PUSHING OUT THE BOATS

Michael Trend wonders if

Britain can really repatriate boat people forcibly

BARRING what would have to be the extraordinary accident that might yet carry him into Downing Street, Douglas Hurd has now reached the climax of his career; he has returned to the place where he originally began as a high-flying civil ser- vant 37 years ago — as the boss. He will be at home here; but the big question will be (and it is another matter that will have worried Mrs Thatcher) whether the politic- al abilities that he has developed over the past years to be his own man and to make his own decisions will overcome his natural tendency, as Foreign Office Man, to show a proper reluctance to rock the boat.

And one of the most pressing matters that he has inherited relates, most particu- larly, to the matter of rocking boats those that have landed 40,000 now un- wanted Vietnamese in Hong Kong. Mr Hurd's immediate predecessor, Mr John Major, had made a bad start with this problem area of government policy when he announced — only last week, although it seems to be an age ago — that the Government is prepared to send the re- fugees 'home' against their will.

Everything that is wrong about our present policy over the Vietnamese boat people was caught in one of the phrases that Mr Major used on that occasion 'involuntary repatriation'. What he meant,

of course, was compulsory, or forced, repatriation. This has been the policy of the British Government for some time. In July of this year the authorities in Hong Kong tried to present the world with a fait accompli by flying a first consignment of refugees back to Vietnam. The aeroplane was said to be ready on the runway (at six o'clock in the morning) but the business was called off at the last moment, partly as a result, it is thought, of pressure exerted from the United States.

Since then we have had the Geneva conference at which Britain argued its case for a reversal of the policy of the 1979 conference (in the same city) that saw the fleeing Vietnamese as political refugees. Now we have recategorised them as illegal immigrants. Many nations — but not the Americans — were sympathetically aware of the complex and seemingly otherwise intractable problems that the thousands of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong pose for the British Government. But this was not the clever victory for British diplomacy that it might appear because it left quite unaddressed the greatest problem of all how this policy may be carried into action.

The implementation of such a policy would mean using the army. The Hong Kong police have a `conscience clause' which says they may refuse to hurt people. Moreover, it is clear that the refugees will not go quietly. These desperate people, whose care has been left in the hands of the Department of Correctional Services (ie, the prison service), will, like prisoners the world over, put up a struggle when they have to.

How far will the Hong Kong authorities be prepared to go? Will they force Viet- namese men, women and children into straitjackets and tie them to the seats? How else will they do it? It is quite impossible to try to do this sort of thing in secret. The first television pictures of troops bundling people into aeroplanes will be the worst sort of publicity for this country. And sooner or later there will surely be deaths, through the use of force or by suicide. The reckoning that Western television audiences are still 'suffering' from 'compassion fatigue' cannot be taken for granted. Television companies from all over the world have been to see the camps where the Vietnamese are kept in Hong Kong, knowing that a good 'story' could break out there at any moment.

I have heard some British policy-makers argue that there is nothing new about repatriation by force: we do it here in Britain as a matter of course; the Amer- icans do it all the time on their southern border; and the Hong Kong authorities deport most of the 20,000 or so Chinese who try to cross into the colony each year. It is argued that the Vietnamese in Hong Kong can expect no different treatment. But this is surely a great over-simplification of the particular problem that the Govern- ment is faced with in the boat people. It is a completely different situation with very different historical roots; the British re- sponse, too, has been different from usual and the muddle that our policy towards the boat people has become reflects this.

At first the boat people were welcomed as legitimate refugees from a tyrannical regime; the appearance of those who had survived often quite appalling journeys was seen in some way as a justification of the war that the United States had waged in Vietnam on behalf of the 'free world'. As William Shawcross wrote in The Spectator this June, 'The boat people seemed to help prove that although America had lost the Vietnam war, it had been right about its human consequences.' The authorities in Hong Kong behaved in a way that did them great credit, taking in these poor people while others were pushing their sinking boats back out to sea.

Then, by stages and degrees, the re- fugees found their position in Hong Kong changed. In June 1988 their right to auto- matic refugee status was replaced with a policy of viewing new arrivals as merely asylum seekers who would need to prove that their cases fell within a strict inter- pretation of Article 14(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ea person who, owing to a well founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of origin and unable or, owing to such fears, unwilling to return to it'). There is now, therefore, the extraordinary position in Hong Kong whereby the pre- June 1988 Vietnamese are kept in refugee centres from which they will not be de- ported back to Vietnam and which they can leave during the day to work; the more recent arrivals, however, are in detention centres which, as most of us will have seen on television, have taken on many of the characteristic signs of concentration camps. These people face forced deporta- tion in the very near future. This cannot help but look terribly unfair.

