TNAG-0881-FCO40-1091-Refugees-from-Vietnam-in-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-boat-people-1979 — Page 67

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8.26 p.m.

Indo-China;

[14 FEBRUARY 1979]

Lord MONSON: My Lords, if I may echo the right reverend Prelate, I would say that I am sure that the entire House is grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, for drawing our attention so powerfully, so comprehensively, and indeed so passion- ately, to this important and tragic problem, the full magnitude of which has been far too little appreciated in the West generally, and in this country in particular. The noble Lord's Question draws attention to the predicament of the 200,000 refugees and asks about the causes of the exodus and its implications for British foreign policy.

I shall take the causes first. I am sorely tempted to run through the history of the past 30 to 35 years in order to demon- strate how very wrong the fun revolu- tionaries were; how wrong the ill- informed students of Berkeley, of Nanterre, of the LSE, and of West Berlin (of all unlikely places) were to cast asper- sions upon American motives. They were perfectly entitled to criticise American strategy and American tactics, as did many of us who, in broad terms, supported America. (What a tragedy it was that the Americans had nobody of the calibre of General Templar, with ihs sensitivity to local conditions). But they were right to criticise and impugn American motives, inspired as they were by the highest ideals of the Kennedy era.

not

However, your Lordships will hardly welcome a lengthy analysis at this late hour. Therefore, suffice to say that over a generation ago, when Ho Chi Minh came to power in the North, over 2 million Vietnamese-most of them Roman Catholics, but not entirely so--fled South. In contrast, virtually none fled in the other direction. Whatever one's assessment of the merits of both contending sides, the proof of the pudding is surely in the eating. To cut a long story short, I should say that the uneasy truce evolved into a war, initiated not by the Americans, but by the North Vietnamese Communist Party, as a Labour Member of Parliament then representing an Essex constituency, and now a junior Minister, made clear to the House of Commons at the time.

When Russian-built tanks rumbled into Saigon in April 1975 it was perfectly obvious to me (and to many others) that history was going to repeat itself, the H.L. 12 O

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only questions being: when would the exodus take place, and exactly what form would it take? Of course, there were a great many naïve optimists in this country and elsewhere who thought that a new era of peace and concord was about to begin. To be fair, they were in good company. What was known as the Third Force in South Vietnam, mainly but not entirely Buddhist, who disliked the Thieu Government and the Com- munists equally, thought that they would be able to reach a modus vivendi with the conquerors. But, alas!, my Lords, Stalinists do not change their spots, and the members of the Third Force became sadly disillusioned people, and have joined the exodus in large numbers.

The predicament of these peoples, referred to in the first part of the noble Lord's Question, or of a small segment of them, was something I was able to see almost exactly two years ago, when my wife and I visited, on two occasions, the

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refugee camp in Songkhla, Southern Thailand, on the Eastern part of the isthmus, fairly near the Malaysian border. The camp consisted almost entirely of boat people who had made the perilous journey across the Gulf of Siam. I use the word made in both senses of the word, because many of them had made it, many of them had not. I have also used the description "refugee camp", but I think one really ought to call a spade a spade and refer to it as an internment camp, because that is in fact what it is. I suppose most refugee camps fall into this category, with the possible exception of those in the Near East.

I imply no criticism of the Thais at all in this matter. I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Elton, mentioned about the poverty of Thailand. I think it is all too easy to forget that the quad- rupling of the oil price at the end of 1973 hit the poor countries of Asia, of Africa and of Latin America almost as badly as, if not worse than, it hit the industralised West. In addition, the Thais have to cope, not only with the influx from Vietnam and from Cambodia, which is fairly recognisable and to some extent can be contained, but the influx from Laos. The people of Laos are ethnically and linguistically not very different from the peoples of North-Eastern Thailand, and in consequence they can slip across the border very easily without being