Forced Return of Vietnamese by Hong Kong Protested Here

More than 300 Vietnamese-Americans quietly demonstrated Sunday in front of the British Consulate in Los Angeles, protesting last week’s forced repatriation of Vietnamese refugees from the British colony of Hong Kong.

Demonstrators received no response from inside the closed consulate offices on Wilshire Boulevard. They held signs, flags from the Republic of Vietnam, which fell to Vietnamese Communists in 1975, and a six-foot version of the Statue of Liberty.

“What Hong Kong is doing is a violation of human rights,” said Tran Minh Cong of Mission Viejo. “What they are doing is very cruel.”

The government of the British colony in South China last week forcibly deported 51 Vietnamese refugees from squalid detention centers, in the first such expulsions since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. However, Hong Kong sent only one planeload of refugees to Hanoi before announcing it would wait until at least Tuesday, when the British House of Commons will debate the issue, before resuming the program.

“We want to help them, but there is not enough space in Hong Kong for all of them,” said John Houlton, British vice consul for information at the Los Angeles consulate.