OXFAM
樂施會 •
REPATRIATION
Fleeing Vietnam is difficult and dangerous.
Those escaping
know that if they are caught they will be jailed for at least five years. If weapons are found on their boat they may be executed.
They also know that the families they leave behind will be blacklisted and punished loss of the family home is a common fate.
And then there is the voyage, usually undertaken in small boats which are totally unsuitable for such a long journey, kept afloat by constant bailing and frighteningly vulnerable to a storm. Nobody knows how many people have drowned between Vietnam and Hong Kong, but the number must be in thousands.
Yet still they come.
So
Talk to them of repatriation and they recoil in horror. it is important to repeat the clear and categorical assurance we received from the Hong Kong government that no person accepted into Hong Kong as a refugee under the terms of the 1979 Geneva Conference would ever be forcibly repatriated to Vietnam.
It would
Repatriation is a very complex issue, involving the safeguarding of human rights on the one hand and international relations with Vietnam on the other. require a new climate of understanding and cooperation between Vietnam and the West, and an effective and independent monitoring system to ensure that those who were repatriated were not mistreated. Such changes do not happen overnight.
Screening would have to be introduced, with adequate safeguards for those people truly fleeing persecution or death. A clear warning would have to be sounded in Vietnam that the rules of the game had changed, and that people arriving in Hong Kong may be repatriated.
In January 1986 Attorney General Michael Thomas said new arrivals could only be sent back to Vietnam if "the government of Vietnam would accept them, and provided that we could be satisfied that they would not be treated inhumanely on their return. It (the Vietnamese government) has given no indication that it would be prepared to meet either of these provisions."
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