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- <text id=92TT0335>
- <title>
- Feb. 17, 1992: World Notes:Hong Kong
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Feb. 17, 1992 Vanishing Ozone
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 53
- World Notes
- HONG KONG
- More Tet Horrors
- </hdr><body>
- <p> About 55,000 Vietnamese boat people languish in Hong Kong
- detention camps, and as hopes dwindle that they will ever be
- classified as legitimate refugees, more and more are
- "volunteering" to go home. But frustration and bitterness have
- been building for months.
- </p>
- <p> Last week, just before the arrival of Tet, the Vietnamese
- celebration of the lunar New Year, the worst violence yet
- erupted among 800 likely returnees waiting for the flights home
- in a camp known as Shek Kong.
- </p>
- <p> Fighting started in a section of the camp between
- Vietnamese northerners and those from the south, who are
- normally held separately in the camps because of their
- longstanding political and cultural antagonisms. As police began
- arriving in force, 2,000 southern Vietnamese in an adjacent
- section tore down a 17-ft. wire-mesh fence and joined the fray.
- Panicked northerners sought refuge in a corrugated-steel
- dormitory. Their attackers began burning blankets and stuffing
- them through windows, setting fire to the building. The eventual
- toll: 23 burned alive or suffocated, including 10 children, and
- 125 injured, some of them seriously enough to be hospitalized.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-