Refugees Closing the Doors

By Jill Smolowe

Tai A Chau, a little island off Hong Kong, is a hilly, barely habitable patch that measures less than half a square mile. Abandoned more than a decade ago by native fisherfolk, the islet is teeming with life these days. Its new residents are Vietnamese boat people who, having fled their homeland and braved the dangers of the high seas, expect to make it the departure point for a better life elsewhere. More than 4,500 refugees vie for space in Tai A Chau's dozen crumbling huts and 50 tents, and the number keeps rising. Last week alone more than 700 boat people were sent to Tai A Chau. Each day the Hong Kong government dispatches a medical team to the island and provides drinking water, canned food and biscuits. Beyond that, the colony's administration is at a loss for a way to ease the refugees' plight.

Every boat person who washes up in Hong Kong in search of asylum no doubt has a compelling tale to tell, but the colony no longer listens sympathetically. With a population of some 6 million people squeezed into only 413 sq. mi., Hong Kong finds itself burdened by the presence of more than 44,400 asylum seekers -- and more boat people are pouring in despite the colony's year-old attempt to close its doors. About 20,000 have arrived so far this year. "The problem is that it is an unending problem," explains Fazlul Karim, head of the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Hong Kong, he says, is "completely fed up."

The British colony is not alone in suffering from what refugee workers call compassion fatigue. Over the past decade, the world's refugee population has ballooned from 4.6 million to almost 14.5 million. Many of the displaced have fled civil strife and hope to go home someday, like the 6 million Afghans living in camps in Pakistan and Iran. Some, like the Bulgarians of Turkish descent who are streaming into Turkey at the rate of more than 2,000 a day and the Rumanians of Hungarian origin who are seeking safety in Hungary, are too caught up in the frightened flight from ethnic persecution to worry about whether they will ever return home. Finally, there are those, like the Vietnamese boat people, who are fleeing troubles that are more economic than political in nature. Their hope: to find a home in one of the affluent nations of the industrialized world.

But the doors are closing. Everywhere barriers are going up to keep refugees out, largely by challenging whether they are legitimate refugees. The 1951 U.N. Geneva Convention on Refugees defines a refugee as any uprooted person who has "a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion." Western nations claim that much of the deluge crossing their borders consists of people who are fleeing poverty rather than persecution. Thus the issue of accepting the displaced has become intertwined with policy concerns about controlling immigration. "We are not an immigration country," West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has said. "We cannot solve the problems of Sri Lanka here in West Germany."

Kohl's example demonstrates how complicated the debate has become. In Sri Lanka civil war has driven out more than 125,000 Tamils since 1983. When 64 Tamils landed at London's Heathrow Airport in February 1987, British authorities attempted to deport 58 of them. The official explanation was that the asylum seekers "failed to prove they had a justifiable fear of persecution," although several of them bore torture marks inflicted in Sri Lankan prisons. Panicked, the refugees stripped off their clothes on $ Heathrow's tarmac and refused to budge. A court injunction eventually forced authorities to grant the Tamils access to legal representation. Most of them remain in Britain awaiting a final disposition of their cases, but some were sent home; five of those sent away have filed appeals from overseas. Last March a British Immigration Appeals judge held that they had been illegally repatriated and had been detained and tortured as a result. The British government has challenged the finding, and the issue is still under judicial review.

Many refugees, however, lack compelling claims to asylum. Western governments maintain that most of the people flooding out of such places as Nicaragua, Viet Nam and Eastern Europe may be tired, hungry and poor but are not victims of persecution. A host of measures aimed at deterring refugees have been introduced. The most obvious -- and no doubt the cruelest -- is deportation. That has been the recent fate of thousands of Central Americans, largely Nicaraguan citizens, who tried to enter the U.S. Washington's repelling measure has had the intended effect: whereas asylum applications in Texas ran at a rate of 233 a day two months ago, the level has dropped to fewer than ten daily. Other countries, including Britain and Denmark, ship some refugees to "safe third countries." If an Iranian, for example, arrives via Turkey or a Kurd via Egypt, he is returned to the last departure point.

Some countries want the international community to embrace the principle of "forced repatriation." Two weeks ago, at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Geneva, attended by representatives from 76 countries, Hong Kong and the six members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Brunei -- pressed for the mandatory return of boat people to Viet Nam. The appeal was blocked, for differing reasons, by Viet Nam and the U.S., but the conference did ratify a new policy of refusing to grant automatic refugee status to fresh arrivals. In Hong Kong alone, as a consequence, some 33,000 boat people will be invited to return to Viet Nam; if they fail to go voluntarily, they will almost certainly be forced to head home.

