Vietnamese Flee Camps for Freedom

As dawn broke, gray and rainy, police continued an intensive search today through Hong Kong’s high-rise suburbs for as many as 100 Vietnamese still missing after nearly 200 broke out of a detention center amid riots and fire on Friday.

Most of those who escaped spilled through holes cut in a barbed-wire fence and headed for the jungle-covered hills nearby or the anonymous bustle of the city center.

But one woman, with a small daughter born in detention, saw a chance to evade forcible repatriation in a boat on the beach. However, just as an overcrowded boat from Vietnam had landed her in the unfriendly sanctuary of Hong Kong several years before, the fishing craft they found also failed to fulfill its promise of freedom.

The owner turned the mother and daughter over to the police, and next week they will return to their country by plane, against their will.

The mother and daughter are two of thousands of Vietnamese who have languished in Hong Kong detention centers since their rickety boats washed up on the territory’s shores in the decades after the Vietnam War ended. Some have spent as many as eight years in the camps, waiting for judgments on claims that their involvement in the war, their religion or their ethnicity qualifies them for political asylum.

Now, hope for resettlement in a third country is gone. After nearly a decade of screening the asylum-seekers, the United Nations has declared that those left in the camps are economic migrants, not political refugees, and they must go home.

Many camps across Southeast Asia--bleak, prison-like places that offer no jobs, no schools--are scheduled to close June 30. Hong Kong’s Whitehead detention center is typical: a collection of steel army barracks that house 8,600 people, surrounded by walls and fences topped with barbed wire. Hong Kong, whose population of migrants is the largest in the region at about 18,000, must clear its camps before China resumes rule of the territory on June 30 next year.

After the escape Friday, Beijing blamed the Hong Kong government for “creating a burden” on the territory by accepting the migrants in the first place.

As conflicts elsewhere produce boatloads of refugees in Liberia and overcrowded camps in Rwanda--and as Vietnam becomes richer and more open--even international sympathy and aid for the Vietnamese have drained away. But the migrants’ fear of persecution and the desire for a better life have not.

The Correctional Services Department, a branch of Hong Kong’s prison system, which runs the detention centers, had heard whispers of a planned “mass breakout,” a spokesman said, and had scheduled extra security for Friday morning, when they were to announce the names of the next batch of those to be deported. The scale and violence of the predawn escape caught camp officials off-guard, however, and by the time police reinforcements arrived, the camp was in chaos.

“The entrance by the main gate was foot-deep in rocks and stones [that protesters had thrown], and the whole place was on fire,” said Jim Gray, an inspector with the police tactical unit. Several hundred Vietnamese swarmed the police vehicles as they came through the gate and engaged guards in hand-to-hand combat with homemade weapons. “They’ve fought in wars, remember,” Gray said. “They knew what they were doing.”

By the end of the day, police had launched more than 1,000 tear-gas grenades, brought in helicopters to dump buckets of water on 17 blazing buildings, freed 15 hostages and captured 61 Vietnamese.

The escape was a long time in planning, said Police Supt. Charles Mitchell, who examined the singed remnants of records, the neatly cut holes in the perimeter fences, and the crude knives and spears patiently forged from water pipes and metal scraps. Some people had crafted makeshift gas masks from pillowcases and plastic water bottles.

The residents of four sections of the Whitehead detention center--nearly 5,000 people--on Thursday afternoon had held a coordinated demonstration against forced repatriation, marching and chanting slogans against the Hong Kong and Vietnamese governments. More than 1,000 demonstrators were scheduled to be moved to another holding camp today before being flown to Vietnam, and though the camp officials had not announced the move yet, the camp rumor mill had.

“The obvious troublemakers had thought a lot about what they were going to do,” Mitchell said Friday morning, after spending seven hours inside the fences trying to calm the remaining rioters. “They destroyed their records, undoubtedly thinking it would slow down the repatriation process. Then they left over the hill through incredibly thick, black smoke” from burning cars and buildings.

Officials from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which helped establish the centers, have claimed that the some in the camps are “hard-core criminals” who fled Vietnam after committing crimes there and face trials when they go back. Police and camp workers say that gangs of young, single males dominate the camps and intimidate others.

“They’re the ones who instigated the rest of the camp to resist going back,” said Leonel Rodrigues, a government spokesman.

There have been two other large-scale escapes from detention centers in the past year, and there was a dramatic 17-hour standoff a year ago, when police used tear gas and assault forces to remove protesting residents from the roofs of their dormitories.

Many in the detention centers are like the woman and her daughter--afraid, desperate and unwelcome in Hong Kong.

“Most are quite ordinary people, with ordinary families, who have been detained in Hong Kong as long as eight years,” said Pam Baker, a lawyer for the advocacy group Refugee Concern. “They have learned that it doesn’t do you any good to go quietly. They probably figured they didn’t have much left to lose.”