level of arrivals; but a flow of people out of Vietnam nevertheless continues. Much as we and the Hong Kong Government dislike the policy, we see no alternative to continuing it while refugees continue to arrive in the territory.
The open camps are run by the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) with the assistance of various voluntary agencies. The camps are run by the Hong Kong Government, in cooperation with UNHCR and voluntary agencies. In all the camps, refugees are provided with food, medical, welfare, educational, training and sports facilities.
The Jubilee Camp, which Ms Goodrum says she visited, is an open camp located in Sham Shui Po, which is in the main urban area of the Kowloon Peninsula. was originally opened as a transit camp in 1979 when the influx of refugees into Hong Kong was at its peak. When the number of arrivals fell it was converted into a reception centre for newly arriving refugees. However in mid-1982 delays in resettlement and historical antagonisms between Northern and Southern Vietnamese led to disorder in the only remaining transit camp, at Kai Tak. Jubilee was reopened at very short notice as a second transit centre, in order to relieve some of the pressure upon Kai Tak.
By European standards Jubilee is indeed crowded, as are all the camps; unfortunately this is also true of many other areas of Hong Kong, which has a population density 20 times that of the UK. In general the space allocated to refugee families is similar to that allocated to squatter families resited to temporary housing areas in Hong Kong.
The Jubilee camp has been difficult to run in the past, mainly because the rate of resettlement from it has been very low. All the refugees living there are ethnic Vietnamese from South Vietnam, usually of rural and poor educational background; and many of their cases have been looked at by at least one resettlement country and rejected. Since December 1984 however, UNHCR has been conducting a special campaign to increase resettlement from Jubilee, with the aim of substantially reducing the camp population. This has had some success, but the population still stands at 2,200.
On the general question of resettlement from Hong Kong, Ms Goodrum is correct in her understanding that the UK has agreed to accept some 500 Vietnamese refugees for
/resettlement