Countywide : 5,000 Expected to Join in Walk-a-Thon Aimed at Helping Vietnamese Refugees

About 5,000 people are expected to participate in a 10-kilometer walk Saturday to help raise money for Vietnamese boat people, organizers said.

The fourth annual Walk-a-Thon starts at 9 a.m. at Warner Avenue and Euclid Street in Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley.

Organizers said they hope to raise more than $100,000 from the event. The money will be used to hire attorneys, legal assistants and interpreters to help refugees in camps in Southeast Asia avoid repatriation to Vietnam.

“Almost all the camps are scheduled to close by ‘95, and we want the ending to be humane and dignified for our people,” said Van Tran, a spokesman for the event.

Some 45,000 refugees are now living in about a dozen camps, according to figures from Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers, a Westminster-based group specializing in refugee rights. The group is one of more than 20 organizations sponsoring the Walk-a-Thon. Similar events will be held in San Jose and Houston, organizers said.

“We know that the majority of these people will have to go back to Vietnam,” Tran said. “But we want the screening process to be fair. We want the people who deserve to qualify as asylum seekers to get that status.”

Camp refugees go through a screening process to determine whether they left Vietnam for economic or political reasons. Refugees will not be sent back to Vietnam if they can prove that they left Vietnam for political reasons. Otherwise, repatriation is the rule, Tran said.

Tran and other human-rights activists say the screening process as it is now forces repatriation of many Vietnamese who will face hardships for their political stance when they are returned to Vietnam.

Tran said that in the past three years, some 200 people who were supposed to be repatriated have won political asylum status because of LAVAS intervention with the United Nations and camp officials.