Asian and Western nations alike are coping with the crush by packing refugees into overcrowded detention centers and camps. Upwards of 14,000 are warehoused in Hong Kong's three "closed centers," the detention areas for those boat people recognized as potentially legitimate refugees. In Thailand . about 300,000 Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees are held behind barbed wire, subsisting on meager rations; some have lived this way for ten years. Detention centers at Britain's Heathrow and Gatwick airports shelter some arrivals for as long as a year. In Miami up to 700 refugees, mostly Haitians, have at times been crammed into the Krome Avenue Detention Center, which was built to hold 525 people.

Detention is not the only way to discourage refugees. Visa requirements have been tightened in nearly all European countries. Britain, West Germany and Denmark have enacted legislation that punishes airlines with stiff fines if they fly in passengers who lack valid travel papers. In West Germany asylum applicants are not allowed to take a job for five years, while their cases are under review. According to Lothar Struck, a Red Cross counselor in Bonn, "After five years of vegetating, ((asylum seekers)) get despondent, ill, psychotic or become alcoholics." In Italy, where boatloads of Africans arrive weekly from Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal, the Mafia is tapping parts of the unemployed refugee community to deal drugs: of all drug arrests in Italy last year, 12% involved foreigners, primarily Tunisians and Nigerians.

Most Western countries would prefer to avert such problems by intercepting refugees before they can land or settle for any length of time. In 1981 the U.S. and Haiti signed an accord, for example, that permits the U.S. Coast Guard to stop Haitians in international waters and turn them around. Since the agreement was signed, more than 20,000 Haitians have felt its impact.

Various U.S. Congressmen charge that such treatment stems at least in part from racism. "There's been a lot of discrimination with Haitians," says Representative Bruce Morrison of Connecticut, new chairman of the House subcommittee on immigration. "They are black, they are from a nation close to ours, and their country isn't Communist." Responds Perry Rivkind, district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami: "I've always said I wish a boatload of blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon Protestants tried to enter the U.S. illegally. They too would be subject to exclusion."

Charges of racism have cropped up in Europe as well. "The view ((in Britain)) is that the fewer nonwhite people come in, the easier it is to achieve good race relations," says Alf Dubs of the British Refugee Council. Adds Pedro Vianna, head of the Refugee Documentation Center in Paris: "Governments fear the Third World invasion." But racism does not explain all the resistance to refugees: in West Germany, for example, where antiforeigner rhetoric is at a high pitch, two-thirds of the latest wave of asylum seekers are Europeans, mainly from Poland and Rumania.

Refugee workers fear that Europe's doors may shut even more tightly with the approach in 1992 of a fully integrated European Community. West German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble has spoken of the need within the Community to "standardize procedures, so that an asylum seeker's rejection in one country would be binding for all countries."

Refugee organizations, by contrast, argue that target countries should set aside their preoccupation with fending off refugees and look toward more constructive solutions. While none of these groups contend that the doors should be thrown completely open, they suggest that some basic principles must be upheld: people should not be prevented from seeking asylum, should be treated humanely once they arrive and should receive a fair hearing. A 1987 "Refugee Policy for Europe," proposed by the European Consultation on Refugees and Exiles, a forum of nongovernmental organizations, calls for an end to the shuttlecock phenomenon that bounces refugees from country to country, a time limit on applications after which refugees should be allowed to stay, and an end to interdiction methods that prevent refugees from getting a fair hearing.

"We need an international wave of generosity," pleads Pierre Ceyrac, a Jesuit priest who has devoted most of his life to serving the needy in India and Southeast Asia. "The most fundamental human right is the right to live." Philip Rudge of ECRE echoes the thought, speaking of a need to "create the kind of spirit we had after ((World War II)), where the imagery of people struggling through barbed wire to get out was heroic, and we leaped to help." But as more and more refugees knock on the doors of heart-hardened nations, it is difficult to imagine how those countries will be able to shake off their compassion fatigue.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Cynthia Davis

[TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: U.S. Committee for Refugees}]CAPTION: WORLD REFUGEES

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Hong Kong and Lisa Distelheim/London, with other bureaus