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I should also be grateful if you could consider how contribution to any further special appeal specifically for South East Asian refugees might be funded. We have r indication at the moment of the level which UNHCR might be considering for such an appeal, but we estimate that the cost to UNHCR of undertaking responsibility for a further 25,000 of the refugees now in Hong Kong, for example, could be of the order of US$ 30 million for the remainder of 1979. This is quite apart from the additional numbers arriving in neighbouring South EastAsian states. Since the situation in Hong Kong is the government's primary responsibility, and we are pressing the High Commissioner very strongly to take responsibility for all the refugees arriving in Hong Kong, any contribution by the UK to such an appeal would obviously need to bear some relationship to the costs which we are asking UNHCR to take on.
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