Starting Over It’s Bitter Homecoming For Vietnam Boat People

Former boat people huddling inside the gloomy immigration hall of Hanoi’s airport received a grim welcome home Wednesday from stiff officials handing out stacks of paperwork.

The 93 Vietnamese returned on the United Nations’ last flight from Hong Kong for refugees who agreed to go home after failing to find asylum abroad.

Still, the flight did not end the boat people saga that began in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. Nearly 3,000 Vietnamese remain in Hong Kong. Now that the U.N. voluntary flights have ended, the Hong Kong government is likely to start forcing the refugees to leave.

“This was the last chance for me to come back, so I took it,” said Vu Thi Van, who came from a Hong Kong refugee holding center. “But I can’t help being scared.”

Van stood with the other refugees inside the international airport’s human immigration processing area as uniformed officials handed out customs and identity forms.

While Vietnam’s communist government officially welcomes them home, the refugees often have trouble integrating back into society. Former neighbors and potential employers often discriminate against the boat people when they return.

Van, who fled Vietnam almost eight years ago, realized that starting over won’t be easy.

“We are the people who have nothing to come back to, and that’s why we stayed there for so long,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “If I only had a home or a family to come back to, I would have done that a long time ago.”

Hers was the last of more than 300 U.N. flights that brought home more than 57,500 boat people who volunteered to make the trip.

“This is not really a moment of celebration,” said Jean-Noel Wetterwald of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “We aren’t popping the champagne cork, but we are relieved this is behind us.”

The first boat people fled Vietnam in the 1970s after communist forces overran South Vietnam. A second wave of economic refugees, this time predominantly from northern Vietnam, began to leave in the late 1980s.

In the end, more than 2 million Vietnamese - families and sometimes entire villages - tried to escape, often on overloaded and rickety fishing boats.

Victims of piracy, neglect and bureaucracy, the boat people survived harrowing ordeals on the high seas only to languish in detention camps throughout Southeast Asia.

The nearly 3,000 Vietnamese in Hong Kong remain from a total of 214,000 who fled there over the years.

Nearly half are considered refugees from persecution but have yet to find a country willing to take them.