No Hong Kong Haven for Vietnam’s Boat People : Refugees: Despite angry international reaction, Hong Kong officials plan to continue shipping Viet refugees back to Vietnam.

The pathetic sounds of women and children wailing and crying, being led out of a Vietnamese detention center by police in riot gear, greeted Hong Kong residents on morning newscasts less than two weeks ago.

Earlier that morning, 51 terrified inmates from the Phoenix House detention center were bundled into caged trucks, driven under heavy guard to the airport and placed on a flight to Hanoi. More than half were women and children.

Hong Kong decision-makers, after bickering and soul-searching, had taken the first and most difficult step in clearing the colony’s prison-like camps of 44,000 “boat people,” and it had been carried out without a hitch.

While much of the world condemned the forced expulsion of refugees--in Washington, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater called the act “unacceptable”--the hard-nosed approach was applauded in the seething streets of Hong Kong, where people are busily preparing for Christmas and Chinese New Year. A recent poll in downtown Hong Kong showed that 90% support forcible repatriation.

For the Vietnamese roused from their beds at 3 a.m. on Dec. 12, this wasn’t the way a treacherous journey across the South China Sea was supposed to have ended.

Like most of the other 50,000 asylum-seekers languishing in Hong Kong’s detention centers, the next stop was expected to be Canada, the United States or one of the other major resettlement countries. Many had sold all their belongings in Vietnam to finance the trip to Hong Kong.

Despite the miserable conditions of the detention centers, inmates who have spent several months sleeping on wooden boards in a warehouse-like hut with hundreds of other boat people say they would rather live in the camps indefinitely than return to Vietnam. Indeed, one makeshift poster seen from a window at Phoenix House read: “We would rather die than return to Vietnam.”

The repatriation was timed to deter further arrivals when the current monsoon season ends in March. Only 600 boat people went home voluntarily last year; 30,000 have sought refuge in Hong Kong this year. The 405-square-mile colony is home to almost half of the 90,000 boat people in Southeast Asia.

Pirate attacks, austere conditions in the camps and the threat of being sent back has failed to stem the human tide of people into Hong Kong harbor.

Hong Kong’s appointed legislators are clearly suffering a bad case of compassion fatigue. Overwhelmed by the swelling ranks of boat people, members of the policy-making Legislative Council said they are no longer willing to approve more funds for the construction of new camps. Some have even suggested that Hong Kong abandon its asylum policy. What is clear is that 14 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Hong Kong is beginning to close the gates to Vietnamese refugees.

After heated debate in the British House of Commons last week on repatriation, further expulsions are expected to continue until the camps are cleared. No amount of shouting or crying--from the Vietnamese or foreign critics--is expected to halt the process. For one thing, the Chinese, who resume sovereignty over the colony in 1997, have made clear that they want every Vietnamese out of Hong Kong by then.

As part of preparations to move larger numbers, Hong Kong officials have been in London shopping for huge ferries that can be refitted as giant floating prisons.

Critics say that by sending people back unwillingly, British and Hong Kong officials unilaterally abandoned a pledge--made at a U.N.-sponsored conference on Indochinese refugees in Geneva in June--to give voluntary repatriation more time to work.

There are also grave doubts about Hong Kong’s system of determining whether the boat people are genuine refugees or merely migrants seeking a higher standard of living. The colony’s immigration officers--using a controversial procedure introduced in June, 1988-- tend to screen out applicants without a thorough investigation into their motives for leaving Vietnam.

“The screening of asylum-seekers is so inadequate that there is a danger that individuals at risk of human-rights violations could be sent back to Vietnam,” said an Amnesty International study team.

For ethnic Chinese, the majority population here, forcibly repatriating people back to a communist regime is no worse than the treatment given to the thousands of Chinese nationals--many of whom have relatives in the colony--who sneak into Hong Kong each year. Up to 90 illegal immigrants from China are unceremoniously sent back each day. Even illegal immigrant mothers caught visiting their husbands and children living in colony are immediately repatriated.

What worries refugee officials is that other Southeast Asian countries will follow Hong Kong’s lead and begin sending boat people back to Vietnam--or worse, turning boatloads of Vietnamese back to sea. In recent months, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan have forcibly towed boat people from their shores, exposing them to the danger of pirate attacks and drowning.

The decision to repatriate such a small group was clearly a trial balloon designed to test international reaction and ultimately the willingness of the Vietnam government to honor its promise of not punishing returnees. As part of a secret agreement with Vietnam, Britain says it has secured rights to monitor the treatment of those sent back.

Although the government of Vietnam has assured Britain it will not punish anyone, Vietnamese law stipulates that a person who leaves the country without permission commits a criminal offense. Quyen Vuong, 24, who lived in Orange County for a time after she fled Vietnam in 1981 with her family, has spent long hours helping boat people amid the corrugated tin and barbed wire of Hong Kong’s camps. Now a student in Hong Kong, she says it is unreasonable to assume that the returnees will not be subjected to harsh treatment back home. “The local authorities can make their life unbearable. The stigma for those who left will stay with them forever.”