ON THIS DAY ·
Whitehead Detention Centre
1989–97 — At Ma On Shan, Hong Kong held “screened-out” Vietnamese—people judged not to be refugees—in a fenced camp. Riots and hunger strikes followed, and on 12 December 1989 a forced flight returned 51 people to Hanoi at dawn. Whitehead became a symbol of the end of automatic asylum.
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The moment in context
The 1979 Geneva bargain depended on two movements occurring together. Countries near Vietnam would give arrivals temporary refuge, and Western countries would offer them permanent homes. Departures continued, however, while resettlement places became scarcer. Regional officials also believed that each family accepted abroad encouraged others to leave: generous resettlement, in their view, created a ‘pull factor’. If that was right, making the journey less rewarding might reduce the number waiting on their shores.
From Comprehensive Plan of Action, chapter 11 of Uprooted: Refugees in Europe 1945–1960 and Indochina 1975–1990 (1989).
The place: Whitehead Detention Centre — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Compassion fatigue. More than a million Indochinese had been resettled by the mid-1980s. The crisis attracted less news coverage, public enthusiasm faded, and…
- The turn — Geneva, 14 June 1989, and the Whitehead camp. The CPA adopted at Geneva changed the question put to Vietnamese arrivals. Since 1975 they had been presumed to be refugees; after the cut-off dates…
- What it changed — Screening becomes the norm. In the 1990s individual screening became a model for asylum systems around the world, as Europe received refugees from Yugoslavia and arrivals from…
Then ask the room: Was the Comprehensive Plan of Action a humanitarian solution to the boat-people crisis or a retreat from the principle of asylum? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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