(c)
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Norwegian ships had lately been unable to find any refugees and were now negotiating with the Indonesians the picking up of refugees from remote islands;
most nations (including the UK) considered that they were already sufficiently involved in rescue operations by virtue of the presence of their merchant ships in the course of normal commercial operations; no further offers of warship involve- ment were made. Nor were there any declared intentions of promoting further involvement by voluntary organisations. The UK drew attention to the difficulties for the Hong Kong Government of a more active role in search and rescue;
(a) the "magnet" effect of a more organised system of
rescue was mentioned with misgivings by the UK and others; as was also the encouragement that it could give to the Vietnamese to expel more people;
(e) it was generally agreed that nations should again
remind their ship-owners and masters of their international obligation to rescue persons in distress at sea;
(f) doubts were expressed over the extent to which flags of convenience ships were carrying out rescues;
(g) concern was expressed over the "disincentive" effect of financial losses arising from rescue efforts; (h) all speakers drew attention to the guarantee of
resettlement within three months which their governments automatically provided for refugees picked up by their flagships failing resettlement elsewhere. Such refugees were in all cases counted against existing quotas. The UK remained silent on this point.
The involvement of three Italian warships which had
This
picked up 897 refugees was explained by the Italian represent- ative to have been limited to the period 26-31 July. was a one-off exercise and had mainly involved the pre- arranged picking up of refugees pushed off by the alaysians. The Italians now appeared to have doubts about this kind of exercise and would not be sending any more ships.
5.
The US representative (Carpenter, US Refugee Office) described US Seventh Fleet involvement in rescue operations. This was in the form of extensive searches by carrier-borne aircraft as ships of the fleet steamed through the South China Sea in the course of normal military operations backed up by standing patrols of shore-based maritime reconnaissance air- craft. Since 21 July when the Seventh Fleet had been ordered to step up its rescue activity over 1400 vessels had been sighted of which nine turned out to be refugee boats and of the latter four were deemed to be in distress and only 180 /refugees
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