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5. Hirdman's most interesting piece of news concerned a private conversation with the Deputy Leader of the Vietnamese Delegation in which he had asked how many more refugees were to come. The Vietnamese delegate had answered that there were between 600 and 700,000 more ethnic Chinese who would probably "wish to leave". But he then had gone on to say that there were two other categories who should not be forgotten. There were about 1 million former members of the South Vietnamese Army and (basing his figures on those given in a book "A Decent Interval" by a former Deputy CIA Chief in Saigon) about 2 million people including families who had worked in one capacity or another for the Americans or the Thieu regime who might also "wish to leave". This is the first explicit threat I have seen reported from Vietnamese sources to expel dhnic Vietnamese.
6. I asked Hirdman how the Swedes assessed the chances of turning undertakings given at Geneva into action. He said that whilst remaining convinced that nothing would head the Vietnamese off their strategy of pushing out further large numbers of refugees, the Swedes were satisfied that the Vietnamese seriously intend to cooperate in setting up mechanisms by way of transit camps inside as well as outside Vietnam, to make the outflow tolerable to recipient countries. The pressures of world opinion on Vietnam would not ease. The ASEAN countries would go on making their views known and the matter was bound to come up in the presentation of the UNHCR's report in the General Assembly in New York this autumn. The Vietnamese had said that they could see no purpose in the Austrian suggestion of a commission of "wise men". This accorded with the Swedish view; they felt that there was no lack of information nor any lack of channels through which to speak to the Vietnamese. Any such body could only detract from the effectiveness and standing of the UNHCR. For the same reasons the Swedes felt some scepticism towards Lord Carrington's suggestion of a commission drawn from a small number of neutral and non-aligned countries to ensure international participation in any scheme of resettlement. I said that Lord Carrington undoubtedly had in mind the need to prevent any Vietnamese backsliding of which, despite what Hirdman had said, there was an obvious danger. Hirdman said that he thought that the real danger was rather that once the refugee camps in ASEAN countries and Hong Kong were cleared it would become much more difficult to persuade countries to accept a continuing heavy flow of refugees directly from Vietnam even if, as he believed would be the case, Vietnam continued to be prepared at that time to phase the exodus in an orderly fashion. The remarkable wave of sympathy around the world for refugees thrust out to stand a 50/50 chance of drowning or of landing in difficult conditions on the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia might wane when it was a question of continuing to take directly from Vietnam further numbers of refugees running into a seven figure total. Expressing a personal opinion he thought nevertheless that Sweden would not rest on the 2,250 refugees now pledged and compared this with the 8,000 which would be Sweden's share if the ratio proposed by the French of one refugee per one thousand inhabitants were generally accepted.
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/7.