World Notes: Hong Kong

About 55,000 Vietnamese boat people languish in Hong Kong detention camps, and as hopes dwindle that they will ever be classified as legitimate refugees, more and more are "volunteering" to go home. But frustration and bitterness have been building for months.

Last week, just before the arrival of Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of the lunar New Year, the worst violence yet erupted among 800 likely returnees ^ waiting for the flights home in a camp known as Shek Kong.

Fighting started in a section of the camp between Vietnamese northerners and those from the south, who are normally held separately in the camps because of their longstanding political and cultural antagonisms. As police began arriving in force, 2,000 southern Vietnamese in an adjacent section tore down a 17-ft. wire-mesh fence and joined the fray. Panicked northerners sought refuge in a corrugated-steel dormitory. Their attackers began burning blankets and stuffing them through windows, setting fire to the building. The eventual toll: 23 burned alive or suffocated, including 10 children, and 125 injured, some of them seriously enough to be hospitalized.