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Now, with Mr Hartling, it was a time, though old friend as he is, for quite firm speaking, The situation is that of the 57,000 Vietnamese refugees who have arrived here, the U.N. High Commissioner has been able to accept respons- ibility for only 14,000 and to process only about seven or eight.
How can Now, this simply is not good enough.
we hope for people to be resettled if they haven't even been processed by the High Commissioner? However, in principle he ought to be taking playing as large a part as he can in the care and maintenance of these people. He explained frankly that his staff here was inadequate and his funds for his total worldwide programme are inadequate and I haven't the slightest doubt this is completely true. But he did promise to increase he'd already increased his staff here - but he promised to increase it further and to adopt a crash programme for registering and processing the numbers that had accumulated. So I hope
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something will come out of that soon.
With regard to future arrangements with him, I think these will have to wait until we see what comes out of this conference which, hopefully, will pledge both money and resett- lement places and it is really only in the light of those pledges that we can decide what is reasonable to expect from the U.N. High Commissioner.
After Geneva we went back for a quick round-up in London which included a talk with the Hong Kong Parliamentary Group, chaired by Paul Bryan. That really was a great pleasure; it was a standing-room only occasion which is a little rare for the House of Commons committees and I think I must have addressed that group half-a-dozen times or more and it's the only time I haven't heard a single critical word about Hong Kong. It's the only time there has been universal praise for what was being done here clearly they were stirred by Hong Kong's reaction to the double stream of immigrants from China and refugees from Vietnam and the way we had stood up to it and the part we were playing in trying to move world opinion so that a successful conference to solve the refugee problem will be set up.
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I also, incidentally, had a a short talk with Mr Peter Shore who, you may remember, visited us 4 or 5 years ago and Secretary for Trade in the U.K. was probably rather more sympathetic than most towards Hong Kong, and as Minister for the Environment a great admirer of our housing programme, but is now shadow Foreign Secretary, so I had a short talk with him.
I do very much hope that the support that we are receiving in the U.K. will stay bi-partisan. It would be thoroughly inappropriate for it to become a party matter. And at this Parliamentary Group it was apparent that support was both parties and I hope it stays so.
even from
So this really brings me more or less to the end of this saga.
Of our objectives, we have achieved more troops which will be of considerable hep to
hep to the garrison here. For one reason or another, world interest and focus in this refugee problem is growing growing rather fast - and this is absolutely essential
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