(c)
(d)
a decision to move the Lao camps the Lao border and thus offer a obvious material attraction to Vientiane area;
further away from
less visible
and
those in
the
the
a full rather than piecemeal approach to problem: an attempt to explore all solutions rather than just resettlement;
(e)
a willingness
in order to
outflows:
to deal with the countries of origin resolve the conditions that caused the
a course which McNamara suggested would not have come close to the cost to resettlement countries and asylum countries of the single policy that had been applied since 1975.
Having said this McNamara recognised that ideal solutions were far from easy
in
as complex a situation as South East Asia in the early 1980s and
in
the emotive international response to the refugee problem.
10.
was
Finally he concluded that humane deterrence an invalid
L approach, simply because it was based on the assumption that if conditions were bad enough they would effectively deter new arrivals, ignoring the basic reasons why many choose to leave. A s examples, he pointed out that neither expulsions of boat people in 1979, nor Thai piracy, deterred arrivals.
He added that resettlement "freezes" were unfairly and arbitrarily applied on a fixed date ignoring the particular circumstances of those who came before or after the date in question (he suggested that perhaps continuing resettlement might have been possible without these freezes if there had been less publicity surrounding it). He added that no exploration of refugee motives 1980 s was effectively possible in the absence programme of screening.
Discussion
of
in
the early any accepted
1 1
•
There followed
fairl a
rly unstructured
and slightly confused discussion which covered a number of areas (not al1 to do with South East Asia). There was a ritual attack on Hong Kong's closed camps as concentration camps by a West German (!) an interesting comment from an African about the (in his view) validity of policies
of humane deterrence in the East African setting; a comment about ODP which led McNamara to observe that in his view ODP had had no direct effect boat departures; and
11
on
a question about a further UK quota for Vietnamese which I was invited to answer. This enabled me to clarify that in fact Hong Kong had never applied a resettlement f reeze" to new arrivals; and to summarise more of the background to Hong Kong's closed camp policy and the dilemma in which Hong Kong found itself. I asked McNamara what solution he saw to the problem: he stated that in his view resettlement to some extent had created the problem by creating a perception
mind of arrivals that they would automatically
sudden withdrawal
be
in the resettled;
of