Mr Flower, SEAD
CONFIDENTTAI
ICEM: INDO-CHINA REFUGEES
1.
HKK 243
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Mr George Warren (Assistant to the Director of ICEM) who called on Mr Simpson-Orlebar yesterday evening for an informal discussion of ICEM affairs, said that Argentina could tentatively be interested in taking up to 20,000 Indo-China refugees if good selections were made. Both ICEM and UNHCR are discussing the matter with the Argentine Permanent Representative in Geneva and UNHCR had been asked to act very quickly to provide Argentina with an initial selection of 25 families.
2. Mr Warren said the operation would require some investment. A subsidy would be required to help the Argentine's resettle the refugees. There would be plenty of money available for this from governments in Europe (he specifically mentioned the Scan- dinavians) and the US. The initial financial requirement need not be excessive, perhaps US $2,000 or US $3,000 per refugee. In the USA it costs little more than US $1,500 to resettle a refugee from Indo-China. Mr Warren added that there was vast potential for settling Indo-China refugees in Latin America, particularly in the agricultural sectors in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela. Indeed, it was really the only hope of coping with the immense resettlement burden. ICEM were making most of the running on this but in close consultation with Mr Hartling who, Mr Warren thought, was not pushing as hard as he might. ICEM's new American Director would shortly be visiting a number of Latin American countries.
3. With regard to the ASEAN states' proposal for the establish- ment of a refugee processing centre on an Indonesian island, Mr Warren said that the idea would be a disaster from ICEM's point of view: it would make no impact whatsoever on the problem and would simply lengthen the processing pipeline. ICEM were interested in getting refugees moved quickly from the region.
4. Mr Simpson-Orlebar explained the British Government's preoccupation over the refugee problem and our ideas for the international conference for which the Prime Minister had called. He thanked Mr Warren for all the help ICEM had given to the UK (particularly the evacuation to the UK of refugees last October from Taiwan) and encouraged Mr Warren in his efforts to find more resettlement places in Latin America for the refugees.'
5.
Mr Warren left the attached copy of a recent ICEM press release about the organisation's efforts to accelerate the resettlement process.
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CODE
22 June 1979 cc: (+ encs)
HK&GD MVD
P Morgan
United Nations Department
K 149
233 8631
CONFIDENTIAL
/UND(B)