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density of population; Malaysia has 8,782 and about 10,000 are
camps in Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Singapore. The British Government has renewed its diplomatic approaches, both bilateral and at multilateral meetings, to persuade other
help to
countries to ease Hong Kong's burden.
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In the past decade, 587,069 refugees are known to have left Vietnam in boats and to have succeeded in reaching neighbouring
countries. Thousands more boat people must be assumed to have
perished. International concern focussed on the boat people at
the height of their exodus in the late 1970s and, on Britain's initiative, a United nations conference on Indochinese refugees was held in Geneva in July 1979. Its main achievment was to speed up the process of resettling refugees through the Office of the
UNHCR, by eliciting increased offers of acceptance from
resettlement countries and by raising international funds to
support the resettlement programme. At the same time a strong
plea was made by the UN Secretary-General (then Mr Waldheim) for a reduction in the disorderly exodus of thousands of people fleeing
political, religious and economic repression. The British
Government has consistently stressed that the "root cause of the
whole problem lies in Hanoi" and called upon the Vietnamese
Government to face up to its responsibility for this. The
negotiation of a system of legal emigration from Vietnam, known as
the Orderly Departure Programme (ODP), between the UNHCR and the
Vietnamese Government in May 1979, represented recognition to some extent of this responsibility. The scheme has provided a valuable (albeit limited) alternative to illegal departures by boat.
Since the inception of the ODP, 109,678 Vietnamese have left
their country direct by air for permanent resettlement elsewhere.
In 1985 the number of departures (24,940) exceeded illegal
departures by boat (22,258) but in 1986 this trend has been
reversed. Monthly ODP departures have fallen from an average of
just over 2,000 in 1985 to 1,675 for the first six months of this
year; during this period, illegal boat departures have averaged
2,012 a month.
People accepted for emigration under the ODP must have
/obtained