CONFIDENTIAL
Informal Aid Memoire
POSSIBLE FRAMEWORK FOR A SPECIAL PROCESSING CENTRE (SPC) IN CHINA FOR REFUG... GIVEN FIRA ASYLUM IN HONG KONG
1. Assumptions:
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Bransfer costs would be minimal;
Construction costs would be met from new contributions to UNICK by the international community;
Initial capacity at 10,000;
Maintenance costs of about US $0.50 per refugee per day (compared with about US $2.00 in Hong Kong);
All refugees transferred would be guaranteed resettlement in the US or other third countries;
and (the following posing considerable obstacles)
The FC would run for 5 years and would not start to run down its numbers for at least 2 years;
There would be no difficulty in persuading refugees to move to the SFC from camps in Hong Kong;
The SIC would be administered by China but with resident UNHCR consultants;
Apart from refugees transferred from Hong Kong, those admitted to the SPC would also include a number (not more than 10%) of refugees who had gone directly to China from Vietnam, This might be restricted to people originally from South Vietnam but irrespective of whether they crossed to China by land or by sea;
The SPC would be isolated from existing overseas Chinese farms in Guangdong province and would be at a site which did not give easy access by land or sea to Hong Kong;
BÍNEFITO TO CHINA:
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Annual foreign exchange earnings for maintenance costs of US $5.5 million;
Additional foreign exchange from local materials and labour used in construction of the SPC (say US $5 million);
Useful facilities to be taken over once the CFC was closed;
The relief of a small but troublesome part of China's refugee burden (those least able or willing to adapt to life in Chira);
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CONFIDENTIAL