Lord Privy Seal
1.
CONFIDENTIAL
T
INST
N.
HKK 243/1
OFF
R
176
ре
I had a talk today with Mr William Bauer the retiring Canadian Ambassador in Bangkok who is an old friend of mine. He has been connected with the South East Asian scene on and off for the last 20 years.
2. He took a very tough line about the Vietnamese Government. They were men who had known nothing but violence and who had violated every international agreement they had signed. In the course of the internal troubles in North Vietnam in the 1950's they had killed tens of thousands of their own people.
3. Mr Bauer believed we should now really be turning the heat on the Vietnamese and exposing their cold and calculated expulsion of the Vietnamese as well as ethnic Chinese from their country. Moreover the Americans who were really the only people who could do it effectively should be pinning responsibility on the Russians for encouraging the Vietnamese who were their allies. The Russians had been encouraging Vietnamese imperialism by large supplies of tanks and aircraft.
4. He thought one advantage which the Vietnamese might hope to derive from the expulsion of the refugees would be to drive a wedge between the ASEAN countries and the West, because the former would be burdened with many more refugees than the latter, who would be reluctant to take many. They might also hope to drive a wedge between the Thais and the Malaysians on the one hand, who were carrying the main burden, and the rest of ASEAN on the other.
5. Mr Bauer also thought that there was little doubt that the Vietnamese were deliberately mixing in with the refugees a number of people who were intended to work for the interest of the Vietnamese Government in those countries in South East Asia which could be expected to receive them.
6.
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He also had a low opinion of de Haan the Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees whom he described as naive and cynical and unlikely to stand up to the Vietnamese.
7. I wish that most Canadians dealing with foreign affairs were as robust as Mr Bauer.
7 June 1979
CONFIDENTIAL
BK Blaker.
PAR Blaker
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