots. The United Nations and voluntary refugee agencies complained that Hong Kong was merely warehousing the refugees like so many caged animals.

Faced with growing international criticism, Hong Kong officials began planning new camps, reallocating land earmarked for future universities, hospitals and housing projects. In an effort to improve refugee conditions, Hong Kong has spent more than $100 million this year building new, fully equipped camps.

Stirred Domestic Resentment

But domestic resentment soon followed. More than 98% of Hong Kong’s people are Chinese, who traditionally look down on the Vietnamese. And Hong Kong deports a daily average of 40 Chinese migrants who try to sneak over the border from China in search of a better life.

“We’re way out on a limb as far as our local people are concerned,” said Hong Kong’s Refugee Commissioner Mike Hanson, who is responsible for housing and caring for the Vietnamese.

Despite the opposition, new camps are being constructed. But even those will not solve the problem. No sooner had the government started dealing with an earlier wave of Vietnamese refugees by moving them out of the human cages, than this year’s wave hit, and the crisis grew.

“Looking back now, the human cages and warehouses are starting to look pretty good,” said one European refugee worker.

Faced with 25,000 new Vietnamese refugees this year alone, Hong Kong has begun storing them on rented ferryboats--sometimes for weeks or months before they can be interviewed by immigration officials. Half a runway at an air force base was closed and a refugee tent city hastily built there--so hastily that refugees began escaping by the dozens through a porous security fence, further alienating Hong Kong residents.

No Water on Island

And in July the authorities opened the tent city on Tai A, an uninhabited island with no water, no food and no toilet facilities, located on the fringe of Hong Kong’s territorial waters in the Lantau Channel, where most of the refugees arrive.

A recent report on conditions on Tai A Island, submitted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees a week before last Sunday’s riot, stated that most of the refugees are suffering from malnutrition and that they are at “great risk” of epidemics.

The refugees had not received a single hot meal, subsisting instead on biscuits, canned mackerel and beans, the report stated.

Mitchell Smith, medical director of the French aid agency Doctors Without Borders, visited the island the day before the riot and concluded that the lack of sanitation facilities had caused widespread diarrhea, infections and skin diseases among the refugees.

Cholera Diagnosed

On Wednesday, the health crisis on the island deepened as doctors evacuated a 4-year-old boy and two women who were found to have cholera, which experts said is likely to trigger an epidemic that could kill scores of people.

Psychologically, the damage is equally long-lasting.

“The overcrowding and overall conditions are such that, over time, it will break down all normal family relations,” said the United Nations’ Van Leeuwen of Tai A and the other detention centers.

Adrie van Gelderen, a Dutch relief worker who has spent nearly three years in Hong Kong’s camps and detention centers, added that the psychological toll is greatest among the children, who make up at least half the population.

“You take away the sense of initiative at the earliest age when you force them to lead these institutional lives,” he said. “We in the relief agencies here are simply trying to minimize that damage.

‘No One Understands’

“To me, the basic problem is an unwillingness here to see the problems facing these refugees and try to find out what it is to live in a camp. Everyone here knows the problem these people are creating for Hong Kong, but no one understands the problems the Vietnamese are facing.”

Refugee Commissioner Hanson is among the few Hong Kong officials in a position to see both sides, and he was the first to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.

“They’re terrible, but we were desperate,” he said of the new detention camps such as Tai A.

The government is building more permanent facilities on the island, Quonset hut-like buildings that will have toilets. In response to the recent U.N. report, Hanson ordered hot rice shipped to the island once a day.

It was during the distribution of that rice last Sunday that the riot broke out. A group of refugees broke from the rice line and rushed the soldiers who were distributing it to get an extra bowl, according to the official report. Suddenly, dozens of refugees began stoning the limited police contingent that administers the camp.

Police Fled the Island

Outnumbered and armed only with tear gas, the police fled the island, which was left unguarded overnight until reinforcements could arrive the next day. When they did, the police found about 1,000 of the refugees, all from southern Vietnam, huddled on a floating barge. They said they, too, had had to flee attacking northern Vietnamese, who contend that the southerners get better treatment.

Hanson and other refugee officials agree that regional rivalries exist in all the camps, but that physical conditions at the Tai A camp helped to trigger the riot.

“It is horrible there, no doubt,” Hanson said. “But it’s better than pushing them off into the sea, which is the only alternative.”

Few Hong Kong officials expect anything that drastic. Even after last weekend’s riot brought public pressure for Hong Kong to abandon its policy of first asylum and even for the British army to be given control of the camps, otherwise hard-line legislators, such as Allen Lee, called for caution.

“I don’t want to see people get drowned, which means you cannot touch them,” Lee said.

Mandatory Repatriation

Rather, the Hong Kong government is intensifying its move toward “mandatory repatriation”-- sending home those Vietnamese migrants who do not pass a screening process set up in June of last year when the colony initiated its tough new policy.

Under the policy, which also created the detention camp system, Hong Kong considers all boat people illegal migrants unless they can prove they are legitimate refugees by showing they would be subject to political persecution.

Hong Kong’s screening process is controversial: Refugees may appeal decisions to the United Nations but are not permitted to be present during the appeal process. And, on average, less than 15% of those who have been screened qualify as refugees and are moved into proper camps.

Those who are officially determined to be refugees here and in all other Southeast Asian refugee camps are now guaranteed resettlement in the West, under an agreement reached two months ago at a conference in Geneva.

“The refugee problem is solved,” Hanson said. “What isn’t solved is the non-refugee problem. And that’s our problem.”

Plans to Ship Refugees Home

Despite stiff U.N. opposition, Hong Kong plans to eventually ship those refugees who fail the screening test--expected to total tens of thousands--back to Vietnam, once the Vietnamese government signs official guarantees that returnees will not be persecuted.

But Van Leeuwen and other international refugee workers insist that the only humane solution is “voluntary repatriation,” combined with an international effort to improve the conditions in Vietnam that force so many thousands to leave.

There have been two repatriation flights from Hong Kong this year, including 124 refugees who voluntarily went home two weeks ago. Van Leeuwen said that since the process began, his office has received 800 applications from refugees who would rather go home than endure life in the Hong Kong camps.

“This is the only real alternative as far as we’re concerned,” he said. “But I agree it’s only a beginning.”

To the beleaguered Hong Kong government, though, it is more of a joke.

‘It’s Not Going to Work’

“We’ve all agreed to give voluntary repatriation a try,” Hanson said. “But it’s not going to work. On the same day those 124 refugees went home, we had 440 others arrive.

“These people don’t want to go home, and they’re not going to leave until every last bit of hope is gone.”

Indeed, one of the victims in last Sunday’s violence at the Tai A camp, speaking on condition she not be identified by name, said that, despite the disease, the hunger and even the threat of rape, she will not return to Vietnam.

“If it comes to it,” she said, “I will tie a rope to a tree and end my life here.”