TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/070389/07038900.008

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 11KB | 196 lines

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