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Vietnamese refugees
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my telephone conversation with Mr Frach.
He is well aware that the waresatin is
67
off the record, and conveys to formal FW now in my way.
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Nigel French (HKG) telephoned me on 24 March to discuss his recent visit to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. He said he was 25/3
finalising the report of his visit. He had been particularly struck
by attitudes of local representatives of ICG countries in Thailand
to the Thai decision to send all Vietnamese "refugees" to site II
and deny them access to resettlement opportunities, at least until
other refugees had been resettled. The ICG representatives
apparently thought that Thailand had done the right thing.
He
2. He said he was considering the position for Hong Kong.
could envisage a situation where a new flood of refugees would come to Hong Kong and they would want to take action to avoid such.
arrivals being added to the resettlement list. He thought that
following the Thai example might be an appropriate course of action, with respect to new arrivals after a publicly announced date. What
would my reaction be?
3. I said that it was difficult to react to so general a concept.
Clearly Hong Kong needed to develop their ideas further. It would
help if any action Hong Kong proposed was part of a regional
initiative. How did he envisage controlling those in the new camps. who had no hope of resettlement? What would be the impact on
current resettlement programmes? One aspect that particularly
worried me was the question of genuine refugees. It would be
difficult enough for us to accept the concept of "warehousing", but
we would have very serious difficulties if genuine refugees were not
screened out.
4. French said that he envisaged any Hong Kong initiative would be
part of a regional initiative. He acknowledged that there would be problems of control, but noted that the Thai initiative seems to
have been most effective in reducing arrivals, because potential
arrivals knew they would be denied resettlement. He said that by
clearly defining the resettlement commitment as those in closed camps before implementation of a new policy, it might be that
CONFIDENTIAL