TNAG-0892-FCO40-1102-Refugees-from-Vietnam-in-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-boat-people-1979 — Page 131

CONFIDENTIAL

2.

3. Mr Cumber said that in his view the first priority was to seal the

Leak of evictees from Vietnam. The situation reminded him of the expulsion of the Jews from Germany.

His own agency was working in

Thailand, and was not geared up to looking after refugees in the United Kingdom.

L

4. Miss Pearce said that Vietnamese policy was very subtle. The first people to leave had been peasant fishermen. Now the ethnic Chinese city of Cholon was effectively dead. The inhabitants had been told that they would only receive economic support if they migrated to a new economic zone. But there, living in straw huts, and with only 1 kilo of rice a month, they were offered the opportunity of buying a permit with their personal possessions. She believed that the boat

people were not being evicted in the strictest sense: many were simply pooling their family resources and even leaving family members behind.

5. Mr Harris said that OXFAM had been able to help with some refugees in South East Asia, particularly in Burma, where refugees were now returning from Bangladesh. The voluntary organisations could only act in a very small way but they did sometimes have better access than government. An OXFAM representative (a sanitary engineer), had recently visited one of the refugee camps on Pulan Bulong, an island off Malaysia. Conditions were appalling. The situation in Indo-China had gone beyond the resources of those concerned.

6.

Sir Leslie Kirkley emphasized the enormous importance which the Standing Conference gave to the British government maintaining its humanitarian policy of rescuing refugees at sea and accepting them in Britain as a last resort.

government placed a different

7. Mr Blaker confirmed that the new emphasis on this policy. But he wished to thank the agencies for their valuable work. The Home Secretary had thanked them in Parliament on 11 June. The Vietnamese were pursuing a clear and deliberate policy of expulsion. Even if there were a numerical limit on the ethnic Chinese Left, that would be meaningless if the Vietnamese Government expelled ethnic Vietnamese whom they considered unacceptable. The world had not yet recognised the extent of the problem.

18.