Stranded in Hong Kong
Refugees on a Sham Shui Po rooftop. Photo from Our Life in West Kowloon, a book published by the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group
In the past, Roy Chipowoaminga walked the streets of Hong Kong as a tourist. In August, he was sleeping on them. Penniless and far from home, he found a bench in Admiralty and stayed there for a month.
“My biggest hope is to be able to go back home,” said Chipowoaminga, a 31-year-old asylum-seeker whose name has been changed to protect his identity. “But it’s unlikely that the situation in Zimbabwe will improve anytime soon.”
It has been nearly a year and a half since Chipowoaminga left his job as a banker in Harare to live, without family or any source of income, in Hong Kong. He had been doing financial work for the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe’s beleaguered opposition party, he said, when he was threatened with arrest by agents from President Robert Mugabe’s notoriously oppressive government. In recent years, as Zimbabwe has plunged into economic and social chaos, members of the opposition have been detained, tortured and killed. Chipowoaminga took no chances.
Now, he is one of the roughly 2,000 refugee claimants in Hong Kong, a territory that offers asylum-seekers no clear rights, no system to process their claims and almost no chance to stay, even if they are granted refugee status.
With the exception of cases involving torture, which are handled by the Hong Kong government, applications for asylum made in Hong Kong are dealt with by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, an international organization responsible for dealing with refugees worldwide. Most refugee advocates agree that it is not well-equipped to deal with Hong Kong’s refugee situation. The waiting time for decisions can be more than a year, for instance, and it offers no financial aid to refugee claimants. If their claim is denied, they are given no specific reason and offered only a limited chance to appeal.
According to information provided by the Hong Kong Immigration Department, the UNHCR processed 4443 refugee claims between 2005 and 2007, more than half of them in 2007 alone. Only 182 were accepted.
“The UNHCR in Hong Kong has one of the lowest acceptance rates in the world,” said Brian Barbour, acting executive director of the Refugee Advice Centre, a non-governmental organization that provides legal assistance to asylum-seekers. “That’s probably because there’s no legal aid” to advise them. Claimants “don’t really know what they have to prove to the UNHCR. They’ll be asked, ‘Why are you here?’ and they’ll say something like, ‘I want a better life,’ so they’ll be classified as an economic migrant. But what they might really mean is, ‘I’m tired of being tortured and I want to be free.’ A lot of it just gets lost.”
Like many asylum-seekers, Chipowoaminga first arrived on a standard tourist visa, expecting only to stay for a short time.
“I approached Hong Kong almost as an extended vacation,” he said last week in a McDonald’s on Nathan Road. Stocky and energetic, Chipowoaminga has a round, expressive face and a self-assured demeanour, despite his situation. “I came here twice with my then-girlfriend on vacation and it was probably the best place I had visited in the world. If you’re going to live in exile, you’ve got to go somewhere where you’re comfortable.”
After extending his visa for the fourth time, Chipowoaminga was approached by an immigration official who asked him why he was staying so long. When he explained his situation, the official recommended he apply for asylum with the Hong Kong government as a victim of torture – or potential torture, in his case. After he filled out an application for asylum at an immigration handling centre in Ngau Tau Kok, however, he was detained for four days and his passport confiscated.
“There’s no real clarity,” he said. “When they released me they gave me some form, a recognisance form with my personal details, my address, my photo. It’s basically an ID. They still have my passport so when they gave me that form, it’s like I’m on bail, only instead of reporting to the police station I have to report to immigration authorities every eight weeks. I’m not even sure if they are processing my case or not.”
Chipowoaminga is also applying to the UNHCR for refugee status, but his interview will not take place until the end of December – five months after he first approached the organization. The Refugee Advice Centre will represent him and help him deal with the technicalities of the application process.
Officials from the Hong Kong Immigration Department offered a written response to questions about the way the government deals with asylum-seekers. “The 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees does not apply to Hong Kong. We have a firm policy of not granting asylum, and are under no obligation to conduct refugee status determination,” they wrote. In the past, they have cited the territory’s small size, prosperity and liberal visa regime, which allows people from more than 170 countries to enter Hong Kong without visas, as reasons for its refusal to accept refugees.
Barbour, like most refugee advocates, rejects the government’s position. “There’s no good reason for HK not to accept refugees,” he said. “If they had a real determination system in place it would be a lot more efficient, they might even save money. There would be less waste of human resources in terms of refugees just lying about and the government always trying to catch up with them.”
The Hong Kong government’s reticence towards refugees might be rooted in the territory’s history. In the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled to Hong Kong from war, and poverty, famine and political upheaval on the mainland. In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, more than 200,000 migrants from Vietnam arrived here. While some were allowed to stay, the vast majority were eventually resettled abroad by the UNHCR, but not before the Hong Kong government spent more than HK$1 billion to house them in detention centres.
More recent refugees tend to come from South Asia and Africa. While many arrive under similar circumstances as Chipowoaminga, others come to Hong Kong with no identification. They are often detained for months without charge. In recent years, refugee advocates have raised concerns about their treatment, pointing to the high number of strip searches performed on asylum-seekers held in detention.
Chipowoaminga considers himself lucky. So far, the police have given him no trouble. The only time he has been stopped was at night in Mid-Levels, when police asked him for identification and, after he presented his papers, let him go.
“They must have wondered what a black man was doing up there at that time of the day,” he said with a wry smile.
But the shock of leaving a comfortable life in Zimbabwe for one in which he is struggling to survive has taken its toll. In Harare, Chipowoaminga owned a four-bedroom house, two luxury cars and two dogs. It was a long way from there to the streets of Hong Kong.
“I was living a very good life, by most standards, even for Hong Kong. So for me to find myself homeless now, it’s a very difficult position to be in. You start reflecting on your life, on who you are and where you come from. I’ve never admitted this to a lot of people, but thoughts of suicide start swirling around. I always tried to squash them but I was really very depressed.”
Chipowoaminga left the streets in August when a Catholic charity organization found him a bed in a halfway house for ex-convicts. The charity provides him with basic necessities, such as food, toiletries and clothing, but no cash. His savings depleted, he manages to get by only through the generosity of friends and whatever money his brother is able to send him from Zimbabwe. While the Hong Kong Immigration Department says that “humanitarian assistance is provided out of government funds” to prevent asylum-seekers from falling into destitution, Chipowoaminga has seen none of that money.
To pass the time, he volunteers for the charity organization, visits the library and audits an anthropology course at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He keeps in daily contact with his parents and siblings through email and internet chat. He has made friends since arriving in Hong Kong, too, most of which are also asylum-seekers.
“We basically live on the periphery of society so we have to band together. It’s like a support group more than anything else,” he said. “Once you fall into the cycle of depression and self-pity it’s very easy to become reclusive. I try to keep in contact with a lot of people just to keep myself in touch with what’s going on.”
Asked if he has any regrets about coming to Hong Kong, Chipowoaminga considers his answer. He spent time in South Africa immediately after leaving Zimbabwe and if he had stayed there he would be “desperate,” he said. Europe might have offered him a quicker and more transparent refugee application process. But he is convinced that the quality of life in Hong Kong is higher than elsewhere: “This is the safest place in the world right now,” he said.
What he cannot tolerate, though, is the amount of time that it is taking for his fate to be determined.
“Right now my life is stagnant. You know, these are supposed to be the most productive years of my life. I’m supposed to be raising a family, securing my future, but instead I’m in Hong Kong doing nothing. I need to move on.”
Tags: Hong Kong, Migration, Refugees
