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BRITISH REFUGEE COUNCIL
THE ROAD TO REPATRIATION
Forced repatriation is as close as you can get to an obscenity in the refugee vocabulary. They are words you are better off never using - best of all, you have never heard of it.
R
efugees have, of course, been refouled and repatriated often
enough. But in the past governments denied it had happed or issued embarrassed apologies.
But the fast-deteriorating situation of Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong has concentrated minds. The U-turn in official attitudes has compelled agencies to confront the issue. Since last month's UN Conference on Indo-Chinese Refugees, repatriation is out in the open.
Great care is needed to steer clear of the many pitfalls awaiting anybody who enters this discussion. Above all, we must insist that every asylum-seeker has a right to apply for asylum from persecution; every refugee has the right to have their application fully and fairly considered; and in the case of Vietnam, there is evidence that many claims can be justified even under the strictest criteria.
What has forced the change in thinking has been the collapse of the twin pillars supporting policy towards Vietnamese refugees since 1979. No longer are neighbouring countries willing to offer first asylum to every Vietnamese who manages to get out of the country - and survive the China Sea pirates. And no longer is the industrialised West prepared to provide resettlement opportunities for large numbers of refugees.
The Vietnamese refugees were always a special case. There have from the first been the desperate images of the boat-people. and the immense dangers they were prepared to take. But there was another reason for special treatment. The US has been
unremittingly hostile to Vietnam, and has orchestrated throughout the West the idea that anyone who wanted to leave that 'communist hell' should be welcomed by the 'free world'. Over a million Vietnamese were recognised as refugees and resettled. Because the economic disaster was supposed to be a part of the communist nightmare, economic hardship was as good as the same as political persecution. The distinction was unimportant in a way that it was not, for instance, in the Horn of Africa.
This is where confusion has arisen. While there is a very good case for considering as refugees people who are suffering hardship as a consequence of war and instability, it is not the basis of international convention and law. A look at the history of international law relating to refugees helps here.
The 1951 UN convention was developed in response to the crises and displaced people of Europe during and after World War II. It offered protection only to Europeans, on the basis of events occurring before 1st January 1951. (The 1967 Protocol extended protection to non-Europeans and lifted the time condition.) But much more important for the future was another criterion: the Convention required the individual to establish a "well-founded fear of persecution".
Two main factors enabled the system to work, even when in 1956 17,000 Hungarians needed to be accommodated without individual assessment. First, it fitted in with the ideological position of the US and its allies both redeeming the past failure to protect victims of Nazism, and drawing
Apprehensions of the future grow for refugees in Hong Kong camps.
attention to human rights abuse by communist regimes. Second, the war had caused serious depopulation, and there was an immense demand for labour in the US, and by the European economic recovery.
A major re-evaluation came at the end of the Sixties. Refugees were increasingly originating in the Third World, and it was there that the concept of the refugee was radically updated. Departing from the requirement to prove persecution of the individual, the Organisation of African Unity Convention on Refugee Problems, 1969, and the Organisation of American States' 1984 Cartagena Declaration included in the definition of the refugee "every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order" and "those whose lives, security or liberty have been threatened by generalised violence, foreign aggression, internal conflict, mass violations of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order."
These declarations much more clearly reflect the realities of current world crises. They define, for instance, the Afghan refugee in Peshawar, and the Eritrian refugee in Somalia, far better than the UN convention does. Dead centre of this framework sits the starving Vietnamese fisherman's family whose economy has been devastated by the Vietnam war and the years of economic blockade since.
But these broader definitions have never gained wider international acceptance, neither in Asia where a large proportion of the world's refugees originate, nor in the West- which is busy erecting barriers to the world's refugees.
The precedent for the 1970s settlement programmes of Vietnamese refugees is the recognition received by the Eastern Europeans of the 1940s and 1950s: an early example of the West's presumption in favour of people fleeing from communism. But dependence on the geopolitical extigencies of a superpower has proved fragile in the case of the Vietnamese. With the thaw in US-Soviet relations, resettlement countries have abandoned their commitment, and the burden on countries of first asylum has become unmanageable. The last knee-jerk reaction of the cold war mentality has been seen in the US's refusal to contemplate either repatriation (which it practises every day with Salvadoreans) or aid to Vietnam.
Instead of a modernisation of UN refugee law, incorporating the advances made by the OAU/OAS, the UN community is falling back on the principle of individual persecution. Screening, once that path has been taken, is inescapable. With it, logically, goes repatriation of some kind: unless return is accepted as an outcome of screening, individual refugee status has no meaning.
Repatriation looks as if it will, at least, bring an acknowledgement by the West of Vietnam's desperate need for aid. It may well serve as the framework for monitoring of human rights in the country. Both these provisions are an absolute requirement if forced repatriation cannot be avoided, together with guarantees of personal protection of returning refugees. If this is done, it will be a rare instance of countries addressing and acting to remove the causes of flight of refugees. Understanding that should be the basis for greater flexibility towards the crisis faced by the world's 14 million refugees.
JULY 1989 EXILE
HOWARD DAVIES
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