DEMO LAIVIN
0
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HICK 24315
British Embassy Bonn
RASCITED IN BAMISTLY NO. 21 November 1980
0 1 DEC1980
ROTHY
Taken
PA
82.12 AW
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INDEX
RC Masefield Esq
ملل
Information Branch
Government Secretariat
Hong Kong
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103
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Dear Robi
VIETNAMESE REFUGEES IN HONG KONG
ORA)
1. After receiving your letter of 22 October about the questionnaire issued by the Hong Kong Community Council for the Resettlement of Refugees (not copied) I wrote along the lines you had suggested to Dr Specht of the Deutscher Caritasverband in Freiburg to ask what had become of the 400 questionnaires that had been sent to him earlier this year. Frau Lang, one of his assistants, telephoned yesterday in answer to my letter. It was not a very encouraging conversa- tion.
2. Frau Lang said that in the light of my letter she and her colleagues had looked again at what could be done with the questionnaires. Not many of them had been sent out since the Spring and since most of the Vietnamese refugees taken from Hong Kong had moved out of reception centres and into accommodation of their own it would be difficult to locate them all. The refugees had, moreover, been bombarded with such a welter of paper by the German authorities that they were unlikely to respond positively to the idea of filling in yet another form. The pressure on the FRG quota such that only a relatively small number of refugees from Hong Kong were likely to arrive in Germany in the future and Frau Lang wondered whether the exercise was worth pursuing. In any case Caritas understood that the situation in Hong Kong had greatly improved. On a recent visit to the territory Dr Specht had been told by an official source that increased off-take by the US and Australia had practically solved the refugee problem.
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3. I told Frau Lang that this was a very disappointing response. The questionnaires had been prepared as part of an exercise designed to help prepare the refugees for the problems they would have to face after resettlement, regardless of where. The British Government hoped that the FRG could be persuaded to accept more refugees from Hong Kong since the
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