}
**
024/522/1
D Thomson Esq NENAD FCO
CONFIDENTIAL
BRITISH EMBASSY
TUNIS
22 August 1986
533.
(48)
(485)
/aid
UNHCR AND REFUGEES/IN TUNISIA
1.
I was impressed, nay intimidated, by the staggering list of questions in Mrs Wyeth's (ODA) briefing requirement for UNHCR EXCOM enclosed with our copy of your letter of 30 July to John Illman in Algiers. I was the more daunted because, to the best of my knowledge, there was and is no UNHCR office here and because we have such a minimal technical/programme that our normal links with the UNDP here (under whose auspices UNHCR presumably comes) are correspondingly tenuous.
2. A brief glance at the Tunisian country extract from the UNHCR's document (when it eventually arrived - many thanks!), was however enough to convince me that we were being asked to assemble a very large telescope (the questionnaire) to scrutinise a pretty small pebble (UNHCR's involvement in Tunisia). I cannot believe the completion of this all-embracing questionnaire (much of which is self- evidently inapplicable) on what is done here on UNHCR's behalf either deserves priority or is a cost-effective exercise, when the object of such scrutiny is a group of some 200 politically uncon- tentious people, either elderly Europeans or African students, with UNHCR paying for dentures etc for the former and scholarships for the latter. The much more numerous Palestinian contingent here do not qualify for UNHCR's attentions! We are surely and thankfully in a different league from virtually all the other NENAD posts, in each of whose countries refugees presumably number in the tens or hundreds of thousands and thus constitute a genuine and legitimate political pre-occupation.
3. If I get the chance to pin down whoever in the UN mission here knows about the refugee situation I will pass on to ODA whatever I glean. But this letter is just to warn you of, and explain, the probable nil return.
2016
PS.
CC:
BE Stewart
irs J Wye th
Lisasters and RefCONFURENTIAL