XN000022-1995-05-23 — Page 17

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They will be replaced initially by the 1st Battalion, The Staffordshire Regiment and subsequently the 1st Battalion, The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), each of which will serve overlapping five-month, unaccompanied tours in the Territory before July 1997.

5 Airborne Brigade is based at Aldershot in south east England, and is part of Britain's contribution to NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps.

Exercise Venerable Chant has seen the Gurkhas deploy at short notice last Sunday to the fictional state of Zarat "somewhere in Africa" whose Kadar Province, represented by Pat Sin Leng and Plover Cove Country Parks in the New Territories, is claimed by the neighbouring state of Zarat.

•About 800 servicemen have taken part in the exercise including men of the 1st Battalion, Royal Gurkha Rifles; 67 Gurkha Independent Field Squadron, Queen's Gurkha Engineers; the Logistic Support Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps and No. 28 (Army Co-operation) Squadron, Royal Air Force.

Hong Kong soldiers from the Royal Hong Kong Regiment (The Volunteers) and the Hong Kong Military Service Corps have provided the enemy Zarat forces on the exercise, supported by fast pursuit craft from HMS Tamar.

End/Tuesday, May 23, 1995

45 VMs return home voluntarily

*

A group of 45 Vietnamese migrants today (Tuesday) returned to Vietnam under the Voluntary Repatriation Programme of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Comprising 21 men, 14 women, eight boys and two girls, they were the 230th batch to go back under the

back under the programme.

The group brought to 803 the total number of Vietnamese migrants who had returned voluntarily this year, and to 44,997 the total number of returnees since the programme started in March 1989.

End/Tuesday, May 23, 1995