TNAG-0894-FCO40-1104-Refugees-from-Vietnam-in-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-boat-people-1979 — Page 296

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Mr Murray

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VIETNAMESE REFUGEES:

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NEW UK QUOTA

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Phasing cl cell

Payvate Secretary Sandy Hate Sho

The Secretary of State has asked for an indication, before tomorrow's Cabinet, of Sir M MacLehose's reactions to the outcome of yesterday's meeting of OD, in particular the idea that the new quota of 10,000 should be phased over a period longer than one year.

2.

I telephoned the Governor this morning and gave him an account of the decisions reached by Ministers on the lines of paragraph 2 of FCO telegram No 177 to Suva. Sir M MacLehose said he thought it a pity that a generous offer should be hedged by reservations. He made two particular points:-

a) While the UK offer to take 10,000 from Hong Kong would

certainly help, his main concern was to get the Americans to do more. The Americans had made it clear that they would not take more refugees from Hong Kong unless the UK did. It would be very important to be able to tell the Americans that we had agreed to everything that the UNHCR had asked.

b) The deduction from the new quota of those rescued by

British ships could make a great deal of difference to the value of the offer for Hong Kong. A few Sibonga-type rescues could well mean that very few refugees from Hong Kong were actually resettled in Britain under the new quota. But some other resettlement countries were bound to point to the 10,000 quota as a reason for not taking refugees from Hong Kong.

Sir M MacLehose said that he fully recognised that we might in practice find it difficult to resettle 10,000 people from Hong Kong within 12 months, and that a series of major rescues would also create problems. But these were administrative matters, and there was no need to detract from the value of our pledge by spelling them out. The Governor hoped that we might say in public that we had agreed in principle to offer 10,000 new resettlement places over the next year but that we might need to reconsider this figure if the number of refugees rescued by British ships became unexpectedly large.

4. I asked how matters stood on the UNHCR's target figure of 10,000 for Hong Kong. The Governor said that his position remained as set out in paragraph 3 of his telegram No 910, ie

CONFIDENTIAL

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