TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070389/07038900.008

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 11.0 KB | 213 lines

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≈#4                                                         WORLD, Page 24

REFUGEES

Closing the Doors


With millions of people in search of asylum, compassion is
drying up

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.


-- Jay Branegan/Hong Kong and Lisa Distelheim/London, with other
bureaus