Another muddle was made of the attempt by the authorities to be 'legalistic' about the boat people. The 'processing' procedures for the refugees have come under sharp criticism. All new arrivals have to fill in a form with what is called their tio-data' and are interviewed. An immigration official then makes a recom- mendation to a higher officer who decides the case; if this goes against the applicant there is no right of appeal in a proper court.

This again seems very unfair to a con- temporary Western sense of justice; and those who have gone to Hong Kong to see it work for themselves say that it works in an arbitrary way. Mr Robert Chambers, the secretary general of the British section of the International Society for Human Rights, who was in the colony last month preparing a report on the boat people, told me that many of those interviewed do not understand what is happening to them and think they are creating a good impression by suggesting at their interview that they are hard workers, keen to get on. They believe that they are presenting themselves as real Western go-getters likely to be of service to the economies of the world; to the immigration authorities, however, this is all the 'proof they need that their motives are those of 'economic refugees' and they can thus be sent back. The fact that these people prefer to live in barbaric conditions (in the summer at one time on one island, Tai Ah Chau, the detainees were given only one litre of water each a day) rather than go back to Vietnam is not considered to be of any importance at all. Moreover, the policy of trying to make life as tough as possible for the refugees in the hope that others will be deterred from setting out has proved to be a failure.

0 ther difficult questions have been raised over the sincerity of the classifica- tion exercise. Much was made of the early judgments by Hong Kong officials that only ten per cent of those arriving in Hong Kong were 'genuine' refugees — this even before the individuals were questioned. How surprising it seemed when this figure was later confirmed by the immigration authorities. In fact even this figure is doubtful. Of the ten per cent who have been given refugee status in recent months the great majority, according to Mr Cham- bers's report, have been given it on the grounds that they have relatives abroad; only about one to two per cent have been allowed refugee status under a strict inter- pretation of UDHR Article 14(1). The Government might argue that in many cases there is not sufficient documentary or corroborative proof that any particular person would be in danger by being sent

back to Vietnam. But that argument .can easily be turned against itself: how are the refugees supposed to bring the necessary `proof with them? Where is the proof that these people are not in danger? Where is the proof that they will not be hurt when they get home?

At the moment the British Foreign Office are negotiating what they hope will be satisfactory 'terms' with the Vietnamese by passing over a cash 'bounty' with every boat person sent back. In proposing this, however, they are offering a huge hostage to fortune, for it is a form of open-ended blackmail. If the programme does get under way, what will stop the Vietnamese authorities, some of whom have been accused of taking bribes to let the boat people out of the country in the first place, upping the stakes? Will we be in any position to haggle in public over the 'price' of these lives? It should rather be Western countries who use the pressure here: grants or loans to be made at a later stage could be made conditional on basic reforms and agreements to allow proper supervision of any refugees who do return.

In the shorter term, we would surely do better by trying to put more pressure on various countries around the world to accept more of the boat people for resettle- ment — especially the Americans, but also the French and the Australians, who have had close ties with Vietnam. The numbers involved are, compared to other cases, not great; there are already one million Viet- namese in the United States. Our present policy of trying to force as many of the boat people as possible into the 'economic refugee' category has done a great disser- vice to us here. Other countries hide behind the technicalities that we have set up and feel no need to come to the help of the fugitive Vietnamese. This policy has also allowed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to get itself out of the front line. (UNHCR is, in any case, in a hopeless muddle itself. It has run up a huge deficit — around $60 million which includes a debt of many millions of pounds to Hong Kong for the services it has provided there. It is entitled to attend all the interviews of refugees but only has enough manpower to sit in on about a quarter of them. Last week the High Commissioner himself, Jean-Pierre Hocke, resigned over an inquiry into travel funds.) Present British policy, then, compounds an already very difficult problem. The desire to go it alone and achieve a 'simple' solution will only heap more coals upon our heads; one is strongly reminded of Denis Healey's wise advice that the first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. This is what, in the end, Mr Hurd faced up to in the case of the Guildford Four when he was at the Home Office. He needs to bring a similar sense of political courage and a fresh imagination to finding a better way of handling the posi- tion of the Vietnamese boat people now.