TNAG-0881-FCO40-1091-Refugees-from-Vietnam-in-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-boat-people-1979 — Page 61

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Indo-China:

[14 FEBRUARY 1979]

In sizing up the scale of this tragedy, we must remember that the figures I have given are for the numbers of people who have succeeded in escaping from Indo- China since 1975 and who have as yet failed to find a permanent home. I have left out two other groups: first, those who have already been taken in by third countries. It does not include 130,000 taken in by the United States immediately after their retreat from Indo-China; nor the 142,314, I think, who escaped later and who, by last December, had found permanent places of refuge.

Refugee Problem

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or is it merely a vague idea? I can tell your Lordships how to make it real. 1 shall tell you how to grasp the threat and the burden that this is for Thailand. Imagine such numbers arriving here. Imagine over 200,000 refugees pouring into this country in the space of under four years, and only 60,000 of them getting moved on. The outery that it would

cause is unimaginable,

However, the population of Thailand is smaller than ours and it is infinitely poorer. About 12 million of them have an average income of less than £50 per year, yet they bear more than half the cost of maintaining this crowd of refugees- some £4-5 million in the period 1st March to 31st December last year alone. In some ways the Thai people shame us with their generosity. By the end of last year over 70,000 boat people had landed in Malaysia. Despite a successful resettle- ment programme abroad, over 49,500 were still in camps, and still they came.

If we add up all the people who have succeeded in getting out of Indo-China since 1975, we get a figure of roughly 490,000; that is more than the population of the cities of Edinburgh, Bradford or Bristol. If we add to those the number who have actually made it to Indonesia, Japan, Macau, the Philippines and even, incredibly, to Australia as their first call, as well as the 16 other countries their own small boats have taken them to, the total rises to over half a million-503,000. That is more than the population of the City of Manchester, and is a very formid-90,000 refugees from elsewhere tem- able vote indeed by the people living in the lands now occupied by the Vietnamese or controlled by their politicians against the régime under which they have had to live.

Yet even that is not the whole story. have not counted-and no one ever will count-how many thousands have perished in little boats unfit for sea and swamped by the monsoons; how many have been deliberately drowned-and I regret that that happens because I have eyewitness accounts of it-by robbers posing as friends until they overturn their boats in midstream of the River Mekong; how many have died at the bestial hands of pirates in the Gulf of Siam; and how many were shot down by patrols of the Khmer Rouge army or blown to pieces in the minefields and boobytraps with which they scattered their path to freedom. They would fill the cemeteries of Leeds over and over again.

But today we must concern ourselves with the living. The number of refugees in temporary camps is now greater than it was when I visited them in 1970 and told your Lordships of what 1. found. In Thailand alone there are over 140,000. I wonder whether that figure seems real,

The Malays are a kindly people. Despite having an often unreferred to

porarily, they were foremost in taking in, educating and settling, the Moslems among those who first escaped Thailand by land. They actually went out and collected 1,400 of them, but they now have 60,000 refugees of their own. Their coastline is saturated and their despairing

ineffectual showers of stones as they wade villagers pelt the pathetic arrivals with

through the surf.

I should like to quote Tan Sri Ghazali bin Shafie, the Home Affairs Minister of the Government of Malaysia recently in Geneva. He said:

"As you may know Malaysia today is busily engaged in a programme of social engineering aimed at the twin objectives of the eradication of poverty and the restructuring of society. It is difficult enough already as it is, when with the world economic situation we have to sell cheaper and buy dearer than before, when we have to struggle with the problem of unemployment, when we have to uplift the living standard of our people whose expectations are high, when we have to maintain law and order, when we have to preserve our security and stability, when we have to integrate the various communities into a single Malaysian nation

and he did not say, of course, that the population of Malysia is part-Malay and part-Chinese-----

with a common and shared valuation system out of diverse cultures and creeds, these ... by