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S T Nash Esq SEAD
Mr. Leeks HKD Mr. Whitehead, R.)
PUSD
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32,
Mnom't
FCO
Lew Stee
VIETNAMESE TRANSMIGRATION
1.
BRITISH EMBASSY,
HANOI.
28 February 1986
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Jenerally - I would be mot of these reports were If movements SN.!
Cte 19/3
You asked for comment on the item in a Hong Kong newspaper by journalist Peter Loke. The item said that according to Thai sources, picked up by left-wing Hong Kong papers, Vietnam plans to move 7.5 million people from north to south.
2. Any reports about Vietnam that originate in Thailand and are repeated by the left-wing press (which must in Hong Kong terms mean pro-China) should be taken with a large grain of salt. This item seems a particularly wild interpretation of declared Vietnamese intentions and was perhaps deliberately spread to scare readers in Thailand and Hong Kong who might be expected to resent any further surge in refugees from Vietnam.
3.
Some elementary arithmetic would make it plain that the logistics of resettling 7.5 million people are of a magnitude of astronomical proportions. To move such a number even over twenty years would take enormous resources. Even the announced plans for resettlement will, if attempted in full, take resources that Vietnam would be much better advised to put into other development rather than into moving people into areas which if they had been naturally advantageous for supporting human communities would have been heavily populated long long ago. But just because we might think the activity stupid does not of course mean that the Vietnamese will not attempt it!
4.
The
The announced details are that the Government does have a plan to move several hundred thousand people from "overcrowded cities and villages" into "new economic zones" in the central highlands. This is planned for the next five years. Many of those to be resettled are to be the young (unemployed?). pressure on the young to move may of course encourage some of them to seek to escape, just as it is believed that some of the Vietnamese who cross the border into Cambodia are young men seeking to avoid conscription. But the factors of danger, cost,
LIKK 243/1
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19 MAR 1986
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