MON
HKK 243/4
Senhor P A Machado CVO Portuguese Embassy 11 Belgrave Square LONDON SW1X 8PP
HKK 243
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW JUN 1980
SWIA 2AH
DCS INDEX
ло 26 June 1980
2.7
RY
laken
Aw यान
When you called on Mr Daunt, Head of the Southern European Department, on 3 June, you asked that we should do everything we could to ensure that a favourable response was made by the Government of Hong Kong to a request from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that Hong Kong should receive 2,000 Vietnamese refugees now in Macao.
We have, of course, considered this very carefully. So far we have not received such a request from the High Commissioner. I am afraid, however, that we would not be able to support it. The Hong Kong authorities already face the problem of accommo- dating and transferring the 40,000 Vietnamese refugees who remain in Hong Kong, a large number of whom have come from Macao. Public opinion in Hong Kong would not understand a move to transfer a further group from Macao to Hong Kong, nor would the resources in the Territory be able to deal with this.
We do, of course, very much sympathise with the problems of Macao. I wonder, however, if the difficulty could be approached in a different manner. I understand that many of those in Macao have gone there after settling in China. Our own experience suggests that the key to the problem is to identify those refugees who have arrived in this way, in order to facilitate the task of returning them to the Chinese authorities, and to discourage other refugees from believing that they can achieve resettlement in this manner.
1
bcc Mr Daunt SED
R D Clift
Hong Kong and General Department
Dr D C Wilson, Policital Adviser, HONG KONG