CONFIDENTIAL
Serial No: 4313
1.0.
機密
10th June 1982
Information from Vietnamese Refugees
(L/Ms 1558, 1562, 1626, 1642 and 1648)
!
A
General
These five boats between them brought 154 refugees to Hong Kong between 22nd December 1981 and 8th May 1982. In each case members of the groups spent different amounts of time in the Southern Chinese port of Zhanjiang (3277/3068), Guangdong Province. Whilst in Zhanjiang the different groups received varying degrees of assistance from Chinese officials attached to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO). Some were accommodated briefly and given shelter whilst others were given longer-term accommodation in an Overseas Chinese hostel run by the OCAO. One group, L/M 1642, was provided by the Chinese authorities with a sailing boat for its onward passage to Hong Kong after the members of the group had spent a two-month period living in the Overseas Chinese hostel.
2
Many refugees from these five arrival groups were tested on Viet- namese knowledge. To pass this test requires the recognition of Vietnamese bank notes currently in circulation (notes issued before the currency change in 1980 are used as a control) and answers to some simple questions on current affairs. The majority of those tested failed. Many of the refugees interviewed had a good working knowledge of Cantonese and this, taken together with the poor results obtained on the Vietnamese Knowledge Test, indicated that ex- China Vietnamese Illegal Immigrants (ECVIIs) were mixed in among the genuine refugees.
3.
Suspected ECVIIS were therefore submitted to intensive questioning which revealed that there were many discrepancies among the finer points of departure details and journey descriptions. However, none of the refugees admitted to having been resettled in China, and each maintained the same basic details of the date and point of departure and the number of refugees in the departure groups.
4.
Although it is almost certain that many of these 154 refugees are ECVIIS, the interviewing team cannot prove this. When confronted with obvious discrepancies in their stories the offending refugees simply claim they were confused.
5.
The investigation was complicated by the fact that the composition of the groups changed considerably between the time that they claim to have left Vietnam and the time of their arrival in Hong Kong. The claimed original departure groups are described in paragraph 6 below. The groups as they arrived in Hong Kong are described in paragraph 7 below.
The results of the detailed interviews of the departure groups are at Annex A of this report and a diagram showing the relationship between departure and arrival groups is at Annexe G.
Original Departure Groups
6
(a) Group (a). A group consisting of 23 persons claiming to have departed from Cam Pha, near Haiphong, on 23rd September 1981.
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