ASIA : U.N. Under Fire for Policies on ‘Boat People’

As efforts to repatriate thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” to their homeland reach a critical phase, the U.N. refugee agency in Hong Kong is facing a new wave of criticism.

Many human rights advocates here are increasingly skeptical of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ humanitarianism and methods after its alleged mishandling of a case involving a Vietnamese teen-ager and on account of its rejection of pleas for asylum from 39 Vietnamese adults belonging to a group that opposes their homeland’s Communist regime.

The refugee agency is speeding up repatriation to end the 18-year-old saga of the boat people by clearing detention camps by 1995--a decision that more than 30 countries endorsed in February at a U.N. meeting in Geneva.

“An organization like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has a multifaceted range of activities throughout the world, and many of these activities are ones that we applaud,” said Michael Darwyne, a lawyer in Hong Kong and an outspoken champion of the boat people. “But in relation to the situation in Hong Kong, one has to say that the UNHCR has consistently come across as being committed to the repatriation of the Vietnamese rather than being committed to the identification and protection of the refugees amongst the Vietnamese.”

The top U.N. refugee official in Hong Kong, Jahanshan Assadi, maintains that the camps will be cleaned out--one way or another--in less than two years. “The Vietnamese should know that if they don’t sign up with our voluntary repatriation program, the alternative is to get deported by the Hong Kong government,” Assadi said. “I think we’re going to have some rough times ahead of us.”

The move to accelerate repatriation has sparked widespread protests here and hunger strikes by about 25,600 Vietnamese being held in the British colony.

The Hong Kong office of a refugee advocacy group called Refugee Concern said such protests helped draw attention to the plight of a 16-year-old Vietnamese orphan boy, Ngo Van Ha. The U.N. refugee agency reversed an earlier decision and allowed Ha to join relatives in San Gabriel earlier this month. Public pressure had mounted after the agency first insisted he be sent back to Vietnam, where he had an uncle who could not or would not care for him.

“The UNHCR’s credibility has been reduced even further with this case, if that’s possible, and not a single person in the camps trusts them,” said Ha’s lawyer, Pam Baker.

Assadi said Ha simply had very good links with people “who know how to stir things up.”

“We realize that from a public relations standpoint, no matter what we did, it would be a disaster,” he said.

Two of the 39 anti-Communist adults have now been returned to Vietnam against their will, one bound and gagged, under a Hong Kong government program to deport Vietnamese not granted refugee status.

Refugee lawyers here continue to battle the U.N. agency over the status of the remaining 37 members of the group, who fear persecution in Vietnam.

Many human rights advocates say the agency’s role began to change in 1988, when the Hong Kong government decreed that new Vietnamese arrivals would be considered non-refugees and would not be allowed to resettle unless they could prove that they were fleeing political persecution.

The U.N. agency began last year to put more pressure on refugees, announcing that repatriation grants of $360 per person would be cut to $240 for anyone who did not volunteer to return to Vietnam by Nov. 1, 1993.

Adult education and vocational classes in the camps were canceled, and opportunities for Vietnamese to earn money by helping to administer the camps were cut back.

“I think the problem with the UNHCR is that we bring the Vietnamese the kind of information they don’t want to hear, and obviously they don’t like that,” Assadi said. “They also have the misconception that we are somehow involved in their deportation, when in fact our program is voluntary.”

But rights advocates question whether the agency is doing anything more than cleaning up and clearing out.

“The UNHCR is supposed to serve as a safety net,” Darwyne said. “But they’ve changed from protector of the Vietnamese to betrayer.”