Hardship Awaits ‘Boat People’ Forced Back to Vietnam : Refugees: Authorities reward those who return voluntarily, struggle to help others rebuild lives.

Judging by the experience of Le Van Kim, the thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” who face forced repatriation from Hong Kong will encounter no official retribution when they return home, but a life of enduring adversity.

In contrast, when Nguyen Ngoc Son returned voluntarily to Haiphong last month from a camp in Hong Kong, he had to cope with little more, by his own account, than a wife embittered by his infidelity. His adjustment problems have been negligible.

The two men represent the two sides of a looming problem for the Vietnamese authorities: the reintegration into society of the thousands of boat people who have fled abroad only to face being returned as illegal economic emigres. There are 43,000 boat people in Hong Kong alone, and thousands more in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Kim, 37, and seven members of his family were among the 51 Vietnamese who made up the first group of refugees sent back to Vietnam by the Hong Kong authorities last December. The repatriation caused such an outcry that Britain has suspended the practice, at least temporarily.

Kim had suffered an incredible run of bad luck even before he left Vietnam. He lost an arm in a fireworks explosion five years ago, his fishing business was ruined by two years of bad catches and his family arrived in Hong Kong in June, 1988, just four days after Britain began screening out the so-called economic emigres. Shortly after arriving in Hong Kong, his mother died.

Back in Haiphong, Kim, his wife, Le Thi The, and their six children have yet to find a place to live. They have been forced to accept the charity of a man who has two children in the Hong Kong camps.

“The local government has helped us a lot,” Kim said through an interpreter. “Still, I’m very sad.”

Kim’s greatest problem is that his source of income, his fishing boat, was destroyed by Hong Kong authorities after he arrived in the British colony. A new boat would cost about $10,000, far beyond his means.

The family subsists on local government payments of 100,000 Vietnamese dong a month for each family member, the equivalent of about $25 each, or $200 in all. This is a handsome sum by Vietnamese standards, but the assistance, which is underwritten by the British government, will last only a year. What will happen then is not clear.

Kim’s wife said she spent the recent Tet lunar New Year holiday in tears because the family had no home of its own and no prospects of getting one.

“We are really feeling the hardship,” she said.

Kim seems devastated by the recent turn of events but bears no grudge against the British or the Vietnamese governments, which he said had kept a promise not to discriminate against him for leaving. He seems bitter only when talking about his current predicament.

“Many delegations have come here and promised us help, but we haven’t seen them again,” he lamented.

According to Hoang Ngoc Tri, deputy chairman of the Haiphong People’s Council and the head of a committee for receiving refugees returning from Hong Kong, 640 boat people have come to Haiphong since last year, about half of the total of 1,169 who have come back voluntarily and 51 who were forced back.

Tri said there had been two cases in which boat people had been sent to prison after their return to Vietnam, but he insisted that these involved prison escapees who asked to be sent back to jail. It is a crime in Vietnam to flee the country, but there have been no known prosecutions in Haiphong.

Nghiem Xuan Tue, a vice director of the Ministry of Labor, said in an interview that unemployment in 1988 reached 6 million people out of a working population of 32 million. But he maintained that a lot of boat people “are the children of rich families.”

Like Kim, Nguyen Ngoc Son is 37 years old, but when he fled to Hong Kong he left behind his wife and children. He said in an interview that his only reason for leaving was so that he could be with his girlfriend. Indeed, the woman, who has remained in Hong Kong, even paid for his passage out, about $250.

Vietnamese officials appeared anxious to portray the boat people as being more like Son, suggesting that they left the country for frivolous reasons rather than the economic hardships experienced by Kim and his family. When a visitor expressed sympathy for Kim, a Haiphong city official retorted that he would not be in this predicament if he had stayed here.

“I didn’t leave because I wanted a better life,” Son said in an interview in his comfortable central Haiphong home, wearing a dapper corduroy sports jacket.

Son said he volunteered to return to Vietnam even before the Hong Kong authorities considered his application.

“I decided I was doing something very wrong for my family,” he said.

One of the paradoxes of the system is that Son, who returned voluntarily, is paid more than Kim. He gets 120,000 dong a month, a little less than $30, in addition to anything he can earn on his own. The volunteer return program is funded by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

“People who have come back to our city have to realize that they have done wrong,” said Tri, the People’s Council official. “When they come back there is no discrimination against them, whether they volunteer or not.”

He agreed that the main problem for the returning boat people is economic, because most have sold everything they owned to pay for their voyage out.

“They come back empty-handed,” he said.

Although the U.N. subsidy is essential, he said, it falls short of what the city spends to help the refugees. As he described it, the world body pays Vietnam $560 for every voluntary return, and of this the government pays $360 directly to the refugee. He said about 20% receive a living allowance, 4% get help with education, and 40% get help with furnishing their homes.

Tri said there are still distinctions between those who volunteered to come back and those who were forced back. For ideological reasons, the government describes the former as “volunteers” and the deported group as people who “did not protest” their return.