Vietnamese to Rally in Protest of Forced Deportation of Refugees

Vietnamese-Americans from Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California will hold a rally Sunday in front of the British Consulate in Los Angeles to protest the forced deportation of Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong to Vietnam, spokesmen in Orange County said Friday.

Fifty-one refugees have been returned to Vietnam, but the deportations have been temporarily halted pending a debate on the issue to be held by the British House of Commons on Tuesday.

“We feel that forced repatriation is no solution because it’s a violation of human rights,” said Ban Binh Bui, an official of the Council for Refugee Rights and a Westminster businessman. “Besides, it just doesn’t work.

“We have learned that repatriated Vietnamese have returned to Hong Kong camps because they couldn’t find jobs in Vietnam.”

He said the Sunday rally, scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., will be an effort to increase public awareness of the critical situation and gain public support against repatriation, which could affect hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese-Americans with relatives and friends in refugee camps.

A handful of student demonstrators from UC Irvine picketed the consulate on Thursday. Many more are expected on Sunday from San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties, according to a spokesman for the Boat People S.O.S. Committee in San Diego, which is coordinating the rally.

John Houlton, a vice consul for information in the British Consulate in Los Angeles, said that UCI students from Project Ngoc (Pearl) presented a letter Thursday urging a halt to the government’s repatriation policy during a peaceful demonstration.

“They presented the letter to us with their comments and we passed it on to the British government as they requested,” he said.

Houlton noted that the consulate, normally closed on weekends, was unaware of the planned rally on Sunday.

The rally, and other public demonstrations planned for this weekend in Vietnamese communities across the nation, are part of an attempt to revive similar refugee sympathies that surfaced in the early 1980s for the boat people, Bui said.

About 56,000 Vietnamese are being held in overcrowded camps in Hong Kong. About 12,200 of those have been declared political refugees who are eligible for resettlement in the West. The remaining 44,000 are considered economic migrants and face deportation.

Hundreds of Vietnamese-Americans in Southern California sent telegrams this week to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the British Parliament, urging the immediate release of the 12,200 refugees who have already gone through the screening process. They also pleaded for creation of post-screening regional detention centers, possibly in the Philippines, and asked that non-Communist countries pressure Vietnam to improve economic and political conditions.

“Closing our minds and closing our eyes does not make the problem go away,” said Lam Vu, 23, a UCI graduate who visited the refugee camps in Hong Kong last summer. “If the (United Nations’) Orderly Departure Program doesn’t work, then it’s our job to make it work and explore alternatives and solutions that would not place the burden on first-asylum countries.”

“We don’t want to see the same refugee issues drag on for another 14 years,” Vu said, referring to the length of time since South Vietnam was taken over by the Communists in April, 1975.

The deportation issue is especially sensitive in Southern California, where an estimated 280,000 Vietnamese live. The concentration of Vietnamese in Orange County--centered in Little Saigon’s booming commercial area in Westminster and Garden Grove--is regarded as the largest outside of Vietnam.

Discontent on the issue of forced repatriation has grown since the British colony of Hong Kong initiated a restrictive screening policy in June, 1988.

Distinctions between economic migrants and political refugees is convenient only for “lawyers and immigration officials,” said Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, who disagrees with the forced-repatriation policy.

“I, as an elected official, view this much more on a human level,” Agran said. “When you see refugee families separated by these policies, you tend to do whatever you can to reunify them.”

In May, Agran accompanied an entourage of Vietnamese-Americans from California and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles) to Vietnam to raise humanitarian concern for family reunification. Agran also recently helped approve $10,000 in city funding to aid refugee family reunification cases in Irvine.

“As a solution, we need to open the pipelines so that these people can resettle in hospitable circumstances, and by that I mean in the United States, Great Britain and Canada,” Agran said. “I’m not persuaded by these fine distinctions. . . . We have scores of Vietnamese families willing to be reunited. Let’s get on with it.”

Bui, who was part of a group of Vietnamese-Americans from Orange County who attended last June’s International Conference on Indochinese Refugees, expressed anger at the British government’s agreement to pay Vietnamese Communist authorities $600 for each refugee as a “resettlement” cost.

“With the 47,000 remaining Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong, this amounts to about $26 million that they are going to give a corrupt government with no strings attached,” Bui said.

The money, he said, could have been spent establishing a regional detention center, possibly in the Philippines. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has only $6 million available, Bui said, adding that estimates to build a detention center are in the $24-million range.