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ments we had made. The subsequent decisions as to when the refugees left the ship and where they were to be housed were his, and were only taken fairly late on the Sunday.
?
So where did we go wrong?
Obviously both our telegrams 748 and 761) were badly drafted and failed to bring out the salient fact that we were awaiting a decision by the UNHCR representative. Moreover the wording of the latter was tart (written late on a Saturday!) and I duly apologise. While to meet your concern we could have moved the refugees ashore into temporary accommodation, I doubt if the double move would really have been to their advantage, or even if this is what Ministers would really have wanted if they had understood the position fully. Similarly we could have urged the UNHCR representative to greater speed in order to meet Ministers' wishes (whose strength frankly we had not realised), but this could not have saved more than one day.
Perhaps our people may have been influenced by their experience with the CLARA MAERSK
in May '75 when humanitarian, health and safety considerations required that the 4,000 refugees be landed immediately, and the subsequent reshuffling from their temporary accommo- dation into more permanent quarters was time consuming and irksome to all concerned, and also delayed and confused processing by prospective host governments.
our old But in retrospect I
I freely admit that all this should have been made much more clear than it was - enemy "failure of communications". wonder if for your part you are satisfied that everything was done in the FCO to make sure that Ministers were not unnecessarily alarmed owing to a mistaken picture of the situation. Could not someone have rung us up and told us that no one in London could understand from our telegrams what we were about, that tempers were rising, and that a better explanation needed to be given to Ministers? It is so much more important to avoid misunderstandings developing than merely to allocate blame afterwards.
I sincerely hope the problem will not arise in the future as the UNHCR representative
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