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General Points
12. UNHCR hope to issue a more general description of world-wide resettlement needs in two months time.
13. Mr Simmance summed up by saying that UNHCR were constantly looking at the local integration and voluntary repatriation of durable solutions and accepted that regional integration and, better still, voluntary repatriation were always better than the distant resettlement solution. However, apart from a small group of Laos who could be voluntary repatriated to Thailand and a group of Khner Muslims who were locally integrated in Malaysia, there was no practical possibility for the majority of the other Indo- Chinese refugees to be offered any durable solution other than distant resettlement. He told us that he considered governments were in a better position to persuade the South East Asian governments to consider the durable solutions of local integration and voluntary repatriation, but even so he had to add that the South East Asian countries were worried about the "pull-factor" and therefore were most reluctant to accept local resettlement. He then turned to Mr Cooper who told us that, at the present rate of resettlement, it would take 25 to 30 years to solve the Indo- Chinese refugee problem.
Yours sincerely,
Delia.
DJ Walker (Miss)
CC:
Mrs J Wyeth, ODA
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