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and would be extremely costly to develop. Furthermore, with a cool winter and the threat of typhoons accommodation in Hong Kong must inevitably be more elaborate than elsewhere.
While Hong Kong has not made any direct contribution to UNHCR funds (your paragraph 6), we have already budgeted to spend about HK$80 million (US$16 million) on maintenance costs for refugees in Government accommodation HK$32.5 million) and on the development of new sites (HK$48 million) for up to about 60,000 refugees in the period from December 1978 to March 1980. The eventual costs are
likely to be much higher.
A Refugee Processing Centre (RPC) Hong Kong?
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The suggestion of a processing centre in Hong Kong (your paragraph 5) was raised with me by the Acting US Consul-General, Nat Bellocchi, on 4 June. I explained that apart from the argument on grounds of costs to UNHCR (and thereby to the US and other major contributors) for moving refugees quickly out of Hong Kong, there were other objections:
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An RPC would be publicised and would therefore attract more refugees to Hong Kong, as the Indonesians have found with the Galang island proposal.
There would be understandable local suspicions that the US would use such a scheme to delay any increase in the rate of onward movement from Hong Kong to the US.
Given the numbers already in Hong Kong, there could be no question of refugees being transferred here from elsewhere (an essential element in the RPC concept as applied to the Galang project).
I asked Bellocchi if the Americans could not achieve the same result by giving extra resettlement guarantees to refugees here on the same basis as would be done with those who were to be moved into the Galang RPC, i.e. before sponsors were found and with no expectation of an early departure date. There would be no need for such people to be kept in a separate camp as such: indeed, one possibility would be to tell them that for the three years or so that they might have to wait before going to the US they would be expected to find jobs locally and cease to be supported by UNHCR. I emphasised that such a scheme would have to be worked out between us, the Americans and UNHCR, that it would be essential to have a system of assigning priority to extra US resettlement offers which ensured that the delay in onward movement
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