Britain's dishonorable exit

Britain's dishonorable exit

Hong Kong's transition from British to Chinese sovereignty, due to be completed at midnight on June 30, 1997, is not going smoothly. One reason lies in the British refusal to solve one small post-colonial anomaly, The Jakarta Post's Asia Correspondent Harvey Stockwin reports. The problem should have been solved as soon as the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in 1984. Instead British procrastination has been the thief of the colony's confidence.

HONG KONG (JP): Eleven years after the problem first arose, nothing has been done to rectify the plight of several thousand Indian and other residents of Hong Kong who will effectively become stateless in 588 days.

On Nov. 10, Hong Kong passed the latest milestone -- it was exactly 600 days until the fateful moment when sovereignty over the territory passes from the United Kingdom back to China.

It tells you something about the problem of the handover that the parties are counting the days.

In Tiananmen Square, Beijing, there is an electronic clock recording the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds until Hong Kong is reunited with the Motherland.

As China behaves more and more like a harsh colonial power -- its latest political maneuver is to try and water-down Hong Kong's Bill of Rights -- the counting of the days is born more of deep and growing anxiety. The transfer of power on July 1, 1997 is, for millions of Hong Kong Chinese, the day when they again come under the control of the country from which they once fled.

For several thousand South Asians, that date marks a different but no less acute apprehension -- their already slight hold on nationality status will weaken further, almost to the vanishing point.

Estimates of precisely how many persons will be affected in this way vary between three and seven thousand. Most are Indians, some of them having come to Hong Kong well before the partition of the Indian subcontinent, but there are other South Asians as well as some Eurasians in the same predicament.

All were once British subjects. Some even renounced their Indian citizenship in order to become British. Steadily over the years their Britishness has been devalued. First they became British Dependent Territory citizens with right of abode in Hong Kong only. Now they must become holders of a British National Overseas (BNO) passport, which bestows no citizenship.

Whether possession of this document even guarantees their future residence in Hong Kong is uncertain (given the wholly unsatisfactory state of Sino-British negotiations prior to the handover).

The BNO passport will not entitle them to British consular protection in Hong Kong after June 30, 1997. They will not be able to hand down their BNO status to their children born after that date.

Thus in 588 days time their citizenship status will be precarious, to say the least. Sooner or later, they or their families will become stateless.

The "plight of the ethnic minorities", as the problem tends be labeled in the Hong Kong press, should not be confused with the Hong Kong Indian community as a whole. Many Hong Kong Indians have Indian passports. Others have old or recently acquired first class British passports, promising right of abode in Britain. Some Hong Kong Indian residents have already obtained passports in third countries such as Canada and Australia.

There were two possible solutions to the problem posed by those Indians and others facing statelessness. Racial considerations bar the way to their adoption.

China could avoid the looming statelessness by promising to give Indians and others a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region passport after 1997. But these documents will be issued to ethnic Chinese only. Given the essentially racial nature of Chinese nationality laws, this is unlikely to change.

Britain could have avoided the looming statelessness at any time in the past eleven years with a stroke of the Prime Ministerial pen, granting those affected full British citizenship.

Those affected lobbied for such a gesture. Numerous press articles urged the necessity of such British action. Hong Kong's newly-emerging class of politicians frequently spoke up on the issue. But London did nothing.

Britain feared that if the "ethnic minorities" were granted passports, the 3.3 million Hong Kong Chinese British subjects -- who are effectively being handed over to become Chinese subjects -- would likewise demand remedial action.

The truth was more that British action in favor of the minorities would have reassured the Hong Kong Chinese that Britain was at least trying to make an honorable exit. Britain's failure to act has prompted the opposite conclusion.

To be fair, the British, in the wake of the horror of the 1989 Beijing Massacre, did agree to grant 50,000 full British passports to Hong Kong families before 1997. Amazingly, that decision was not coupled with a decision that all potentially stateless persons would receive such passports as of right.

So while the number threatened with statelessness has declined as a result of this British gesture, it has not been eliminated. The criteria upon which the passports are granted is mysterious. I know one well-respected Indian journalist whose application has been refused, with no grounds for the refusal provided.

It was the need to quickly solve niggling Hong Kong problems arising from the reversion to Chinese sovereignty, which prompted this reporter, among others, to urge the earlier appointment of a politician as Hong Kong Governor as a good way to secure their speedier resolution.

When former Conservative party chairman Christopher Patten was belatedly appointed Governor in 1992, there was hope that rectification of the stateless problem would be expedited. Patten conveys the image of trying to do something. But perhaps because he obviously hopes to resume a political career in Britain one day, he has been unable to overcome Conservative reluctance to further increase the number of Asian immigrants.

The absurd lengths to which the British go to restrict immigration is shown by another unsolved Hong Kong problem. There are 23 war widows living here, all of either Chinese or Eurasian ancestry. All lost their husbands when they were fighting on the British side in World War II. They, too, have been denied full first-class British passports, as of right, as the handover approaches. They have been given the right to reside in Britain, so the denial of a passport to go with it indicates a lack of generosity which is that much more inexplicable.

Prompt British action long ago to correct this small but important issue of statelessness, a tiny post-colonial anomaly, would have helped diminish Hong Kong's enduring and still- deepening crisis of confidence. Instead, the British failure to act indicates prevarication which is shameful, and a moral cowardice which is deplorable.