TNAG-0558-FCO40-653-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-into-othe-1975 — Page 96

CONFIDENTIAL

布政司署

香港下亞畢道

REGISTRN.

本署檔號 OUR REF.: SCR 1/4821/75

23 JUN1975.

212

COLONIAL SECRETARIAT

LOWER ALBERT ROAD

HONG KONG

18 June, 1975

* YOur Ref.:

HIR 18/25

R&R

PA

PL O'Keeffe Esq CVO

Hong Kong & Indian Ocean Department

F CO

Dear Laurence,

VIETNAMESE REFUGEES

REF.

82

B

11/7

182.

140

The Governor has asked me to reply on his behalf to your personal note of 3 June about the offer of £20,000 to help defray the cost of maintaining the Vietnamese refugees in transit in Hong Kong.

2.

Naturally we are grateful for the offer of £20,000 and for your background explanation of the various factors which you have had to take into account. Thank you also for your assurance about the snags and the political traps which we raised in our telegram No. 525.

3.

We are glad that you will be keeping up the pressure on the question of resettlement, particularly in the United Kingdom. We are afraid of the risk of embarrassment by what may seem to be unwillingness by the UK to accept any of our refugees. We consequently look forward to hearing how many of the 71 refugees whose particulars have been forwarded by the Immigration Department will be accepted in Britain.

4.

So far we are getting positive help from Canada, France, Australia, Denmark, Belgium and now Austria. The performance of the United States has not been so good. Apart from accepting the nine refugees on the Air America plane and the 58 who arrived by Swissair under the protection of an American citizen, the Americans have only taken 10. We shall find it difficult to make the Americans fully sympathetic if the UK appears to have done little to share our real problem of finding homes for the refugees. The Americans claim that there is awful congestion in the camps at Guam and in the United States. I suspect that they are secretly afraid that by starting any movement of refugees out of Hong Kong to the States they would inhibit other countries from accepting refugees or adding to those they have already accepted.

/contd....

C.S. 41A

CONFIDENTIAL