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9.
Thais are apparently having some success with their new measures, but we do not know about the other first asylum countries. To follow this line
implies housing new arrivals in closed camps with no promise of resettlement. Such camps would probably have to be purpose-built but, more importantly, the conditions in any closed camp would have to be an improvement on existing camps which are only tolerable on the basis that people can come and go.
So this would not provide a deterrent.
It just would not be worth gambling a considerable sum of public money, staff resources and local political credibility on the hope that the flow would dry up before the backlog, which we should have to maintain indefinitely in limbo, reached unmanageable proportions. In the circumstances of very large numbers of Hong Kong people being underhoused the practical and political objections to closed camps for refugees rules out this option;
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(f) to threaten to repatriate refugees to Vietnam. The correspondence and expense suggest that this is not a realistic option. But if the threat were taken seriously it could be a very effective deterrent. There might, therefore, be some advantage in declaring publicly (perhaps in concert with ASEAN) an intention to open negotiations with the Vietnamese with a view to arranging repatriation, in exchange for assurances that refugees would not be ill-treated. It is for you, and HM Ambassadors in the Region, to say whether the ASEAN countries would see any attraction in a move of this kind.
In the light of recent experience, and for the reasons given, all the above options have considerable drawbacks. Without guarantees of resettlement the least acceptable to Hong Kong is (a), that is, to carry on as before. To do this implies that Hong Kong alone should find a solution to what was recognised in 1979 as an international problem. Somehow we
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simply must get the international community to understand and accept that we, and other first asylum countries, cannot be expected to continue to be passive receivers of refugees without knowing when - or indeed whether they are to be resettled. It goes without saying, therefore, that we need your urgent advice on what can be done to ensure that the decisions of the Geneva Conference are implemented in the spirit in which they were agreed, and what help HMG can lend to this end.
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(Philip Haddon-Cave)
Chief Secretary
CONFIDENTIAL