FIFTEEN months ago, it seemed nothing more than a pipe dream, the forlorn hope of a few frustrated bureaucrats trying to talk down their own difficulties.
Yet the dream has started to come true: the population of Hongkong's crowded Vietnamese boat-people camps is falling.
Thousands are going home, none are coming. For the first time since 1,000 Vietnamese a day flooded into Hongkong in the summer of 1979, an end to one of the territory's most intractable humanitarian problems is now in sight.
Even at its lowest ebb in the mid-1980s, the tide of new arrivals never dropped.
Just 12 boat-people have been picked up in Hongkong waters this year, and more than 12,000 have returned home.
The tide turned virtually overnight at the end of October, 1991, when Britain and Vietnam signed an agreement to forcibly repatriate boat people who would not join the United Nations-sponsored voluntary return programme.
