TNAG-0971-FCO40-1190-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-in-the-UK-1980 — Page 197

DRAFT

ER.

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF BCAR 24 MARCH

Mak

Speech by Minister of State (Mr Raison)

I should like to thank you all for giving me this opportunity to speak to the Annual General Meeting of the British Council for Aid to Refugees. It is

some time now since some of us were working together in connection with World

Refugee Year and it is a great pleasure for me to be with you today and to

see so many old friends gathered together again.

It is characteristic of today's world that hundreds of thousands of unfortunate

people increasingly find themselves forced out of their homes and countries

and compelled to join the ever-swelling ranks of the world's refugees. The

tragic human problems that arise from mass movements of people across both land

and sea frontiers are not now confined to one country cr one continent. In the

past year we have all seen on our television screens the reality of this situation and we have been moved by the human needs that have been so vividly

presented to us.

The present crisis is such that the world's response cannot be confined to one country or continent and this country has seen it as its duty to respond

to the new situation as it has in the past to other refugee crises. What I

want to do today is to talk principally about the way we are handling our own distinctive contribution that is the programme for receiving into this country some of the refugees who have fled - often in conditions of appalling danger and hardship from what they see as the even worse dangers facing them if they had remained in Vietnam. In the process I should like to reflect also

on the progress we have made in receiving and resettling these refugees and on the lessons we can draw from our experience so far. I hope later in my speech, however, to touch on one or two other matters of more general concern.

The United Kingdom's response to the Vietnamese situation

You will not need much reminding of how the situation developed. The exodus from Vietnam grew during the latter half of 1978 and increased most dramatically during 1979. The first large group of refugees accepted into this country was those rescued by the British ship Wellpark in the autumn of 1978. As the flow of refugees continued the last Government agreed to accept a quota of 1,500 refugees from Indo-China, some from Malaysia and Thailand but most from Hong Kong. By the early summer of last year, however, the exodus had reached such proportions that it was evident that only a major international effort could tackle the problems that were threatening to disrupt the countries bordering the South China Sea. It was for this reason that the Prime Minister took the

initiative which resulted in the Secretary General of the United Nations calling