Tear gas fired as police, guards transfer Viet detainees

HONG KONG (AFP): Prison guards fired tear gas at defiant Vietnamese yesterday in an attempt to end weeks of protests at Hong Kong's biggest detention camp for Vietnamese boat people.

Some 100 rounds of tear gas were fired at 400 Vietnamese who were refusing to come down from the roof of one of the metal barracks that make up the teeming Whitehead detention center, a government spokesman said.

"There have been no casualties or fighting reported," the spokesman added.

Reporters at the gates of the camp in rural Hong Kong heard several rounds being fired about five hours after 500 prison guards -- backed by 700 police with full riot gear -- marched in just before dawn.

An AFP photographer who climbed a hilltop for a view over Whitehead's high walls discerned that the rooftop had been cleared, and that there was no apparent outbreak of violence.

Whitehead houses the vast majority of the 26,000 Vietnamese migrants in Hong Kong who face repatriation to their homeland after failing to secure refugee status and resettlement in Western countries.

Yesterday's operation was aimed at transferring 1,500 migrants to another rural detention center, High Island, following several weeks of peaceful sit-down protests and hunger strikes against forced repatriation.

"Because there are so many Vietnamese at Whitehead, there might be fewer protests if there is a gradual reduction of the numbers there," another government spokesman said.

Six hours into what looked to be an all-day operation, about 430 Vietnamese had been transferred to High Island, the spokesman said.

Earlier, press photographers saw about a dozen Vietnamese atop two water towers inside Whitehead, wearing headbands and waving a white SOS flag for reasons that were not immediately clear.

Relief workers and officials from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees were denied access to the camp while yesterday's operation -- backed by a helicopter and police armored vehicles -- was underway.

Some 4,500 Vietnamese demonstrated inside Whitehead without incident on Wednesday, local radio said.

Last week, in a surprise operation, police swept through Whitehead's metal barracks -- which each house dozens of families on plywood bunkbeds -- in search of homemade weapons.

Nearly all the Vietnamese still in Hong Kong detention centers 19 years after the end of the Vietnam war are deemed to be migrants from their country's chronic poverty who fail to meet UN criteria for refugee status -- that is, a genuine fear of political or religious persecution.

More than 41,000 before them have agreed to go home under a United Nations program that offers them subsidies to resume their lives in Vietnam.

But nearly 900 have been forcibly sent back on cargo planes under a so-called "orderly repatriation" scheme hammered out by Britain, Hong Kong and Vietnam in October 1991.