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OXFAM
樂施會
Ian Champion, former educational coordinator for
International Social Service at Chi Ma Wan, said: "I seek to teach, the CSD to control. I hope for the development of the individual character through education; the CSD, as a prison service, seeks only to dehumanise its detainees through locked gates and imposing fences."
The role of CSD should be confined to security
guarding
the perimeter of the centre and monitoring life in the camps to ensure that there are no serious disturbances. Responsibility for centre management should be transferred to welfare agencies, with a brief to stimulate refugee involvement. This is common practice in other countries and may well cost less than the present system. We urge the government to begin discussing this possibility with welfare agencies it should not necessarily restrict its discussions to those agencies already working in the
centres.
The government has said that if conditions in the centres were improved more refugees would come to Hong Kong. There is no evidence to support this view. On the contrary, there is a growing feeling that UNLESS conditions in the centres are improved, it will be Hong Kong that suffers.
People who are confined in a prison and denied education or any meaningful activity for years on end inevitably lose touch with normal life. Mr French told us he was dismayed by what he called the "mental deadness" of the refugees in the closed centres, but that is the clear result of their prolonged incarceration. The longer they stay there the less attractive they become to resettlement countries. The centres offer very little scope for the refugees to develop or to demonstrate their skills and abilities.
Single young men are a particular concern. There are 930 of them in the three main closed centres. They now represent 15 per cent of the total population of these centres, up from 12 per cent in April 1986. A single young man with no family ties overseas knows that his prospects are bleak, even if he is of exemplary character. Some have been in the closed centres for four or five years and have never once been interviewed for resettlement.
As
Mr Champion warned: "Sixteen to seventeen year old boys have grown up over the last five years in an abnormal enclosed environment where traditional Vietnamese values, normal societal values and public opinion have ceased to exist. a result ... these people are almost totally unresettleable. No matter where they go, be it Vietnam, Hong Kong, America or Australia, they will cause trouble."
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