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8. We should and will continue to intervene in obvious humanitarian cases of hardship etc. What little credit we have accrues largely from hard work put in by current and past Embassy staff with their Vietnamese counterparts in ODP-WG. But this is severely limited and should be used sparingly. Of the 600 families who remain on our pre-summer 1984 list, 174 have been waiting to leave for the UK since before 1983. Above Le Trong Duat for instance, there are 214 families (pre-May 1983) and before Mai Kim Dinh there are some 340 cases (see Annex C). To us concerned with ODP in this mission, it seems inappropriate to push for some cases merely because an MP has taken it up (or Amnesty International) when there are many others who have a prior claim and whose chances we may actively harm by pushing for those who may be no less deserving but who have waited less long (and may be better off while they wait) and who are, in Vietnamese eyes, "political cases". We are likely to waste the little credit we have in these cases and thereby weaken our ability to help others who are merely caught in the bureaucratic morass.
9. I am indebted to our ODP officer, Kevin Garvey for the statistics and much of the background to this letter.
10. I attach some suggested draft paragraphs for use in dealing with enquiries. My hope is that you may be able to answer MP and other enquiries from London, noting when you do so that you pass on the correspondence to us for raising with the Vietnamese in the normal course of ODP exchanges, thus saving both telegram traffic and time.
yous
ever
Mike
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M J H Wood