INTRODUCTION
For the past 18 months the focus of Oxfam's work has been in Africa, where drought and famine have caused suffering on a huge and tragic scale. This report, on how Hong Kong cares for Vietnamese refugees, may therefore come as a surprise. Nobody who has seen the desperate suffering in the feeding centres and refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan would dream of comparing those places to the refugee camps in Hong Kong.
Yet Oxfam is fundamentally about helping people to help themselves, helping them not just to have more but to be more. We are concerned that in Hong Kong more than 4,000 men, women and children live in closed camps, many of them with no prospect of leaving in the near future. We felt that we should look at the refugees' situation and see whether Oxfam, either in Hong Kong or through its head office in Britain, could do anything to help.
This report has been prepared by a working group of ten people (see Appendix A), none of whom claims to be an expert in the care of refugees. We are ten concerned Hong Kong people who have tried to take a serious and unbiased look at the closed camp policy and at Hong Kong's treatment of refugees in general. We have tried at all times to see the refugee issue in the context of everyday realities in Hong Kong.
Although we set out to make a study for Oxfam, we hope that our report will be more widely read. We have been able to visit all of Hong Kong's refugee centres, to talk to refugees and to many of the people involved in caring for them. Few people have the time, access or interest to examine the issue at first hand, and so we hope that this report will be a useful summary. We also hope that the report will be considered by the Hong Kong government, which has the difficult and thankless responsibility for caring for the refugees.
Many people have helped us in this study, and we thank them for their time and patience.
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