COND.
ENTIAL
2
Government, perhaps in their next year's programme, but we cannot be certain. The US authorities are anxious to try and spread the burden of resettling boat refugees in order to avoid sole responsibility for them and, meanwhile, with the rapid erosion of American popular interest in Vietnam, it is becoming difficult to find sponsors who are prepared to take on unknown refugees.
4.
It could be argued that we have seen the end of the great exodus of refugees from Vietnam by boat. There has been an atmosphere, engendered not least by the Vietnamese authorities themselves, that 1977 is the year of "the great clear-out" and that next year they will get down to the problems of establishing a new and "better" · society in the South. No doubt there will continue to be the occasional attempts at escape, as from every Communist country, but it could be said that the major exodus of "bourgeois elements" has already taken place.
There may
be something to this view, but it would be unwise to become complacent too soon. There are also seasonal factors involved. The prevailing winds are more suitable for sailing to Hong Kong in the summer and autumn than in the winter and spring when the monsoon tends to blow from the north east. So even if there is a lull in boat cases during the first few months of next year, we may nevertheless see the exodus of this summer repeating itself next summer. Moreover, even if boats do not reach Hong Kong directly, they can always sink in the shipping lanes near Vietnam and the passengers be picked up by ships coming to Hong Kong as their first port of call, or by British (including Hong Kong-registered) ships, e.g. going to Singapore with the result that we become involved in guarantees as in the Sinkiang case.
5.
One point which has been commented on widely here, including a recent issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, is the fact that the broadcasts in Vietnamese by the Voice of America and the BBC tend to encourage the Vietnamese to try their luck on the high seas by giving accounts of success- ful escape attempts. You may like to consider whether it would be worth approaching the Far Eastern Service of the BBC and asking whether they could broadcast some comments on the disadvantages of Hong Kong in the context of refugees seeking resettlement overseas, e.g. highlighting its over-crowdedness and overwhelmingly Chinese ethos, with some suitable stories about how hard it has been for Vietnamese refugees to settle in here, even temporarily. Clearly the BBC cannot be expected to muzzle its reporting of refugee affairs, but adding some balance by explaining the difficulties faced by places accepting refugees would help. The paradox is that the more praise we earn for our liberal treatment of the refugees from Indo-China, the more we store up trouble for ourselves in the future.
Looking at the earlier papers, I see that at one time the UK "reserved" some room for Vietnamese refugees
6.
/contd....
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