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confirm that we were more than willing.
But what about the
Vietnamese? Our trade with Vietnam had increased over the last two years and there has been a continuing ELT programme for Vietnamese students in Britain. This was not indicative of the Government's being against normalisation of relations. But the Vietnamese must help too by radically recasting their style of government, which Lord Goronwy-Roberts considered to be neither socialism nor communism, but rather the deepest kind of inhuman reaction.
5. Mr Gwilym Roberts said he accepted part of what Lord Goronwy- Roberts had said. And part of the Britain-Vietnam Association's job would be to approach the Vietnamese Embassy to express concern. But he asked whether, apart from the harshness of the State system in Vietnam, there was any fundamental problem which applied to a particular sector of the Vietnamese population and which thereby caused particular harshness for that sector. Lord Goronwy-Roberts said there was not. In his view it was a question of an ideology carried to extreme and fed by nationalism. In answer to a further question from Mr Gwilym Roberts, Mr Smith confirmed that the boat refugees were by no means confined to one class; many of those now leaving were peasants and fishermen.
6.
Lord Goronwy-Roberts went on to say that Vietnam was a big and potentially wealthy country. We would value good relations with her. But he was not willing to listen to lectures to the UK as to why we were not doing more to improve relations these lectures should be addressed to Vietnam. The reports of human rights violations there were grisly and depressing. People were taking their lives in their hands to escape, as they had not under the former regime. Certainly the Britain-Vietnam Association should go ahead and try to promote improved relations; there was no built-in anti-Vietnamese bias in the Government here (nor was there such a bias for example against Chile). But if the Britain-Vietnam Association had any influence with the Vietnamese Embassy they should make clear the need for the Vietnamese
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