CONFIDENTIAL
Resettlement
11. Most of those around the table at my meeting had lost a few teeth during the last round of negotiation to get resettlement places in the UK. There was no facile enthusiasm for taking on the Home Office and the Prime Minister again!
12. But we all recognised that our credibility in Geneva would be zero unless we had a respectable resettlement offer to put on the table. Predictably, those whom we pressurised with the "conditional" offer we made last December are playing this back to us: the US have already offered to resettle 22,000 refugees from the region as long as the response of others is "commensurate"!
13. We agreed that more work needs to be done quickly to gauge a little more what the Americans have in mind and what, if anything, the Home Office feel they might be able to support. But our assessment was that 1,000 over 3 years new places would be the absolute minimum; and that to give our negotiators a reasonable hand, we might need to seek the Prime Minister's contingency agreement to a ceiling of 2,000 new places (or at least 1,500) within which we would go for the minimum we could get away with. I shall aim to let you have further thoughts on this very rapidly, including on tactics for how we present our case to the Home Office and to the Prime Minister.
Conclusion
14. I fear that, once again, time constraints prevented us from standing further back from this nexus of problems, let alone from trying to weave together an overall strategy encompassing also recent developments over Cambodia. But I think my two meetings have outlined a good many areas in which further work can profitably be done. It would be helpful to have your early endorsement of this general approach, in order that Robin McLaren can get ready for his visit to Washington and we can all prepare to get the most out of Hocke's visit.
8 May 1989
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GLENARTHUR
CONFIDENTIAL