The Rt. Hon. Lord Shawcross, GBE, QC
27th June 1979.
ch
HOUSE
OF
LORDS
His Excellency Mr. Sung Zhiguang,
Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Beijing,
People's Republic of China.
Mykor Munaww
As your country's Ambassador here is at prescat on leave in Peking I am writing to tell you of the increasing anxiety which many of us here feel about the refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia.
The number of these refugees now in Thailand and Malaysia has become quite intolerable for those countries to accept or assimilate. Malaysia is reported to be turning them away but Thailand is said to be intending to force large numbers of those already in camps in Thailand back into Cambodia. Conditions in Cambodia are now quite terrible. There is no food and the greatest brutalities are taking place. To force refugees in Thailand back to Cambodia would be to expose vast numbers of them to almost certain death.
In the U.K. and other western countries there is growing shock and concern about this situation, accompanied, I believe, by an increasing realisation on the part of our people that we ourselves must help to relieve the burden on the South East Asian countries by accepting the responsibility for receiving a much larger number of refugees ourselves. As you know, Mrs. Thatcher, our Prime Minister, has taken an initiative in suggesting an early international conference on the matter and I have ventured to write to her urging that we should in the U. K. make an early and express statement that we will accommodate a really significant number of these wretched people. But three or four weeks must elapse before anything definite can be done.
I have also written to the Prime Minister of Thailand, General Kriang sak, who is an old friend of mine, urging that the Thailand Government should hold its hands for a few weeks before expelling any more of these refugees into Cambodia and that it should state that it is doing this in the