Racism must be outlawed if Hong Kong is to be a truly international city, activists said yesterday as they launched the “Hong Kong Against Racial Discrimination” campaign.
Anna Wu Hung-yuk, who chairs the Equal Oportunity Commission, said the number of complaints of racial discrimination last year – 66 – was twice the total of the three previous years. She said the commission was advocating new legislation, since at present it was only able to act on complaints about discrimination on grounds of disability or gender.
About 200 people met at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club to launch the campaign. Victims recounted instances that they said occurred almost daily, ranging from subtle forms of unfair treatment to outright racial abuse.
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When Harinder Veriah had an epileptic fit more than a year ago, no one realised it would trigger a chain of events that have helped expose Hong Kong’s great ‘dirty secret’.
On 2 January 2000 Veriah, known to her friends as Hari, died. Shortly before, she told her husband, the British journalist Martin Jacques, that she was at the ‘bottom of the pile’ at the hospital where she was being treated. She meant her skin colour and Indian race were responsible for a lack of attention.
Today an unusually large coalition of 12 organisations, including Indian, Filipino, Thai and Nepalese groups, is holding a memorial for Veriah and meeting to campaign for anti-racial discrimination legislation. Vandana Rajwani, a lawyer who is one of the meeting’s organisers, says they have been inundated with people wanting to participate.
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Hari was born and brought up in Malaysia. She was an ethnic Indian, her family having emigrated from the Punjab almost a century earlier. As a young child she grew up in a Chinese area of Petaling Jaya, where she learnt Cantonese and came to understand and appreciate the Chinese Malaysians. She lost her mother when she was six and her father in her twenties. She grew up in poverty and adversity. Somehow, though, she was untouched by it. Rather than being bowed or scarred, she was ennobled by her background. She learnt how to stand on her own two feet and yet was possessed of an extraordinary compassion born of her experience of hardship.
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When Malaysia-born Harinder Veriah first arrived in Hong Kong to work with a leading British law firm she seemed to have all the qualifications to ensure years of success in this supposedly internationally minded and business-oriented city. Unlike most of the overseas professionals Hong Kong is keen to attract, she had the added advantage of speaking Cantonese, as well as flawless English, which remains the language of the law in Hong Kong.
But Ms. Veriah’s skin color was quite dark. And though both she and her husband, Martin Jacques, a well known British journalist and writer, had lived in London where racism is often close to the surface society, Ms. Veriah found in Hong Kong a new and more pernicious form of racial prejudice — one Mr. Jacques believes finally cost her her life a little more than a year ago.
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The death of a young mother has reaffirmed an anti-racism group’s determination to continue with its work
THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be an article about the decline of a recently formed organisation which wanted racial discrimination outlawed in Hong Kong.
The group, Hong Kong Against Racial Discrimination (Hard), was on the verge of collapse just last month, its members having failed to hold a monthly meeting since February.
This story was going to convey the founders’ frustration and feeling of helplessness at the Government’s intransigence on the issue, refusing to make discrimination on the grounds of race illegal. It was going to trace the death of Hard.
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The government has a blind spot to an obvious problem – racism. On November 30, the acting Secretary for Home Affairs, Kwan Wing-wah, said that Hong Kong did not need laws to prohibit race discrimination because the problem is not serious here.
Yes, thankfully there is no racial violence or overt racial tension. That does not mean there is no serious discrimination. It is disingenuous to argue that the degree of seriousness depends on whether there is violence. The Government would be severely criticised if it applied the same measure to discrimination against the disabled. There is no violence against the disabled, and yet no one argues anymore that there shouldn’t be laws to protect them from discrimination.
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Martin Jacques found his soul mate in Harinder Veriah; it was a passion that knew no cultural bounds. But in Hong Kong, he says she faced racism in everyday life and believes it was ultimately responsible for her untimely death in hospital
One afternoon in December 1993, a journalist called Martin Jacques and a lawyer called Harinder Veriah sat over lunch in Hong Kong and made a number of life-changing decisions. Jacques, who was 47, lived in London and had a partner of 18 years; Veriah, who was 26, was Malaysian, lived in Kuala Lumpur, and was also involved in a relationship. They had met on Tioman, off the east coast of Malaysia, the previous August. They had just spent a week together and knew that they couldn’t continue life without each other.
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