home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME - Man of the Year
/
CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso
/
moy
/
021792
/
0217001.000
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-08-28
|
1KB
|
34 lines
WORLD, Page 53World NotesHONG KONGMore Tet Horrors
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.
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.
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.