18 Killed as Refugees Fight in Hong Kong : Boat people: 128 are hurt in worst violence since camps were set up. Police blame dispute over hot water.

Fighting among refugees in a detention center for Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong left at least 18 dead and 128 injured Monday night in the worst violence since the camps were set up more than a decade ago, authorities said.

The 18 people who died were in a building set on fire during fighting that broke out between rival gangs during festivities marking arrival of the Lunar New Year, according to police in the British colony. The charred bodies were found after firemen extinguished the blaze.

Police said that a dispute over hot water for a bath touched off the fighting. But the torched building was in a section of the camp reserved for about 800 Vietnamese who had agreed to be repatriated to Vietnam.

Robert van Leeuwen, head of the Hong Kong office of the U.N. refugee commissioner, told the Associated Press that the trouble began when two Vietnamese, one from the north and one from the south, began arguing over the question of returning home. “Apparently it escalated into a major disturbance,” he said, according to the wire service report.

But police spokesman Tony Chan maintained that the violence stemmed from “a dispute over getting hot water for a bath. Then they started fighting. . . . There are longstanding rivalries (in the camp).”

Hot water is available only in some sections of the camp.

Other factors--such as regional rivalries, gang activities and the general tension of life in the camps--may also have played a role in starting the violence, which occurred at Shek Kong Detention Center, home to about 8,900 Vietnamese.

Police told the media in Hong Kong that at the peak of the violence, about 300 camp residents battled each other with homemade spears and axes. The fighting apparently involved rival gangs from the formerly capitalist south and the north, which has imposed Communist rule on the south.

More than 300 riot police using tear gas needed more than four hours to bring the situation back under control. Of the 128 injured men, women and children, five were reported in critical condition and dozens were described as seriously hurt.

The Hong Kong government has launched a program of forced repatriation of those boat people judged to be economic migrants rather than genuine political refugees. One purpose of the forced repatriations is to pressure more of the Vietnamese to return to their homeland voluntarily.

Many Vietnamese in the camps, which now house a total of nearly 60,000 people, still hope to win resettlement in the United States or other Western countries, even though only a very small percentage are likely to win classification as political refugees. The camps hold more than 20,000 people who have already been assigned non-refugee status, while more than 36,000 still await screening.

The Hong Kong government hopes to empty the camps within three years, sending confirmed political refugees to resettlement in the West and requiring all others to return to Vietnam.

These policies create tensions in the camps between those willing to return to Vietnam and others who insist that solidarity in refusing to return will open doors to the West.

“It is very difficult for Vietnamese in detention centers to put themselves forward for repatriation,” Jane Warburton, director of the relief organization Community and Family Services International, told The Times in an interview last year. “They fear that they will break the solidarity.”