TNAG-0792-FCO40-996-Refugees-from-Vietnam-in-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-boat-people-1978 — Page 274

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HKK 243/1

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

London SW1A 2AH

106

RECEIVED IN REGISTRY MO. 51 16 JUN 1973

Telephone 01- 233 86bisk ofFFICER

INDEX

(PA

PENTRY Action Træe

H L1 Davies Esq

Head of Chancery

British High Commission SINGAPORE

Your reference

Our reference

Date

15 June 1978

VIETNAMESE REFUGEES

1. Thank you for your letter of 12 May about the Vietnamese refugees who were on board the "Regenstein" and for your further letter of 5 June on the general subject of Vietnamese "boat people". The background information you provided was most useful. The "Regenstein" affair (which for me was the cause of some insomnia) was, as you say, a classic case of brinkmanship. But not by design. Your suspicion was right that the different time zones between Washington and London was the decisive factor.

2.

We did not really expect the Singaporeans to approach you for a guarantee on behalf of that group of refugees: we thought there was, however, just an outside chance that they might. We knew they were hardly likely to accept the refugees without such a guarantee but we did at least hope that the UN High Commissioner's personal appeal to Lee Kuan Yew might have had some effect, especially since the ship was Singapore registered. And we were trying to get the shipowners here to give us some breathing space to allow the Singaporeans time to react to the UNHCR message.

We also wanted, in this case, to avoid asking you to go into bat with the Singapore Government: such an approach would have been bound to fail. I had a difficult time in dealing with the owners here who, at one stage, were pleading imminent bankruptcy and, at another, gave me an ultimatum that the ship's captain would be instructed to sail for Vietnam, within a matter of hours, if the British govern- ment did not provide the guarantee which the Singaporeans required. The attitude of the owners to this affair did not amuse us. I had no way of knowing whether the master of the vessel would refuse instructions to sail for Vietnam with a group of people still on board who feared persecution if returned to Vietnam and we were not prepared to take such a gamble: your comments on this matter were interesting and there was clearly a good deal of confusion among the owners, charterers and ship's crew. I had visions of mutiny among the refugees

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