STRANGE SILENCE IN VIETNAM
Christopher Lockwood witnesses
the prudent reticence of the boat people on their return
Hong Kong IN early December photographers, lenses bristling like ordnance, could zoom right into Phoenix House, an exclusive little detention centre conveniently located for Hong Kong's international airport. Fifty- one Vietnamese boat people, hand-picked for their docility with not an unattached or fractious male among them, were isolated there, waiting out the last days of their failed attempt to escape. They were hoping, perhaps, for a last- minute reprieve and the promise of the resettlement in California or Canada which had lured them to Hong Kong in the first Place. More than a million boat people have left Vietnam since 1975, and many of those who prospered abroad have lately been returning to visit and console, splashing their money around and inducing the butler at one Western embassy in Hanoi to head for Hong Kong on the next available boat.
Videos smuggled in from Thailand and Projected on bed-sheets show affluence to crowds of villagers at 2p a time: every Vietnamese knows how his country is missing out on the prosperity (and liberty) which have sprung up elsewhere in south- east Asia. At Phoenix House, someone hung a banner outside the window for at gaping lenses: 'We would rather die here than go back to Vietnam.' The strange thing is that none of the 51, rift back in Vietnam after offering no resistance to their loutish deportation in the middle of the night of 12 December, remember anything about such a protest. say, in fact, that they are happy to be back home in time for Tet, the Vietnamese 'until' New Year. As for being forced back, said a Mrs Nguyen Ti Banh, no, she had aceepted a paper informing her of her !allure to win the coveted determination of rvefugee status, and that was equivalent to volunteering to go home, wasn't it? As for wanting to go to America, the old enemy, tA° one (and this goes for the volunteers the' would admit to have planned to go l'euere, certainly not there. Their reasons for e aving Vietnam in the first place were qually mundane: the fishing had not been good last year, and life was difficult.
Other boat people might have had more damaging tales to tell, but there were no non-pecuniary complaints from any of the 30—odd among them whom the regional authorities in Haiphong and Quang Ninh province allowed Lord Ennals and Timothy Raison to see last week. Journal- ists who tried to do better, before or after the mission arrived to find its facts, were similarly unsuccessful. The missing boat people were out fishing, we learned, or in the very remote and inaccessible part of the province, or visiting relatives.
One inevitably has doubts. Talking to returned boat people is not easy, as Lord Ennals and Mr Raison found. The frank heart-to-heart chat, the discussion of one's hopes and fears, is not a normal compo- nent of such exchanges. Officials from the local government tend to hover, if they do not simply insist on sitting in and, indeed, taking notes. Interpreters tend to be cir- cumspect for their own reasons. One of my government-provided 'guides' simply re- fused to allow me to talk to anyone whom the Quang Ninh authorities had not given me permission to visit. But the main difficulty is the prudent reticence of Vietnamese people them- selves, with or without the presence of the government. One boat person I visited without prior warning worried that plain- clothes police might have observed my 'Looks like they'll have to shoot Mrs Thatcher.' clandestine arrival: true or false, it is impossible to tell, but the point is that people live in such fear. A friend working for the government thought it necessary `just to be safe' to inform the police that she was inviting me to dine with her family. Neither would wish me to name them as having said such things.
The West is rightly repelled by the idea of sending anyone back to communism, but it is also a simple fact that no one wants the boat people any more. Britain has, in the last six months, accepted fewer than 200 boat people, despite the promise of Sir Geoffrey Howe last July that 3,000 would be taken in the next three years.
Voluntary repatriation is usually pre- sented as the ideal compromise: send people back if you must, but be sure that they want to go. Vietnam has only agreed to take people who do not struggle too embarrassingly, and is clearly having cold feet about the whole procedure. Several more batches of 'non-volunteers', as the British Embassy in Hanoi disarmingly calls them, should have been returned by now, but the Vietnamese have not signed the necessary documents.
Voluntary repatriation, however, is hopelessly optimistic. In the last ten months, 1,100 people have returned volun- tarily, 1,300 more are still waiting to be processed, while at least 40,000 have re- fused to volunteer and are in many cases demonstrating against being sent back. A distinctly uneasy Douglas Hurd was greeted at Hei Ling Chau detention centre on Tuesday by a 100 per cent turnout of the 3,000 adult inmates, all wearing neat white headbands proclaiming their refusal to return. Voluntary repatriation is also sinis- ter, since it relies on making conditions so awful in the camps that people will volun- teer just to get out of them.
Sooner or later, then, unless the West changes its mind, a full-scale programme of mandatory repatriation will become inevit- able. So it must be the right programme. In particular, that means that the govern- ment's screening system, which attempts to sort the refugees from the migrants, will have to be radically improved. On Mon- day, it was condemned by Amnesty Inter- national.
The Hong Kong government justified itself by saying that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) oversees the process; the UNHCR then said it was not competent to do so, and said the system needed improvements. But the main thing that is needed is proper, full- time monitoring, with far more than the limited resources of the UNHCR and the British Embassy, which will be swamped as the numbers grow. That ought to be a small enough price to pay as an insurance against something which no Western coun- try has dared to do since the second war.
Christopher Lockwood is Hong Kong cor- respondent of the Daily Telegraph
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