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11 Refuge 1 (1991-1992)

handle is hein.journals/rfgcjr11 and id is 1 raw text is: CANADA'S PERIODICAL UN Kti-UUtt Volume 11, Number 1 October 1991 Indochinese Refugees Sponsorship and Repatriation Repatriation A Solution to the Vietnamese Boat People Problem in Hong Kong? By Lawrence Lam Introduction While memories of the Boat People of Indochina have dimmed, the exo- dus of refugees in Southeast Asia continues. While countries such as Canada, the U.S. and Australia select fewer refugees for resettlement, some 107,571 asylum seekers languish in camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Indone- sia and Hong Kong. Vietnamese offi- cials admit that a severe economic slump in Vietnam and deteriorating living standards are encouraging more people to try their luck overseas, de- spite the dim prospect of being re- settled. A total of 12,646 Vietnamese asylum seekers arrived in Hong Kong during the first six months of 1991. As of June 1991, there were 54,847 asy- lum seekers in eleven detention centres in Hong Kong, in addition to some 6,080 recognized refugees whose re- settlement has been assured under the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action. Responding to the declining num- ber of refugees accepted by resettle- ment countries and the apparent fail- ure of humane deterrence measures, Hong Kong considers all arrivals since June 1988 illegal migrants unless they can prove their refugee status according to the 1951 U.N. Conven- tion. Overcrowded and squalid living conditions, compulsory screening and increasing camp violence, would sug- gest that the coordinated UNHCR, U.K. and Hong Kong effort to encour- age voluntarily repatriation offers a viable solution to the Boat People problem. Not so. Repatriation numbers are small despite efforts made by repre- sentatives from the main resettlement countries assisting the UNHCR in counselling the Vietnamese Boat People to accept repatriation, an aid package of $150 million from the Euro- pean Commission to assist with repa- triation to Vietnam, the recent cam- paign launched by the internationally renowned advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi to persuade them that the life they fled under the Communist regime in Vietnam is preferable to their existence in the detention centres. Less than 10,000 asylum seekers have been repatriated since 1988 -includ- ing fifty-one who were forcibly re- turned in December1989, and a large number of those who were repatri- ated under the 1990 agreement be- tween the Vietnamese Government, the British Government and the UNHCR allowing repatriation of non-volunteers who are not opposed to repatriation. Repatriation, volun- tary or otherwise, does not seem to have had the expected result. Almost everyone has a theory on why the Vietnamese Boat People do not volunteer to return, but no one © Lawrence Lam, 1991. This open-access work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits use, reproduction and distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) are credited and the original publication in Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees is cited. 00 0000\

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